> Your argument is too powerful. It proves engineering as a whole is impossible.
No. It's an argument that we have no good way of estimating the damage caused by rare, spectacular failures in complex systems. But thanks for the down-vote.
> It's an irrational appeal to emotion dressed up in rational trappings.
No. It's pointing out an epistemic hole, one that is essentially the reverse of the sunrise problem [0], that has been discussed by countless philosophers of science, probability theorists, and scientists across dozens of fields. I suggest you read the article I linked and some of the papers it cites rather than make a spectacle of your downright hurr-durr ignorance of the subject.
No. It's an argument that we have no good way of estimating the damage caused by rare, spectacular failures in complex systems. But thanks for the down-vote.
> It's an irrational appeal to emotion dressed up in rational trappings.
No. It's pointing out an epistemic hole, one that is essentially the reverse of the sunrise problem [0], that has been discussed by countless philosophers of science, probability theorists, and scientists across dozens of fields. I suggest you read the article I linked and some of the papers it cites rather than make a spectacle of your downright hurr-durr ignorance of the subject.
0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem