Kathy Jackson Article "Normalization of Deviance"

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I never did understand the logic behind allowing human eating animals to repopulate.

The inverse of these things is also true. Case in point, they are now FENCING the pond at Disney where the kid got eaten by the alligator. Second attack ever in the history of Disney, and first death. Additionally, virtually every parent I talk to now comments that they won't be letting their children near bodies of water anymore. As a Florida native, this has reached near comical proportions, but because I am the minority (nobody is "from" Florida in SE Florida) I get shouted down.

So now we have the "deviance" which is the single death, and the "normalization" which is the fencing and behavior modification.

I can just hear the mommies and the carpet-baggers now... "it's not the odds, it's the stakes!" Oh, wait...

[GardoneVT]

There is a counterpoint, minor though it may seem.

Not to say that safety is not vitally important, but one can go the other direction as well. Acceptable risk is a necessary evil because realistically, we can only eliminate the risk of an unsafe event by not doing it to start with.

Using the NASA example, shuttle launches were complex things to set off. If NASA resolved to hold launches until every possible threat to the space vehicle was investigated , they'd never leave the launchpad. A balance had to be maintained between launching the Shuttle versus the risk of Event X taking it down.

We know twice that the risk didn't pay off. What we don't publicly know are previous times when someone at NASA said " that potential threat looks shaky, but launch anyways" and it never caused a problem since.

Insofar as gun ranges go, I'll be happy if 60% of my customers don't violate more then two of the four rules during their visit. I'm more worried about the obvious safety issues.

[Suvorov]

Using the NASA example, shuttle launches were complex things to set off. If NASA resolved to hold launches until every possible threat to the space vehicle was investigated , they'd never leave the launchpad. A balance had to be maintained between launching the Shuttle versus the risk of Event X taking it down.

We know twice that the risk didn't pay off. What we don't publicly know are previous times when someone at NASA said " that potential threat looks shaky, but launch anyways" and it never caused a problem since.

Insofar as gun ranges go, I'll be happy if 60% of my customers don't violate more then two of the four rules during their visit. I'm more worried about the obvious safety issues.

Correct, launching a space shuttle, putting your ass in a seat inside an aluminum tube going 80% of the speed of sound, and firing a gun ALL by nature involve more risk than lying in bed. This is why people who know what they are doing look at the risks, develop Best Practices and Countermeasure to mitigate the risk as much as possible, and this becomes SOP. In the airline world these SOPs are our Operation Manuals, in the gun world they are are 4 Basic Principles. The cause of the Shuttle Accidents, the MD-80 Romulus crash, and most gun accidents was not that the SOPs were ineffective in preventing tragedy - it was the fact that people were allowed within the culture to cut corners and omit certain SOPs for the sake of connivance or a mistaken belief that it was needed to "get the job done." As time went on, these omissions became the "normal" until the chain of events was such that the original SOP that would have broken the "chain of errors" was not being enforced so it didn't do its job.

Now where I think there is a counterpoint, and self servingly enough it fits into and reinforces my political philosophy as well, is where having too many regulation and too convoluted of an SOP encourages the Normalization of Deviance. Aviators know all to well how one of the first things a new chief pilot or squadron commander often like to do in inject their personal idiom into the SOP - the problem becomes however that the more obscure the rule is, the more likely it is to be omitted which in turn weakens the entire foundation of the rules. Certainly other profession have direct counterparts and anyone who lives or lived in an over regulated land like Kalifornia or your beloved Illinois know that the more laws their are - the less they are followed.

This is why I'm such a big fan of Cooper's (???) 4 Rules. They are succinct and comprehensive enough to prevent just about every firearms accident I can think of aside from ammunition or mechanically induced catastrophic failures without being burdensome to all but the most "extreme" forms of shooting (and in those cases more risk is assumed and the whole process of devolving new SOPs begins).

[Chuck Haggard]

This stuff is why I am regularly telling people that fortuitous outcomes reinforce bad tactics.


In his officer safety training over the past couple of decades renowned trainer Dave Smith has often spoken of cops getting lackadaisical about risk due to a reset in their "Risk Thermostat".

https://www.policeone.com/patrol-iss...eadly-Routine/

[Chance]

"Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" is something that's stuck with me since I first heard it as an undergrad. It's one of a number of reasons I call them "negligent discharges," and not "accidental."

[Mr Pink]

http://www.corneredcat.com/normalization-of-deviance/

That was an excellent article and very usable for many situations, particularly those in leadership positions dealing with lowering standards to accept PC.

[hufnagel]

I'm seeing some correlation between this topic and this event... https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....gent-Discharge

(btw and unrelated, advanced search failed to find it using the words 'travis haley' without single-quotes. had to use google. luckily it had been indexed/crawled/whatever.)

[Joe in PNG]

"Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" is something that's stuck with me since I first heard it as an undergrad. It's one of a number of reasons I call them "negligent discharges," and not "accidental."

Feynman's account of the investigation is also worth reading.

[Dropkick]

This is a very timely reminder for myself not to become complicit in my actions. Otherwise I'm just boiling my own frog.

[Chance]

Feynman's account of the investigation is also worth reading.

Everything Feynman wrote is worth reading, in my opinion. But seriously: that one statement (which I first heard in a class on engineering ethics) totally changed the way I work to identify the origin of problems, and assess a sequence of actions. Those words genuinely haunt me.

It taught me not to look for individuals to blame, but to instead identify the "normalization of deviance" as this excellent article discusses. Very, very few things "just happen." That's why I have a resistance to dismissing things as an "accident."