Or indeed the safety! Which again comes back to giving engineers a well rounded ("liberal arts" to return to the quoted article) education. A good engineering education should inculcate a sense of realism that for all sorts of reasons, probabilistic and systematic, any engineered system will - given enough life time and population - fail in unwanted ways. Then having an understanding how society - and individual psychology - works shows how to achieve a sensible judgement as to whether, for any given system, the consequent risk is considered worth taking.


Such as the acceptable road accident rate that would not be tolerated on any road, air or sea public transportation system. Where there is a very sound, logical, rational, and perfectly justifiable reason for this. This reason being that the human brain works in VERY odd ways when assessing risks  


Looking forward to the three of us meeting up over a pint of lemonade sometime to sort the whole safety industry (and indeed the rest of the world) out!


Meanwhile I'm currently en route to York to deliver safety engineering training to Network Rail staff - these sessions are always a case of trying to make what can be a very dry subject interesting. What always works is bringing it back to case studies - real human stories. Which yet again comes back to the importance of having a wide ranging scope in engineering education.


Cheers,


Andy

Or indeed the safety! Which again comes back to giving engineers a well rounded ("liberal arts" to return to the quoted article) education. A good engineering education should inculcate a sense of realism that for all sorts of reasons, probabilistic and systematic, any engineered system will - given enough life time and population - fail in unwanted ways. Then having an understanding how society - and individual psychology - works shows how to achieve a sensible judgement as to whether, for any given system, the consequent risk is considered worth taking.


Such as the acceptable road accident rate that would not be tolerated on any road, air or sea public transportation system. Where there is a very sound, logical, rational, and perfectly justifiable reason for this. This reason being that the human brain works in VERY odd ways when assessing risks  


Looking forward to the three of us meeting up over a pint of lemonade sometime to sort the whole safety industry (and indeed the rest of the world) out!


Meanwhile I'm currently en route to York to deliver safety engineering training to Network Rail staff - these sessions are always a case of trying to make what can be a very dry subject interesting. What always works is bringing it back to case studies - real human stories. Which yet again comes back to the importance of having a wide ranging scope in engineering education.


Cheers,


Andy