[playa1]

When CEOs make statements like this I assume they know they are lying for sake of the company.

What makes this more interesting is that he clearly believed it was safe. So he wasn’t necessarily unethical. It is more that he was a bad engineer and a poor judge of risk.

[mydogcanpurr]

I'd argue it's still unethical to put others at risk due to your own incompetence. I wouldn't offer to rewire someone's home because I'm not an electrician, and their house could burn down if I do it incorrectly.

[paulcole]

Is it unethical if you don't know you're incompetent?

[ScoobleDoodle]

Hence standards of safety to weed out the incompetent. As usual, written in blood.

[plagiarist]

It probably still is if you fired a competent person for saying it is too dangerous.

[benjaminwai]

There has to be some amount of competency becoming a founder, CEO and a millionaire, with the various ventures he was involved.

[scotty79]

> due to your own incompetence.

Are you still unethical when you don't know about your incompetence?

Can you be unethical if you had no ability to know that what you do is unethical?

[mydogcanpurr]

> Are you still unethical when you don't know about your incompetence?

You're correct that reality can be more complicated, and it depends. I can imagine a scenario, e.g. the plot of "Manchester by the Sea" which doesn't seem completely unethical. I find it hard to believe in this case that he was that incompetent. I think he took what he believed to be a calculated risk, and I'm guessing he didn't go around broadcasting that information to the other people on the tour.

[_Algernon_]

They signed a waiver that mentioned the risk of "death" 3 times on the first page. I'd call that broadcasting.

Edit: I mean just read the waiver: https://nypost.com/2023/06/23/read-the-death-waiver-doomed-t...

It speaks for itself.

[miah_]

If you ever do anything "risky" you'll fill out a similar form. Go look into skydiver liability forms, they also mention the possibility of death or injury. I suspect most people embarking on expensive & risky adventures are used to these and based on previous adventures being alright just sign the paperwork without reading or thinking about it deeply.

[_Algernon_]

I'd be running the moment I read this paragraph:

>2. A portion of the operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel. The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles.

If you don't, you knew and accepted the risk.

[bumby]

I think this is only partially true. Generally,

Risk = probability x severity.

From that link, they characterized the severity (death) but not the probability. Saying "you may die" is different from saying "your have a 50% chance of dying." My guess is nobody had a good estimate for the probability so nobody could have accurately communicated the risk.

[_Algernon_]

"2. A portion of the operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel. The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles."

I don't know. This implies a high probability to me.

[SoftTalker]

I sign waivers that mention the risk of "serious injury or death" for my kids to play little league. People just see it as legalese.

[_Algernon_]

Do those waivers also mention the experimental vessel, explicitly disclaim that any regulations or certifications were followed, and that the construction materials are untested for the intended use?

>2. A portion of the operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel. The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles.

[donkey_oaty]

A local burger place in my town makes you sign a waiver before consuming certain burgers.

[mydogcanpurr]

Fair enough.

[babypuncher]

He had actual experts telling him that this thing was unsafe. He fired people who said the thing was unsafe and that it wasn't ready for manned dives.

I would argue it is always unethical to ignore the advice of experts when putting other people's safety on the line.

[n-exploit]

This is called criminal negligence

[SoftTalker]

It's why the standard for negligence is "known or should have known" i.e. the person has enough experience or education to have known better. It's probably harder to prove than it sounds.

[ImPostingOnHN]

should have known IE the person is operating in a subject/domain where they're expected to know certain things, regardless of their own experience, like deep sea diving

based on communique both to and from the CEO, the CEO did, in fact, know, that the vessel was not certified to do what it was doing, and that there were safety risks to it

[gtvwill]

Lol yes. Ethics judgements aren't exactly made by one's self on one's self (unless you really do bad and you live your life in regret). But are generally made by your peers and those around you. Your ignorance plays no bearing on their judgement of your actions being ethical or not. You can be the dumbest deadshit in the world and they can still judge your actions as unethical. So yes you can certainly be unethical, even if your too dumb to understand why.

[kayodelycaon]

If someone else clearly warns you, yes.

[astrodust]

Similar story:

> Authorities say a 28-year-old Texas man was attacked and killed by an alligator “almost immediately” after being warned by a bystander not to swim in the water, replying “fuck that alligator” before jumping in.

https://www.gawker.com/fuck-that-alligator-man-killed-second...

[rc5150]

Can you still commit a crime if you don't know that what you're doing is against the law?

[tiedieconderoga]

Not usually, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

You can definitely be convicted of one, though!

[gtvwill]

Lol thought experiment. Your driving in a new area and don't see a change in speed limit because a large truck blocked your view of the sign as you passed it. You get pulled over a short period later for going 20 above the speed limit. Do you think you can be fined or not? Should you be fined or not?

[BenjiWiebe]

You can be fined, the fine might be reversible in court, you shouldn't be fined.

The cop should just give you a warning.

[Johnny555]

Given that he was in the submersible himself, I don't think he was lying, I think he really believed he was taking reasonable risks with cutting edge engineering.

[joelegner]

I have this vague idea that a person’s beliefs are not truly known until they use them as the basis to bet something of value. This guy bet his own life, so I agree with you. He believed what he was saying.

[melling]

Yes, maybe he just suffered from some sort of human bias. What’s the one where people are very good at lying to themselves?

Unfortunately, he killed those other people because no one could convince him that he was wrong.

[SoftTalker]

Yeah I think some people with big egos get so wrapped up in their goals that they just dismiss anything or anyone that is trying to point out problems or concerns. They would deny they are lying and I'm sure genuinely believe they are right. After all he got into the contraption and it killed him. He would not have done that if he didn't believe it was safe.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Not really.

He thought it was safer than it was.

But I don't think he thought it was close to a 0% chance of death.

It's clear that he knew it was somewhat risky.

It failed after like 25 dives which means around a ~4% failure rate.

I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

Who knows what the true failure rate is. Maybe they got really lucky, and it actually had a higher failure rate. Maybe they got extra unlucky. Who knows.

I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

[tgamblin]

"It failed after 25 dives" is not a 4% failure rate if the failure was caused by deterioration over time (as it likely was here). It's a 100% failure rate over the full life of any given Titan sub. They'll all implode, given enough trips.

Moreover, both 1% and 4% are horrible failure rates for anything meant to carry passengers. Example: the risk of dying in a commercial plane crash is 1 in 11 million [1]. The risk of dying while skydiving is less than 1 in 300,000 per jump.

This guy was taking extremely unreasonable risks.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html

[2] https://dzoneskydiving.com/articles/how-many-people-die-skyd...

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> This guy was taking extremely unreasonable risks.

It's easy to agree post-ex, after he went and killed himself and 4 other people.

He probably thought the failure rate might've been closer to 1 in 1000. That still seems WAY too high for me, but maybe for him that was fine.

Either way, he was almost certainly wrong, and it was much higher than that.

Would he have done it if he thought it had a 4% chance of failure? Maybe once. But I doubt 25 times...

[saiya-jin]

> I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

Rich folks pay upward of 70k for Everest expedition, where local personal Sherpas babysit them from basecamp/Kathmandu all the way to the top with oxygen, unless SHTF in some form. That's 2+ months of more or less suffering, living above 5000-6000m long term ain't fun for most. Metabolism goes to hell, wounds heal slower, body is clearly struggling and so is mind. I did experience empty mindness above 6k myself and you just focus on getting goals done asap and survival.

Everest has some 2-3% fatality rate, consistently. I'd say it may not be the exactly same crowd but similar mindset that gets attracted to these things.

[echelon]

> I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

1% is horrible. You'd hope for robust systems where individual failures are mitigated by support systems. And even then, five nines doesn't feel so great when the cost could be so severe.

> I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

That poor kid didn't even want to go. He was terrified of the thing and was going to make his dad happy for father's day.

[Johnny555]

>I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

When failure means instant death that would be a pretty awful failure rate for a commercial product meant to take paying customers from the general public. And even if meant to take well informed researchers and engineers.

If failure meant "Oops, the ballast dropped prematurely, looks like we're going to have to cut this dive short", that's one thing, but when it means "You're going to be crushed by immense pressure in a millisecond", that's quite another.

[babypuncher]

I'm struggling to find real statistics to back this up, but my suspicion is that other deep-submergence vehicles used to travel to this depth (and further) have a failure rate of 0% for manned missions.

My suspicion is based on the fact that I can't find any other stories of deep sea vehicles failing and killing their passengers in the last 40 years. DSV Alvin for example has completed 5,000 dives with 0 fatalities.

[WillPostForFood]

According to this interview with Bob Ballard, there have been no fatalities or catastrophic accidents in the deep sea submersible/exploration world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jJ_SSU-ocU

He mentioned since 1960, but unclear if that was because that's when the deep sea submersible exploration started, or something happened in 1960.

That makes OceanGate's sub seem like a uniquely incompetent design.

[babypuncher]

Dr Ballard seems like as authoritative of a source as any.

OceanGate just ruined a 60 year perfect track record for an entire field of engineering.

[notJim]

> I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

I take your meaning, but I'm just laughing at the idea of a 1% failure rate. If airliners had a 1% failure rate, there would be hundreds of thousands of crashes every year. Experimental craft don't need airliner failure rates of course, but 1% still seems too high for anything with human passengers.