Avoiding Overwhelm In their book Meltdown, Clearfield and Tilcsik show how complicated systems fail. They discuss nuclear accidents, financial disasters and medical mishaps and show how we can avoid disasters by reducing complexity. The more complex our systems become, the less easy they are to understand. So they become harder to fix when they break. Add […]
Preventable Harm
A definition: The unintended physical injury resulting from or contributed to by medical care (including the absence of indicated medical treatment), that requires additional monitoring, treatment or hospitalisation, or that results in death. A simpler definition: A medical accident. A few statistics: The medical industry 2014: The estimated number of premature deaths in US hospitals […]
What is Sample Bias?
There are some jobs you really wouldn’t want… Perhaps the most dangerous in history was to be a crew member of a World War II bomber (I don’t suppose it matters which side). You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet, but according to some of the more reliable sources, during World War II: Over […]
Should You Punish Mistakes?
If somebody made a mistake that nearly killed you, would you punish the mistake? In 1989 there was an air show at Brown Field in San Diego. The test pilot Bob Hoover was taking thrill-seekers for flights in his Shrike Commander, a small, piston-powered, passenger plane. The passengers were known as “Hoover’s Heavers” — more often […]
Regression to The Mean
Is the Stick Mightier Than the Carrot? Psychologists will tell you that carrots are a far more productive strategy than sticks. You might think this is a blindingly obvious statement, but the facts don’t always support it. Sometimes the psychologists are proven wrong, often by a case of “regression to the mean”. That is exactly […]