Drift into failure
by Sidney Dekker · first published 2010
58% recommend25% neutral17% critical
Why HN recommends it
Explains how complex systems like aircraft and nuclear plants slide toward failure through gradual, normal drift, with a realistic view of the human element in safety. A solid intro to systems thinking.
Common criticism: Some find it very dense and harder to read than Dekker's Field Guide.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? Or the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the burn-up of Space Shuttle Columbia? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale." ([More from publisher][1]) [1]: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=3018&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_i
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Okay, here's some I haven't seen mentioned yet, although these may be pretty far afield for you: Drift into Failure, by Sidney Dekker. Studies failure analysis in complex systems, and basically argues that our classic reductionist/scientific method approach is the wrong way to study complex engineering failures. How…
on “Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?” ↗You should read Crawford, then. Read Sidney Dekker's "Drift into Failure" as well. Complexity is the problem. Complex, evolving, interacting conditions. You can't just measure in a vacuum when you have many interacting variables. What you're talking about is the result of…
on “Italy’s rarest pasta” ↗Two books in particular have me thinking in this direction... Drift into Failure, by Sidney Dekker, which is about understanding failure in highly complex systems (aircraft, nuclear reactors, etc), and The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew B. Crawford, which is really a philosophy…
on “How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?” ↗…could explain it all with the math. We don't have enough data points. At a certain point, we perhaps can't have enough data points, just because the interactions are so complex. Try reading Dekker's Drift into Failure. It's about failure analysis in complex systems (and why reductionist thinking is often a bad idea when trying to understand such failures), but it certainly applies to trying to "explain" the audible…
on “No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price” ↗Please consider reading Sidney Dekker's books, The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error[1] and Drift Into Failure[2] [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error... [2] - https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3123581163...
on “Why the Austin airport situation was so dangerous” ↗"would be blacklisted, deplatformed, or deamplified by consolidated authorities" Sorry. Not true. You have Black Swan (Taleb) and Drift into Failure (Dekker) among many other books. These ideas are very well known to anyone who makes the effort.
on “CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops” ↗This reminds me very much of Sidney Dekker's work, particularly The Field Guide to Understanding Human Failure, and Drift Into Failure. The former focuses on evaluating the system as a whole, and identifying the state of mind of the participants of the accidents and evaluating what led them to believe that they were making the correct…
on “The Evolution of SRE at Google” ↗It's a thought terminating cliche. Systems thinking is much more nuanced and productive IMO. Drift Into Failure by Sidney Dekker is a good introduction.
on “X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links” ↗A long time ago I had a colleague turn me on to Sidney Dekker’s “Drift Into Failure”, which in many ways covers system design taking into account the “human” element. You could think of it as the “realists” approach to system safety. At the time we operated some industry specific, but…
on “Preliminary report into Air India crash released” ↗There's a great book about the thing you're describing, called "Drift into Failure"
on “Work on production line of Boeing 737 Max ‘not adequately funded’” ↗Drift Into Failure. Great book telling stories like airplane crashes and the Challenger disaster. I posted some notes on my website: https://www.briansnotes.io/book/drift-into-failure/
on “Ask HN: Literature on crisis response?” ↗…handles, stoves, and elevator buttons are interesting but that's only 1/3 of the book. The rest is about iterative design and system failure, for which there are better books like The Lean Startup and Drift Into Failure.
on “Ask HN: Best UI/UX book relevant to 2021 and the rise of Figma?” ↗Drift Into Failure is a good read about how systems fail, albeit a little light on solutions.
on “Ask HN: Best Books on Systems Theory?” ↗…of complex systems and wanting all events and system configurations to be explicable. Reading Hayek after Dekker has been a very unhappy experience for me. [1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/
on “And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men” ↗There's also the concept of the "Drift into Failure", which I believe was coined by Sydney Dekker (https://www.amazon.com/Drift-into-Failure-Components-Underst...), where small compromises in operations eventually cause very important security and reliability…
on “NASA advisers say SpaceX rocket technology could put lives at risk” ↗