Stuart Walker
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2018–2022
16:36 · 180K views · Aug 1, 2015
Astronaut Mike Mullane explains normalisation of deviance, where teams gradually come to accept violations of their own safety standards. He uses the Challenger shuttle disaster as the main case, drawing on NASA's ignored warnings before the launch. It is the first part of a talk given to a fire-fighters' association.
HN commenters cite it whenever a thread involves ignored warnings, shortcuts or routine risk, as the clearest introduction to the concept.
9 comments from Hacker News
Here is an excellent talk on this subject[0]. It's one of the few presentations I like to watch every once in a while. [0] this video
Mike Mullane’s “Normalisation of Deviance” talk to a group of firefighters[1] is relevant here. He describes how the Challenger shuttle disaster happened despite internal memos about the problem years prior. The message of the talk is, essentially, that a person or team can get used to ignoring their own standards when under pressure. [1]: this video
I like the term "normalization of deviance" and would recommand the Mike Mullane's talk on the Challenger disaster [1]. [1]: this video
The “preventable mistakes” point reminds me of this great video about “normalization of deviance” [from routine/checklists] this video
> In fact the "hick" position is the scientific one. If someone eats unrefrigerated pizza ten times without any Adverse Events, then in fact that's an experiment providing (admittedly crude) scientific data I'm going to strenuously disagree with this one. "I've done it 10 times and it has been fine for me" is the logic behind the normalization of deviance and the Shuttle disasters and (in my world) cave diving fatalities: this video As a cave diver I also see this leading to fatalities where divers cut corners on the rules of cave diving, see no immediate consequences and continue to do so up until they wind up dead some day (there are often very binary outcomes for breaking the rules in cave diving). The author of this article does provide a fairly compelling science-based _hypothesis_ though as to why eating-8-hour-cold-pizza is safe though that goes beyond his personal experience. He does argue that the N is actually very large due to reasonable assumption that many college students do this and there is no evidence of a plague of college students in ERs. He also argues that pizza specifically should be pretty safe after 8 hours due to most of it being composed of things with longer shelf lives and tomato sauce having a low pH. That is still mostly all the kinds of rationalization that NASA did though. So those should be at least somewhat scientifically tested. A simple survey of college students could determine their practices of how often they ate morning-after pizza that ha