[csb6]

> You can't stop that, and personally, I don't think its a good idea. To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.

Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit or the claim that the viewport is not rated for the depth it is used at. When interviewed by the BBC, the company represented their submersible as very safe, certainly not as something likely to kill its passengers.

How is it a “nanny state” or “snooping” to require businesses to be honest about their service? This isn’t even necessarily an action a government would have to perform - it could be carried out by classification societies [0]. Do whatever you like with your own experimental sub, but don’t misrepresent it as a safe sightseeing trip for tourists.

> It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.

It’s even easier to imagine scenarios where a business is allowed to sell trips on a vessel with critical safety issues that the company knew of but did not disclose or address.

We have remedies for these real scenarios - they are called laws and regulations.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_classification_society

[zarzavat]

The founder is likely dead and paid the ultimate price for his negligence. There’s simply not much you can do about people who are willing to die and take other people with them, whether intentionally or negligently. You can’t put a dead person on trial.

I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.

[csb6]

> I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.

I didn’t suggest that this is necessary. It seems like there should be enough resources to look into the construction standards of a tourism company based in the U.S. that has received international press coverage for several years. It is possible to stop a tourism company from operating. This wasn’t a secret deep sea dive that no one could halt - it was the latest in a series of commercial voyages that were covered in the press (a BBC reporter went on one a few years ago, and there is a video tour of the vehicle). This dive was publicly announced.

No one needs to be surveilled 24/7 for regulations to work.

[bboygravity]

> There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.

Have you ever heard of the name "Edward Snowden"?

What everybody is doing is already literally being watched all the time and it has been that way or at least decades and has gotten worse with technological evolution.

[vanviegen]

Indexing people's online activity (in order to search for specific kinds of activiy) is a far cry from watching everything everybody is doing, let alone acting on all that information.

[gmerc]

Wait until LLMs meet that data

[balder1991]

It definitely hasn’t worked then. How’s that approach any efficient?

[xpe]

When many people make the claim “it hasn’t worked” wrt some intervention they often miss the point: the key question is change relative to the counterfactual; i.e. having done nothing.

So, to evaluate action at t=0, we compare some metric at the real t=1 against the counterfactual at t=1.

It is logically invalid to evaluate the efficacy of an action by only comparing the metric at t=0 and t=1. That kind of reasoning error is incredibly common.

[slushh]

>it could be carried out by classification societies

So everything already worked as intended. The tourists didn't bother to check the classification or if they did, were willing to dive anyways.

The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough. Likewise doping shows that a legal framework is not enough to prevent advanced cheating.

>Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit

Wouldn't it be better to establish a verification culture? There are always businesses that lie. The law only works retroactively while the tourists would be alive if they had checked.

[csb6]

> The tourists didn't bother to check the classification or if they did, were willing to dive anyways.

My comment was suggesting that the U.S. government require that a business has a certification from an approved classification society in order to conduct a submersible tourism business. This does not seem to be the law currently since OceanGate is allowed to operate without any.

> The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough.

No regulations will prevent all accidents, but I would say the rarity of fatal air accidents in the U.S. in recent decades is partly due to the high standards enforced by the FAA.

> Wouldn't it be better to establish a verification culture?

That sounds good too. That doesn’t contradict that regulations should also be in place so these conventions are required.

> The law only works retroactively while the tourists would be alive if they had checked.

Laws and regulations definitely do not only work retroactively. The FAA can ground unsafe planes, food inspectors can shutdown production before rotten food is shipped out, health inspectors can shutdown a restaurant.

Laws can’t protect these passengers, but they should be made to protect all future passengers.

[grepfru_it]

>No regulations will prevent all accidents, but I would say the rarity of fatal air accidents in the U.S. in recent decades is partly due to the high standards enforced by the FAA.

Because the FAA has reporting requirements for any abnormal flight behavior which causes deviation. They literally prevent future accidents by analyzing past behavior.

[EricDeb]

And there might be more planes that would go down and more cheaters without any regulation. Just because you can't stop everything doesn't mean you shouldn't regulate anything

[xpe]

> Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety.

IANAL. This isn't just your personal opinion. In Common Law jurisdictions, see also: negligence, false advertising, deception, fraud, and misrepresentation. Civil Law jurisdictions have concepts that are comparable.

[vanviegen]

> Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety

Of course it is. But I think GP was just saying that there are no agencies to check rare venture like this. At least not before an incident happens.

[csb6]

I agree that there doesn’t currently seem to be regulations governing what OceanGate is doing. My point is that there should be some in the future so this kind of thing doesn’t keep happening.

> But I think GP was just saying that there are no agencies to check rare venture like this.

I think they were making a stronger claim: that there is not only no agency currently doing this, but that it is pointless and impossible to try and regulate this area, which I don’t agree with.

[miracle2k]

It would of course be possible to regulate OceanGate out of business, and I sympathize with the desire to make sure people are sufficiently informed about the risks, which is hard.

But I agree with GP: there is something off about the calls for regulation here. Fundamentally, people should have the right to risk their lives in crazy expeditions to the bottom of the sea or the top of a mountain, and charging someone else money to be taken along does not change that.

[xpe]

> But I think GP was just saying that there are no agencies to check rare venture like this. At least not before an incident happens.

No. That poster was not just making positive claims. They also made normative and prescriptive claims, which I am pushing back on.