Engineering a safer world
by Nancy Leveson · first published 2011
70% recommend30% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Applies systems theory to accident causation, arguing that failures come from component interactions and that operator error is a symptom, not a cause. Suits engineers who want to go beyond root-cause analysis.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Not root cause analysis. Complex systems fail in complex ways. If you want to read more about how this is done, try Normal Accidents (Perrow), Human Error (Reason)... but you're going to land on Engineering a Safer World (Leveson) eventually. You can get a free copy from the author's web site: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/safer-world/index.html There are tech shops that use these sorts of techniques for every major incident,…
on “Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas” ↗…system. Imagine trying to mix GnuPG with high performance networking! Boom. My preferred tools for thinking about what causes accidents like this are Leveson's systems-oriented frameworks, explained in Engineering a Safer World. The text is available free from MIT Press, I believe. If you're responsible for the safety of a planetary computer system, you should read it and it's principal competitors. And if you do, Akamai Infosec…
on “Heartbleed Update” ↗OT: Have you ever read Engineering a Safer World [0] by Nancy Leveson [1]? Seems like something that'd be of interest to you. Started on it this week, my sister is in her class this semester at MIT. I'll be tackling it over the next few weeks, and then…
on “Kent Beck: “I get paid for code that works, not for tests” (2013)” ↗The article's not silly. Leveson and Hamilton's works cover that explicitly. Start with Engineering a Safer World's Intent Specifications, move on to Safeware, and look at the attention that goes into writing the right TLA+ specs. Lists like "Government regulations, flaky hardware…" look a lot like the upper levels…
on “Programmers who want to change how we code before catastrophe strikes” ↗Leveson's Engineering a Safer World[1] is excellent, for those interested in safety engineering. [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world
on “The Therac-25 Incident” ↗…level of complexity we're building today are impossible to run safely, and we should shut them all down. (I exaggerate, but only a little.) A book I like which responds to Reason's is Nancy Leveson's Engineering a Safer World (free PDF from the MIT Press, even! https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world) which says, okay, if we don't want to shut these systems (like the Internet) down, how can we run them safely,…
on “Human Error in Software” ↗What a fantastic talk! Witty, well-paced and truly insightful. "Operator error is a symptom, not a cause." Ms. Leveson's book "Engineering a Safer World" has a free PDF download at http://sunnyday.mit.edu/safer-world.pdf
on “Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report” ↗Engineering a Safer World by Leveson [0], as well. Goes into great detail about these ideas, how to model them, and how to build safety into systems deliberately rather than as an afterthought. [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world
on “Welders set off Beirut blast while securing explosives” ↗I found Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety to be a much better explainer for systems thinking than Meadows' book. https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Safer-World-Systems-Think...
on “How to Safely Think in Systems” ↗Engineering a safer world - Systems thinking applied to thinking, by Nancy Leveson (MIT - 2009) was recommended in a previous discussion as a more comprehensive and systemic treatment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131981…
on “How Complex Systems Fail (1998)” ↗Nancy Leveson's _Engineering a Safer World_ (available for free here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2908/Engineering-a-Safer-W...) is required reading, in my opinion. It talks about applying systems theory to reducing industrial accidents,…
on “Ask HN: Best Books on Systems Theory?” ↗Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety by Nancy Leveson Definitely one of better books that makes you think outside the box.
on “Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?” ↗Indeed, the whole press release brings to mind a couple of points from "Engineering a Safer World" which, if you're interested in this stuff, I can't recommend enough[0]. In the section "Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering": Old Assumption Most accidents are caused…
on “Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report” ↗…For instance you could have a escape system failure that triggers the exploding rocket or a software system failure which causes both the rocket to explode and the escape system to fail. Take a look at 'Engineering a safer world' for an idea of how NASA and other parties actually calculate these probabilities: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world
on “NASA advisers say SpaceX rocket technology could put lives at risk” ↗Engineering a Safer World was a truly career changing book for me, and I am so thankful for bts and mstone for introducing it to me.
on “Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas” ↗