[wayne-li2]

I don’t really think this is true anymore.

When a doctor messes up, their patient gets hurt. When we mess up, millions get inconvenienced. You can’t really say one is worse than the other. Take Twitter for example. You could say “so what, people can’t tweet for a while” but among those millions of users are a couple (like the Japanese tsunami twitter account) where lives can be lost if your service doesn’t perform adequately.

I work in financial services — if my bug causes a million people to lose money, what percentage of that million were on the border of suicide and my bug tipped them over the edge? Even if that number is 0.1 person / 1 million that means I can commit 10 such bugs in my lifetime before I’ve statistically taken a life.

Not saying this line of thinking is right or healthy, but it’s just not as black and white as “doctor can kill people, we can’t”.

[NikolaNovak]

I believe we are in complete agreement though, if you read through the entirety of the post? :)

My main point was indeed: "While we may not have as immediate and visible impact on people's health, we can and do have significant impact on people's well-being, and should think more consciously on such connections"