How things fail matter more than how they work
Cory Doctorow wrote about how it’s more important to understand how catastrophic (or not) things can be when they fail than to understand how easy things are when they work:
Paying attention to how things work without thinking about how they fail is a recipe for disaster. It’s the reasoning that has people plow their savings into speculative assets that are going up and up, without any theory of when that bubble might pop and leave them ruined.
It’s hard to learn about failure without experiencing it, so those of us who have lived through failures have a duty to help the people we care about understand those calamities without living through them themselves.
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