[godelski]

I like this approach. Also having dipped my toes in the engineering world (professionally) I think it naturally follows that you should be constantly rechecking your designs. Those tolerances were fine to begin with, but are they now that things have changed? It also makes you think about failure modes. What can make this all come down and if it does what way will it fail? Which is really useful because you can then leverage this to design things to fail in certain ways and now you got a testable hypothesis. It won't create proof, but it at least helps in finding flaws.

[isleyaardvark]

The example I heard was to picture the Challenger shuttle, and the O-rings used worked 99% of the time. Well, what happens to the failure rate when you have 6 O-rings in a booster rocket, and you only need one to fail for disaster? Now you only have a 94% success rate.

[godelski]

IIRC the Challenger o-ring problem was much more deterministic. That the flaw was known and caused by the design not considering the actual operational temperature range. Which, I think there's a good lesson to learn there (and from several NASA failure): the little things matter. It's idiotic to ignore a $10 fix if the damage would cost billions of dollars.

But I still think your point is spot on and that's really what matters haha