Yes! And it would be even more interesting to learn why the statistical value has skyrocketed while most wages and benefits have lagged inflation and cost of living for (arguably) the last 40 years..... 🤔
As an engineering manager, I've pushed to add an additional 15% to our safety factor for our structures (we design heavy industrial machines). Our sales guys hated it initially, because our prices were 2 to 5% higher, but after a few years, we earned a reputation for reliable machines that stand up to abuse, our customers love us, and we are doing better than ever. We as engineers have been pushed into increasingly thinner and thinner safety factors by cost cutting focused executives, but they fail to realize there is a limit and by putting so much pressure on the engineers, they are inviting trouble when unforeseen circumstances eventually come knocking. What is foreseeable though, is that there will always be unforeseen circumstances. It's important to push back, and when appropriate, to hold them accountable.
Good on you! Many of the penny pinchers who financially survive their frugalness and the incidents of harm, or even just worn-out machinery, will come to you eventually. Better for a company to get a reputation of quality than to be the Harbor Freight of your industry.
@@jameswilson5165 Some of the shuttle disasters were a result of the pace of missions, overriding some of the concerns of engineers. The Challenger o-ring problem was unanticipated, if I remember correctly.
that's just the opening bid. It's often negotiated down, just like hospital bills. Human life is wasted for much less money in practice. Sometimes its as little as a couple dollars that costs multiple people their lives. Also, this is only the value of human life in one context. If you're handicapped in some way or otherwise impaired by a mental health & physical health condition, you'd be amazed by how little people can value your life. Regardless of your ability to work high value generation jobs, too.... it's pretty f*cked.... America is a healthcare hellscape. 😮💨
"Your public arena for gladitorial fights can always be made safer by spending more resources on design and construction" is a hilarious sentence out of context 😂
...and in context. On the next episode of The Colosseum: Corner-Cutting Construction Clientele VS Your Entrusted Engineers. Don't miss the gladiatorial exchange that everyone's been dying to see!
Let’s start a campaign to ensure this is the quote he’s most remembered for. Maybe it will stick around long enough to benefit future generations as blood sport comes back into fashion.
Any yet again, someone says something incorrect so they can feel good about themselves being an internet sheep to the disease that is meme's. Lawyers are people too.
@@Elrog3 Nay, 'tis thee whom is the sheep! Dude, my dad's a lawyer, I showed him my comment and he thought it was funny Get over yourself and have a laugh lol
@@historicalfootnotes I've very rarely ever seen anyone else hate meme's as much as I do, so the description of 'sheep' is incorrect. And no, I'm not laughing at the normalization of rhetorical devices that are used in place of good reasoning instead of in conjunction with it. I've seen far too many people try to use meme formats in actual arguments and think they made a good point.
At 1:44 Grady says "If safety were paramount we wouldn't engineer anything". That is so true. Here in British Columbia I've seen many jungle gyms removed from school playgrounds because they're SO risky. Instead, the children sit around developing cardiovascular disease, which is much more acceptable, apparently.
@@tomlxyz I'm in BC here, too. Had a kid in his early 20s come into my first aid shack after cutting his knee open, when he slipped. I told him when he got home to flush it with water and he asked if warm water was going to make it hurt 🤦♂
This is a tough topic to explain to the public (especially as an engineer) and you did a fantastic job of it. There is no such thing as something perfect, infallible, 100% safe no matter how much we dream, but we can always strive to make things as safe as possible and as cost effective as possible to meet the client's needs and putting ethics first.
In other words: make it as safe as possible within budget. Agreed that nothing can be made 100% safe but shouldn't safety be the first thing to consider rather than the first thing cut back on?
@@ThuhOthers As I said, I understand that, but safety shouldn't be treated as something that we can afford (or can't afford) but something that should take priority in a budget. Case in point: Japan building tsunami walls for a 100-year flood but getting inundated anyway. I understand that they are now upgrading the walls for a 1000-year flood. Clearly you can't plan or predict everything but it shouldn't depend on a "school bus on the railroad tracks" mindset. According to Grady's info, spending $12.5 million dollars more now will save at least one life later.
@@Filboid2000Safety & Security expert here. The problem is that companies need to make profit, one of our hardest challenges as safety expert is to convince managers, ceo's and directors that spending 20k on a safety measure will save them more money than it costs, let alone 12,5 million. Companies are not eager to spend money that may reduce future costs (the cost of damages after an incident), because it may also not have been required at all and in this case it is wasted money. Providing evidence that says "you do need to spend this money to reduce risks, because it will cost you otherwise." is complicated and often controversial. At least most companies will try to adhere to the regulations, but since regulations are vague this can also spark debate. Furthermore, imagine that you can reach acceptable risks by taking safety precautions worth 10k, at that point there are not many organisations that are willing to spend an additional 5k to drop the risk down even further. It's sad when a company doesn't take care of its employees safety properly, but it is reasonable when a company has provided a lot of safety and says no to diminishing returns. At its simplest neglecting safety is cruel, but chasing it to the end of the world can be naive, unnecesary and too costly to sustain. At the end if the day it is always a heated debate full of complexities that I can not do justice with a few lines on a youtube comment.
I teach Engineering Ethics at a large public technical school, and hundreds of rising engineers take my classes every year. I've been sprinkling Grady's videos throughout my syllabus for years because they're a fantastic educational resource, and his case studies give a real world perspective on the importance of safety in everyday engineering practice. Still, I've been secretly wishing Grady would do a more explicit presentation on engineering ethics. I've even thought about reaching out to Grady directly to help motivate and coordinate such a project. While I've been enjoying Grady's latest videos with the sewer pipe install quite a lot, I selfishly worried that it signaled a more hands-on direction for the channel, making my dreams of an ethics-focused video seem less likely. What a fantastic surprise to find this video in my feed this morning! The final product is really more than I could have hoped for, a showcase of Grady's skills as a video essayist and public educator. A dash of theory, some compelling historical examples (TIL about the Golden Gate Bridge net!), and an overall extremely reasonable and clear-eyed perspective on a challenging ethical issue that is absolutely central to real engineering practice. From my own experience, the question "why is there a price on human life" is one I hear regularly from students when we discuss cases like the Ford Pinto fires, where this "conversion factor" actually influenced a decision that cost real human lives. Explaining this situation to students has always been a challenge for me, since it has no neat philosophical or technical or ethically satisfying answer. This situation is a product of the messy realities of engineering in the real world. No one is better at giving a level-headed presentation of the messy realities of engineering than Grady and Practical Engineering. Thank you so much for this video and for your work! This video is definitely going in my syllabus. =)
Those poor kids. Typical of western "academics" to seek out misinformation for their students. If you're actually a teacher, most likely are just a liar, I would hope you would be fired sooner rather than later foe your students sake.
I scrolled down to the comments to mention that this should be a day 1 video in engineering 101. Glad Grady's work is being shown to our youth. Also, I second the engineering ethics videos. As a PE in MN and other states in the area, I need 2 hours of ethics PDH's for a PE renewal. I have had a PE for nearly 12 years and almost all the ethics videos are some boring professor reading out of an ethics textbooks. The real world problems are a much better lesson.
Ethics case studies were some of my favorite material in undergrad. I'm grateful for instructors like you who take the curriculum seriously and don't simply treat it as a checkbox for accreditation.
A loss of life is a very difficult thing to forget. I can say I am still haunted by the loss of someone who was not very much younger than I was. The young man climbed down into a tank that was lit only by the flashlight he was carrying. At the bottom of the ladder, he turned left took one step, and fell to the bottom of the tank. Had he turned right he would still be alive. During the plan approval process, I rejected the arrangement and the lack of a railing. I rejected each drawing until I was instructed by the vice president of engineering to stamp the drawings approved. A life was lost for the cost of a handrail. A trivial cost in a multi-million dollar project. During construction the shipyard had a temporary handrail in place for OSHA compliance. I still feel responsible for the loss, although I had no control over the decisions that were made.
makes me think of the Sampoong Department Store, The reputable construction company refused to do unsafe work so the owner of the building being built fired them and used their own company.
This reminds me of the Merrimack Valley gas line failure (which Grady also has a video on) In hindsight, it's clear that the problem was caused by poor design and/or documentation of the company's infrastructure and was merely triggered by the workers, but I imagine they can't help but feel somewhat responsible for such a massive disaster. Of course the ideal solution is to design things with the minimum probability of failure, but as @filanfyretracker mentioned, at some point the customer will just have someone else do it for the cost they want, or it won't happen at all.
That must be a tough feeling from a tragic experience. I honestly hate that the VP of Eng at your company forced you to put YOUR STAMP on a drawing you felt was unsafe.
I don't comment that often and I hope you see this. This was really well done and gave information I had no idea about. I work in construction but not the engineering side. I find all your videos fascinating and I learn something every time. Just wanted to thank you for putting in the time you do to make these. We really do appreciate it.
Insurance companies have determine the value of a human life at 100 thousand dollars, for over a decade. Apparently those in the position to make these decisions have little morality.
Extremely well balanced way of explaining this idea and this problem. I think it's a decision most of us would never be comfortable making, in all seriousness. Some folks are willing to joke around and mock the trolley problem, but even they would flat refuse to accept responsibility for such a decision in real life. And yet - as you said, when something is constructed RIGHT, the engineer is the one getting the praise - for a little while at least. Maybe the best praise though is when no one says a word? Because then, you know they aren't even noticing an issue enough to worry about it. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of people cross the Golden Gate Bridge every single day, and how many of them think as they approach it "hm, is this safe?" Of course they mostly don't, because they've learned to trust the bridge, and the engineers who built it. I think ALL of us in the developed world implicitly trust the engineers, even if they don't know it. We've been trained to that expectation, that whoever is designing and building a thing knows what they're doing on SOME level. Surely I never wondered if a road was actually "built right" until I understood what goes into making one in the first place. And roads were something I saw being built all the time, I've never lived in a place where big structures like bridges or huge buildings were being constructed! I can't even imagine what it would be like to have some massive skyscraper going up "next door" as it were. But folks see that all the time in the biggest cities, don't they? And no one seems to spend much time worrying if the giant crane is going to fall over on them. I think that speaks to the consistent ability of modern engineers to look out for the safety of everyone, even when you do factor in the many accidents and disasters it's still incredibly rare for such things to happen. Otherwise we wouldn't be so shocked about it, would we!
Exactly. Philosophers and Ethicists present Trolley problems as some kind of awful extremes, and Engineers just frown as they're required to solve them very frequently. No engineer thinks "I'm killing a child" when they make a poor design choice on a road near a school... but in a lot of ways they are.
The trolley problem in the video has a simple solution. The workers aren't tied to the tracks, so you just yell at them to get off the tracks because there's a trolley coming.
It really depends on your personality. I don't have this problem. But I also am basically "one work interaction away" from people who make these decisions on a daily basis. In general, the key is to have certain rules on how to do stuff and then stick to it. As soon as it's not you making the decision, but the decision is already made and you are just implementing it, most people are fine. That effect is very pronounced in typical roles where one person makes the decision and commands another person do do something: The first one can say "I didn't do anything" or even "I didn't know all the details" and the second one can say: "I only did what I was told to". Just imagine the trolley problem, but you have a dedicated person whose working orders are: "If you see a train coming, divert the trolley to the track with the fewest workers on it". Then most people will be fine pulling the lever.
at 5:20 in the example of the highway, I'd like to note that a lot of these end up increasing the speed people travel, largely because they feel safer and thus more comfortable taking risks like driving faster, or using phones, or being otherwise inebriated. adding safety to a system can allow users to behave less safely and trust in the system to catch them. this is not a reason to *not* build safety into a system, but it is something to consider when claiming the changes will reduce danger.
Helmet laws for bicycles save less people than predicted, because drivers give them less space since they don't look as vulnerable, and probably the cyclists also behave differently.
As a professional doing risk analyses, I really like your comments on white area in your graph at 10:44. Even my colleagues have a hard time understanding that just multiplying probability with effect isn't always giving a good value to the risk.
Its interesting to hear how engineers consider safety. I work in medicine and everything we do is a risk/benefit analysis. No treatment is guaranteed and side effects and adverse effects are always to be considered. Thanks for sharing the engineering version of this!
"Side effects and adverse effects are always to be considered". Except when we gave $30 billion to pharmaceuticals companies and forced our citizens to get the jab without any other considerations and forced them to sign "no-liability" waiver.
@@dimas.2381 I’m a student in healthcare sector (not a doctor btw) so I can tell you that research and development process is more complicated and costly than most people think, also regulatory authorities are making sure that those big pharma aren’t out there to harm people. Everything has pros and cons medications , building methods, material choices, personality traits, etc. and that’s ok. If all the things are well managed, right person on the right job and right stuff in the right place, everything will turn out alright 😊. I love learning the management aspects from different disciplines, it’s a great fun 🤩
We do it in diagnosing illnesses as well. With every test there is the probability of figuring out if the patient has problem X or not. There is also the probability of the test saying problem X exists when it really doesn't. For many things there are more accurate and much more expensive tests, but usually we don't need them to have a high enough probability of being right. But we also need to have a good idea of when the cost of those more accurate tests is justified. If we use them for everyone, we don't have the money to treat everyone. So you always have to pick and choose your strategy. Resources in the real world are always finite. Everything in life is a cost-benefit-analysis whether people can accept it or not. Ignoring the fact only leads to poor decision making.
The issue of matching a dollar value with human life is one of the main reasons why healthcare finance is such a cluster. Lots to say, of course. One example that stuck with me (in becoming a health insurance actuary) is along the lines of the difference between an otherwise healthy 8 year old who needs a heart transplant vs. a 95 year old with dementia diagnosed with aggressive cancer. Both are lives. But they are not the same, particularly in terms of the "kind" of life you're saving; that is, if they go through the life-saving treatment, what is their quality of life afterwards? Some would say a life is a life no matter what. Others see the grim, yet real, difference. Some studies even quantified QALYs, or Quality-Adjusted Life Years, based on various factors, and it's as complex you like. Someone with perfect health as a QALY of 1.0, and someone dead is 0.0. Stay at home for 3 months with TB, .68/year. Hospitalized for life with a contagious disease, .16/year. And so forth. That's just the starting point. Fun stuff. :)
Thank you! I never heard of QALY, but it sounds like a very interesting topic. Haven't really looked through it, so maybe I'm wrong. But it sounds like I often do calculations like these for decisions around covid etc. I'll definitely read into that.
Dementia messes up things because that person is halfway gone (or completely) But everyone always gives special attention to children, makes no sense to me. Your grandma has 80+ years of experience and, depending on how alive her friends/relatives are a lot of connections she has had. It's a realized life. When she dies, all that is done and gone. Of course QALY comes in and it's easy to say, that there isn't much point in keeping someone in a barely alive state for a limited amount of time with the same resources you could have used for greater effect. But also if you have a baby and it dies, well the baby is essentially just a bunch of potential and not much realized. It would be also equally easy to say that there is no point in saving a newborn when you can make a new one in 9 months, compared to someone who had already done 50 years of living.
For everyone saying "the trolly problem is simple because of this workaround" 1) that's not the point of the problem, and 2) look at "The Greater Good | Mind Field | S2:E1" by Vsauce for a more thought-out problem with testing. (the tests begin at 14:34)
Thanks for making this awesome video! This video reminds me of some of the engineering courses I took in college while pursuing my Mechanical Engineering degree. It is morbid, touchy, and feels wrong to calculate, but it must be done to make any engineering choice. My professor made a great statement: No matter how much money you put into a project, it will never be 100% safe. Calculating the "cost of a theoretical life" allows companies and engineers to determine what safety measures can be used and what warnings need to be shared with users. Some great examples that were taught in "Engineering Ethics & Disasters" included: - Ford Pinto Lawsuits - Flight 191 crash out of Chicago on a DC-10 - Citicorp Center building in New York
One thing that stands out to me is how inaccurate the Ford pinto and the Ford's valuation of life was reflected into the public consciousness. It was a generic, I'm not sure what the exact term is but it's where the senate consults industry leaders on the impacts that their legislation would have in the real world. As a result, it's probably just a paper that got kicked around to some small team and no one of importance would have ever known about it, but the general public treats it like it's some conspiratorial evidence. Another strange thing was that the Pinto wasn't even unsafe compared to its competitors and was pretty average. A lot of it was pop culture that lifted it into the stratosphere kind of unfairly. One thing we learned that should have been pretty obvious, was that back in the day cars were just more dangerous to drive, and they continually improve. It's interesting to revisit some of these topics retroactively and discover how we were wrong about things in public perception and how they're passed down and just accepted.
There's a quote from the railroading industry that's very similar to what you said about how rules are written in blood. Now days railroading is a much safer job than the late 1800s, but back then, you could "Tell how long a brake man has been on the job by how many fingers he had on his hand." You take a guess what that means. Back then they used link and pin. A link was held into a socket while the engineer switched the train into another train. Once close enough, the brakeman could put a pin into both sockets. This of course, many times have a brakeman got his fingers trapped between 2 sockets. Back then, any job was grim, but railroading was harsh.
Grady, once again you haven't shied away from difficult subject matter, and have put forth thoughts and concepts that serve to explain quite well WHY things are the way they are. I love what you do, and the care you put into your narrations. They are gold.
Great job Grady! A couple of things I might add are: Adding safety features is adding layers of protection. In the "swiss cheese model", you have to ensure there are no holes in those layers that line up and eliminate the safety features. Risk is the multiplication of Consequences x Probability. The layers protection work to reduce either the consequences or the Probablity like this: Design features: Location of the road, The roughness of the road, the curvature radius, width of the road, slope etc. , design of the cars Administrative and Passive controls: qualification (drivers tests), procedures, standards, operating instructions that people follow (like stop signs and road rules), maintenance, .. Active engineering Controls: Like rail road gates that close when a train is crossing a road, stop lights, air bags, (things that could fail, but have engineered systems to prevent their failure Emergency Response: Things that reduce the consequences, but don't affect the probability of the event, location of hospitals and availability of ambulances etc.
I had a girlfriend for several years that graduated from the University of Oklahoma-Norman. Her job was to figure out how much dead people were worth. She only told me a few stories that bothered her. Don't fight the insurance company unless they think you're dead loved one is worth less than you think . Otherwise the money that would be going to you will stay with the insurance company and their lawyers. She had a big heart but a big courtroom battle was more important.
“Anyone can make a bridge that lasts for a hundred years. Only an engineer can make a bridge that barely lasts for a hundred years.” -engineering proverb on trade offs and cost optimization.
@@jum3628 It was just a joke about the actual physical process of building the bridge, which is done by labourers and tradespeople. I didn't mean much by it, just kidding around :)
this is something which was recently touched on in my engineering course at uni, and i feel as if you've dealt with the topic with more grace than they did
I think it's also important to mention, that the values differ greatly. I think I saw 2016 values of 9-16M, depending on who is doing the calculation and how. Things which may factor in are: 1) If you are in an accident while you are driving, you are statistically more valuable than someone getting hit while walking. Because the fact that you can afford a car correlates with having a job and generating value for society. 2) There are often secondary effects like grieving family taking extra vacation or needing therapy or even the fact that your job will not run smoothly if you take out one person of a team without prior notice and a means to transfer knowledge.
Indeed. People often forget that their lifelong economic contribution to society is worth more than what they make in their lifetime - precisely because their presence enables those around them to make more than if they were absent.
I personally never saw the train question as a moral dilemma. Once I am there decided to not throw the switch, that is just as much a conscious decision as throwing it. At that point I am involved and responsible for any outcome, and as such its simple. 5 lost lives, 5 shattered families, etc ... or 1. Throwing is the switch is the only option since you saved 4 lives.
The trolly problem includes multiple iterations, such as what if the one was your child, spouse, loved one. Or what if the five were elderly and wouldn’t last much longer. Obviously you’re willing to kill one to save five. Not everyone is.
@@jimmypatton4982 I am familiar with the different iterations, but I dont look at it as I am killing one -- there will be loss of life no matter what I do, so to me its a matter of saving as many people as possible in an impossible situation.
it has also been limitly tested and some people just freeze up thinking that someone else will make the call for them, or simply out of fear. So depending on a time limit or not, the answer can change. I know that wasn't really a part of the original question, but it's something to consider.
@@interesting9688 That is fair and a good point. I have been in the situation being the first person on the scene of a car accident and I had to make a hard call. I made that call at that time without thinking, but the aftermath took me some time to accept despite it being what I think as the correct decision even now.
As another person commented, the discussion of this dilemma often adds ...but what if... What if it's 5 elderly people vs one child prodigy? What if the 5 had terminal cancer vs a healthy person? What if the 5 were serial killers vs a doctor? What if the train was going so fast that throwing the switch cause a 40% likelihood of derailment killing all 6 workers?....AND YOU? Does anyone have the legal and/or moral obligation to act (or not act) in the original scenario? You didn't cause the crisis, but your decision could have legal consequences either way.
The bridge fire example is interesting -- of course it's not a risk to human life, but I would like to think they also calculate the financial risk of losing that roadway for 6 weeks.
It might be that the road would have to be closed regardless even if it were made of fire resistant materials. Just because something is fire resistant doesn't mean it's unaffected. Just because it doesn't collapse doesn't mean it's safe for use after a big fire.
@@alex2143 Exactly, it would have to be rebuild anyway. And the materials used might be worse for the environment than the ones we use now. There are just so many factors.
@@alex2143 That's why i said "calculate" rather than "eliminate". Essentially, I'm saying that the cost of failure is more than the replacement cost of the structure. (Replacement cost plus loss-of-use), and I hope that was at least evaluated at design time. It's quite possible that the additional cost of a 30-minute resistance to fire at N degrees is prohibitive.
@@alex2143 I think rebuilding is just an accepted risk because no lives are lost. Also of course in this area its easy to shunt through traffic over to 295 and NJTP and SEPTA/PATCO can pick up some slack to carry commuters into Philly itself.
you also have to consider the probability of the event happening in the first place. Its possible the economic / financial penalty of losing that roadway is larger than constructing a fireproof bridge, but the cost of making every bridge fireproof vs the probability of fire might not be worth it. I'm pretty sure they do this analysis (plus others) in real-life, just this video shows a simplified explanation on how human costs apply.
I have had some experience in the nuclear industry in the UK and the term "As Low As Reasonably Practicable" or ALARP is used a lot, and covers a similar theme to this video. Essentially, you need to demonstrate that your design has considered the various features, functions and design options that effect safety and argue that the risk is as low as can sensibly be achieved. This is usually tied to a potential amount of radioactive dose that could be experienced by operators or the public in general. For example, it may be possible to make a design that reduces dose to operators by some amount, but it worth the extra millions in cost? Or is there something that only has a slight improvement to safety but only costs peanuts to implement? There are some guides and precedent to help but at some point you need to draw the line somewhere and have an argument for why the design's risk to safety is ALARP. It is quite an interesting way to consider engineering in safety critical applications, but can also be applied to other sectors, businesses and life in general.
IEC 61508 quantifies the acceptable risk on the basis that a 1/100,000 chance of an individual dying at work per year is acceptable. A 1 in 2,000,000 risk of killing a member of the general public offsite is also acceptable. For comparison your probability of dying at work of random health problems (heart attacks and strokes) is 1/10,000 per year.
This video makes me feel old... When I was in school (MS Eng Mgt) in 1983 we discussed this. I don't remember the value then, but I would have guessed more like $100k.
One major exception at 1:30 to people not having to consider the safety of a structure and not being to blame: leasehold apartments in the UK. Just look at how innocent apartment owners have been forced to pay to fix structures that were badly built in the wake of Grenfell Tower. Building a block of flats in the UK is one of the few cases where the victims are made to pay.
It is not just a tradeoff between financial costs & risks, but between risks and risks. If you keep increasing the financial cost, that financial cost equals human labor, and putting more and more human labor into a project to ensure safety is maximized only distributes/spreads/shifts the physical safety risk onto somebody else, as more stressed workers have to worry about getting to work more.
Another way to think about this topic is to realize that people have already died in accidents, so we as a society owe it to those souls to learn as much as we can from those situations, otherwise their deaths were for nothing.
The problem of risk is a lot like the problem with authority. Maybe if I sit in my basement with the lights on and try to breathe as little as I can I could probably be both safe and law abiding. One of my better friends is an insurance broker, we disagree greatly as to the purpose of insurance. Being an insurance broker he wants me to live as safe a life possible so we can get the best deal on insurance and not have to use insurance. I personally believe insurance is meant to allow you to live and take risks you otherwise wouldn't or wouldnt be able to.
Thank you again for a wonderful video. I plan on using this in class and shared with 2 of my other colleagues who also teach ethics. As a prior engineer and now philosophy professor this video meets both my interests.
It makes me so happy to attach a value to a human life. It is dangerous to avoid this subject: -Save a certain group of people for any cost, is only virtue signalling. -Not paying any cost to value life, is very expensive as well. Acting on an accurate value of life makes for the best decision making.
Definitely agree. I think with most ethics courses, there's a lot of studies and discussions on moral dilemmas, but no tools or measurements given to actually make a definite decision.
Absolutely! So many people morally grandstand about life being priceless yet if that were the case, you would never fly on a plane if your life was of seemingly infinite value. Our society is built on risk management, not emotions and sentiment.
You have to be careful in what context you use this value though. Is it okay to apply the value for safety measures that may or may not be utilized to prevent accidents? Yes. It is not okay, however, in instances where companies like Ford try to apply this to their legal bills to justify not fixing design flaws that will most definitely cause deaths. And that's the law too because of cases like the Pinto, not just an ethical guideline.
"-Save a certain group of people for any cost, is only virtue signalling" Not really. Sometimes inaction represents such a destabilizing moral hazard that for a government to justify itself, it must spend "any cost" This is the crux of most of the criticisms of VSL. There are special occasions that must be measured specially. Some people have tried to square the circle by suggesting a fine (pigovian tax) but that would require admitting that market failures could occur which is verboten as it is blasphemous to our civic religion
The problem of attaching a value to a human life in essence is that there is always rich people who are so rich that paying this price for them is affordable and post that then they think they can decide what to do with the life they paid the money for.
Grady, I have liked all your videos but this one was an unexpected topic that I had no idea I would be so interested in. Great job and nice idea to cover this topic. I have 40 years experience in electrical maintenance & construction in positions that have let me see the plethora of changes both to structure safety and worker safety and I often wondered how the choices where made. (As a side note the bubble wrapped highway made me LOL for real) Thanks for the interesting video(s) Bob
There is a right answer to the trolley problem: switch the track between the wheels & get the trolley to do a sick drift into both sets of tracks to hit all people and maximize the point value, bonus points if you do a kickflip afterwards.
It always stuck with me ever since I had watched your Hyatt Regency Collapse video on Tom Scott's channel-that there is an implicit handshake that the engineer has with the public, that the public never should worry about the integrity of every ceiling they walk under. I found the lesson pivotal in my view of our built world, and I'm glad to see this video expand on the topic so effectively.
Good video. On the trolley problem, it is the manager's fault. He laid off the engineer and delayed vehicle maintenance for 5 years. Bridges that I designed and built 35+ years ago, do not appear to have ever had the recommended maintenance. Good Luck, Rick
The place I worked had a complex chart with multiple parameters to determine what safety measures/equipment was appropriate for each task. 1. Severity of injury 2. Frequency of injury 3. Likelihood of injury/accident 4. Cost of prevention. Each parameter was rated on a Zero to Maximum, or 0 to 5 scale. Each parameter also had a priority multiplication factor. Management, staff, and floor workers all did individual assessments. It was rare to have consensus. In reality, whatever the manager wanted was what was usually chosen.
If Wendover Productions and Practical Engineering went out to dinner the conversation would start well, but would devolve into an endless loop of references to airplanes and dams.
When my mom was young and fresh out of college, she used to work for an insurance adjuster. She got to figure out what people's loss of life was worth. For instance, a college basketball player who was already scouted by the NBA was hit by a drunk driver and had to have his arm amputated. She had to figure out how much his arm was worth given he was going to make a lo5 of money off of it.
Aviation has a very similar model to this. Safety Management System constantly evaluates risk to keep things safe. That’s part of the reason of a decade-plus of domestic fatality-free flying. It’s not foolproof, but it is amazing to see in operation.
The "Legal Price" for a Human life is not just about doing something or not doing something, it is about comparing different methods. Should we design stair wells so they are fire proof and well ventilated to help evacuation, or install sprinkler? How many people should be allowed in a particular space, and how can we increase that number with more and wider evacuation doors or other safety measures? If we have a million dollars to spend on health care, should everyone get a vaccine or should we invest in five more beds in the hospital? (Or whatever the trade-off would be.) So when we say that "a human life is cheap" when it comes vaccines, what we really say is that vaccines is a cheap way to save a lot of people.
Yes, having a currency allows easy comparison and efficient decision making. Now if only each private entity were allowed to make its own decisions, we would have an efficient free market around safety, rather than a centrally planned one that only suits the average (i.e. no one).
What you describing isn't the price of a life, you're discussing the most efficient way to spend money to save lives... That's not the same discussion. To reword it, it's a difference between how much would you spend to save a life, or how can we save as many lives as possible with this amount of money, they're different questions.. one's a maximum and one's an efficiency question
Well unfortunately the recent pricky things precipitated a higher overall mortality instead of reducing it according to a recent comprehensive study. So not all pricky things 'save lots of people'. Would you believe I've tried to p o s t the link, the title and even a vague description of how to find the study several times here and every comment gets d 3 l 3 ted. Really gets the old n o g g in jo g g in doesn't it?
You don’t need an actual dollar amount on a human life to do those comparisons. If you already have a budget of $1 million then you just look at how many lives each option would save at that price point. Whether a single life is worth $12 million or $120 million doesn’t matter since it would cancel out of both sides of the equation.
I used to work on a ferry that didn't have enough rafts for the rated capacity for many reasons, but my favorite was that we were in a place where EMS response time was FAST and very rarely was the ship even 1/2 full.
@PracticalEngineeringChannel It's crazy how far this channel has gotten over the past few years, I subscribed when I was studying for my Civil Eng. degree when you barely had a few thousand subscribers. Happy that you bring knowledge of our field to so many people!
It's very true, tho. Until someone dies, nothing will make it into law. And even then, it can take multiple escalating incidents for the law to actually be enforced.
Very interesting! As an MD I am familiar with the topic. It comes up more and more with new medicaments that are very expensive: Howvmuch is society willing to pay for a gain of one „good“ year? What is a good year? How much for a month? Difficult questions …
I have thought about this for myself. When I get cancer, not if but when, I may not fight it. The cost is high. If I go through the treatment, well, they go through that aspect. Then there is the financial burden of the cost of that treatment. Let’s say I may get a few more years, is it worth it for me to put my family through that again only to pass away & leave insurmountable debt in my wake. While I’m on the treatment, I may not be able to eat stuff I want to eat or do things I want to do. Hardly sounds like living. Kinda morbid but we don’t tend to want to think of reality of the situation.
I think the issue at the present point in time is maintenance costs. You mentioned that someone designed the trolley brakes, but someone also failed to maintain them properly.
@@LoboPal A single cart trolley though? Those don't really exist much in the modern day. Given the fictitious nature of the problem I was more concerned with the logical scenarios of the problem than trying to fit a real scenario to it.
While it is true that 19 people survived falling to the net of the Golden Gate bridge. It is not necessarily true that it saved 19 people. It might well be that many of those accidents were the result of carelessness brought about in part from the knowledge that the net was there to catch them if they did fall. There was also one incident where a cart fell along with 12 men, which broke the net, killing 10 of them. It's possible that this incident might also have been in part due to carelessness associated with an inflated perception of safety.
I'm guessing you'd refuse to wear a seat belt if that was an option. it's equally likely that ANOTHER 19 workers were reminded of the fall hazard by the presence of the net and worked more carefully.
I've heard that most pedestrian road accidents happen at designated pedestrian crossings, where the pedestrian has an elevated sense of safety because they're on a crossing. Same idea.
So what you're saying is that those 19 people were saved by the net, after they fell, possibly because they were careless. So the net saved 19 people, but may not have reduced the total number of deaths.
@@guyincognito. most vehicle v. pedestrian accidents happen at pedestrian crossings for the same reason most bank robbers rob banks. because that's where the money is.
@@kenbrown2808 You'de guess wrong. I vehemently advocate for wearing seatbelts as it's one of the most effective means of reducing risk in day to day life. I'm just pointing out the nuance of unintended consequences.
And in the road-specific case starting round 4:58: how much safety margin is appropriate for the kind of traffic that you want? Maybe the whole point is to produce a risky environment, so drivers are inclined to drive more carefully. For a motorway, more safety is generally a plus. For a residential street, building in little safety to make drivers drive carefully may very well be the entire point.
@@ironlynx9512 Ah, so likely European with an overinflated sense of self, and jist enough engineering knowledge to either butcher the concept, misapply it, or simply fail to explain it properly for the average person.
I love that you had the courage to address that subject. It's something I always thought about and tried to discuss but it's too taboo to speak about. Hopefully it informs the rest of the public that we're not just some heartless engineers !
Keep in mind, that the LEGAL price he 's talking about. on the black market, prices can be very different, depening on what kind of professional you are dealing with.
5:23 The most effective way to make roads safer is to reduce the number of cars on said roads - and the most effective way to do _that_ is to remove lanes. Induced demand, after all, means that more lanes = more cars, and more cars = more accidents. Also increase spending on public transport, like buses and trains, and make cycling more feasible as well. These are all way more beneficial than "wider roads".
"Safety First" is rarely true - otherwise we wouldn't make much of anything we make, often it's "Money First, Safety Second". If someone can make enough money to justify the inherent risk, they will.
I've seen it "Safety Third". First is accomplishing the goal, such as travelling from point A to point B, second is cost, because people need to be willing to pay to use it, and you need to make a profit (or justify spending public money), third is safety. It reminds people to pay attention, because their safety isn't the sole concern. Put up "Safety First" signs, and people can get complacent about their own safety, because they think other people have taken care of the danger.
We had a similar thing; the city had two places to put a walking overpass to save lives. In one area they determined they could save 10-30 lives over 10 years with the overpass, plus 50-200 injuries. In the other area the numbers were 5-15 fewer deaths, 20-80 fewer injuries. They built it in area two because it was a richer area, so those children were worth more.
“Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyse so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.”
Ok, that's amazing lol. As a practicing engineer, I feel each of those statements intensely, and I wish more architects and contractors understood this.
As another has mentioned here, I would LOVE for you to develop ethics vidoes like this for those of us that need the PDH's. Your relatibility, quality, and entertainment vaule are vastly superior to anything else out there. You could add the Millenium Tower in SF (which you already did) and possibly the Citibank building in NYC which had some very interesting ethical developments which are almost the opposite of the Millenium Tower (they fixed the issue under cover of night instead of alerting the public and losing money).
Great video Grady! Electrical engineer from Aus here. Maybe you can expand this series into another episode(s) based on weight up other (non human/safety) risks - environmental, etc?
One thing you missed on the highway safety bit is that of drivers education. The barrier to entry could be set higher such that only the really good drivers get to drive. Many countries around the world goes that route alongside making much safer roads. The US have very open roads with less sharp bends but they still seem to have plenty of accidents. That's mainly due to poor drivers (and no, not everyone who is involved in an accident is a poor driver but they share the roads with unsafe drivers) and it could be mitigated by having stricter passing grades in drivers education and stricter laws and penalties for doing something that is unsafe or driving a vehicle that shouldn't be driven. Just look at such channels as "Just Rolled In" to see examples of the types of cars that share the road with you... It's HORRIBLE and in my country those vehicles would be red flagged and disqualified from driving on roads until fixed. And most of them can't really be fixed and would therefore be permabanned from the roads. Driving such a vehicle is akin to attempted manslaughter.
If you think about it, that choice would also cost a lot of lives. The US is enormous and most of it is designed around cars. In a lot of places, there is no good public transportation. Banning lower-quality cars would overwhelmingly hit the poor, and make it so many of them couldn't work. That would have huge consequences for lives. Also, we *do* ban bad drivers, we just do it through insurance premiums.
You can say, great, that's encouragement for public transit, but that's much, much easier said than done. Things like this are paid for and run at the local level. It would take years and years to get this in place even if you could get everyone to agree to do it. Or you can require standard safety features on new cars and in the same time allow normal attrition to take the old ones off the road. Honestly, it's rare to see a really old car on the road here. Don't confuse an entertainment show that's deliberately showing something rare for what's actually normal.
That channel showcases the worst of the worst, with examples taken from across the globe. Even then, a good portion aren't safety-related issues. Of all vehicle crashes that result in injury (in the US), only a very small minority were caused by a mechanical issue that could've been prevented by programs that countries such as yours have. With the US being so enormous, and so unwelcoming to pedestrians, the cost of such programs would be higher than the VSL.
Fantastic video, you really make dry engineering topics real and interesting. As an old practitioner i can say that it took me some time to really understand how important issues such as this are to how we go about designing and building infrastructure, they are often overlooked or not sufficiently emphasised in education programmes, in favour of the technical side.
Hi Brady, could you do a video about traffic calming? I was wondering how engineers make roads so that people can only drive to specific speeds. Thank you
I'd love to show my class a video on that premise "building codes are written in blood," highlighting stories of really basic things like GFCI outlets, door push bars, and fire escapes.
When I was in a internship in a big company, I found myself in a meeting with people discussing the risk of decapitation using a costly machine that needed repairs (a safety glass was missing basically). They evaluated the percentage of the risk, the cost of reparation for the machine and how much money they would have to pay if someone was killed using the machine. They finally decided, based on all those numbers and some other decisions factor that the reparation could wait. I was shocked to see them talk about human life as merely cost on a spreadsheet.
Companies have saved tremendous amounts of money because a human life, valued by insurance companies, has been evaluated at about a hundred thousand dollars. Most high quality machines cost more.
It's hard to believe that you were old enough to get an internship but still naive enough to be shocked at such a discussion. What, did you honestly expect that the value of saving a human life was infinity dollars?
@@far2ez You know, with my cursus I've started internships at 15, and it was my last internship at 24 and it was the first major company that was pretty cold about it, so yeah, it was a bit of a shock. Plus my field doesn't not generally involve those kinds of meeting.
7:16 Though, quite often the more neurotic people have imagined the potential disasters before they happen, sometimes even voice concern, but it's usually not taken too seriously before it actually happens. And even worse, some disasters have to happen at least once in each country for laws to change. It seemed to me like in the 80s and 90s there were several fires in overcrowded nightclubs leading to trampling disasters in several countries in Europe, but it seemed like they the laws only changed in each country after they had had a high profile disaster; rather than everyone realising this is a problem when it happened in another country; after all they were major news stories in all countries.
1:01 “Engineering didn’t even exist at the time” this is a crazy statement, you’ve clearly no idea what the Romans and the Greeks built before 27a.d., some engineering masterpiece without using any power tool: arches, temples, theaters.. and before them the Egyptian built the pyramids and in Mesopotamia people built ziggurat
Ey, finally a topic I can relate to. I am currently studying for a Ms.Sc.Eng in systems engineering with a focus on dependability (includes safety) with the study area of aerospace engineering. It is interesting since I have deep dived into aeroplane and road vehicle development and safety standards (ARP4754A toward CS25, ARP4761 and iso26262), where they do not place an inherent dollar value on human life, but instead classifies the effects of failure conditions and specifies how often the different classifications are allowed to occur. Do not have the standards right now but an example from ARP could be the the classification "Catastrophic" which is allowed to only occur 10^-9 times per flight hour, where Catastrophic entails the effect of, for example, loss of hull (Is specified in ARP). From my understanding of them, there is no variable for cost in the equation of "Are we allowed to build it" but rather in the equation"Can we afford to build it". Don't really know what I wanted to say but maybe gives a very small windows into safety in other disciplines and that they are slighley related in this. Hope someone found it insightful.
My answer to the trolley problem is to leave the switch alone. Five workers mean five brains and ten eyes to see the trolley coming, and the law of self preservation takes over. We're all stronger as a team.
This one is a little touchy, but I think it's a really important part of engineering that is often overlooked. Do you think I struck the right tone?
Perfect tone. Measured and real. You threaded the needle.
Ford got in a lot of legal trouble putting a value on a human life while designing the Pinto. Actually, they where just a head of their time.
Nailed it
Yes! And it would be even more interesting to learn why the statistical value has skyrocketed while most wages and benefits have lagged inflation and cost of living for (arguably) the last 40 years..... 🤔
@@gus473live cheaper? That's always possible.
As an engineering manager, I've pushed to add an additional 15% to our safety factor for our structures (we design heavy industrial machines). Our sales guys hated it initially, because our prices were 2 to 5% higher, but after a few years, we earned a reputation for reliable machines that stand up to abuse, our customers love us, and we are doing better than ever.
We as engineers have been pushed into increasingly thinner and thinner safety factors by cost cutting focused executives, but they fail to realize there is a limit and by putting so much pressure on the engineers, they are inviting trouble when unforeseen circumstances eventually come knocking. What is foreseeable though, is that there will always be unforeseen circumstances. It's important to push back, and when appropriate, to hold them accountable.
there are few who think like you
fantastic thing to read ♥ what is the company you work for?
Good on you!
Many of the penny pinchers who financially survive their frugalness and the incidents of harm, or even just worn-out machinery, will come to you eventually.
Better for a company to get a reputation of quality than to be the Harbor Freight of your industry.
If only NASA had held these views during the Shuttle years. A lot of brave astronauts would be alive today.
@@jameswilson5165 Some of the shuttle disasters were a result of the pace of missions, overriding some of the concerns of engineers.
The Challenger o-ring problem was unanticipated, if I remember correctly.
Honestly, $12.5 million is more than I thought they would evaluate for a human life...
It is definitely less
The 1% bring up the average a lot...
I think the amount depends on the context. It's different in for example car insurance claims compared to bridge construction.
That's certainly not a payout you can expect from life insurance or a civil suit for loss of life
that's just the opening bid. It's often negotiated down, just like hospital bills. Human life is wasted for much less money in practice. Sometimes its as little as a couple dollars that costs multiple people their lives. Also, this is only the value of human life in one context.
If you're handicapped in some way or otherwise impaired by a mental health & physical health condition, you'd be amazed by how little people can value your life. Regardless of your ability to work high value generation jobs, too.... it's pretty f*cked.... America is a healthcare hellscape. 😮💨
"Your public arena for gladitorial fights can always be made safer by spending more resources on design and construction" is a hilarious sentence out of context 😂
Also hilarious in context, LOL.
Seems like the arena collapsing saved the lives of some potential gladiators. I wonder what the break even point was?
Ah, welcome to capitalism where the answer is always just "throw more money at the problem!" heh
...and in context.
On the next episode of The Colosseum: Corner-Cutting Construction Clientele VS Your Entrusted Engineers. Don't miss the gladiatorial exchange that everyone's been dying to see!
Let’s start a campaign to ensure this is the quote he’s most remembered for. Maybe it will stick around long enough to benefit future generations as blood sport comes back into fashion.
Humans: “You can’t put a price on a life!! It’s priceless!”
Lawyers: “12.5 million”
Any yet again, someone says something incorrect so they can feel good about themselves being an internet sheep to the disease that is meme's. Lawyers are people too.
@@Elrog3 Nay, 'tis thee whom is the sheep!
Dude, my dad's a lawyer, I showed him my comment and he thought it was funny
Get over yourself and have a laugh lol
@@historicalfootnotes I've very rarely ever seen anyone else hate meme's as much as I do, so the description of 'sheep' is incorrect.
And no, I'm not laughing at the normalization of rhetorical devices that are used in place of good reasoning instead of in conjunction with it. I've seen far too many people try to use meme formats in actual arguments and think they made a good point.
US military: how about $400,000
@@zacharyhoman3597 Russian military: how about a brand new white Lada.
At 1:44 Grady says "If safety were paramount we wouldn't engineer anything". That is so true. Here in British Columbia I've seen many jungle gyms removed from school playgrounds because they're SO risky. Instead, the children sit around developing cardiovascular disease, which is much more acceptable, apparently.
Seen vs the unseen.
Children who never had the chance to get themselves hurt will do so as an adult
@@tomlxyz I'm in BC here, too. Had a kid in his early 20s come into my first aid shack after cutting his knee open, when he slipped. I told him when he got home to flush it with water and he asked if warm water was going to make it hurt 🤦♂
This is a tough topic to explain to the public (especially as an engineer) and you did a fantastic job of it. There is no such thing as something perfect, infallible, 100% safe no matter how much we dream, but we can always strive to make things as safe as possible and as cost effective as possible to meet the client's needs and putting ethics first.
In other words: make it as safe as possible within budget. Agreed that nothing can be made 100% safe but shouldn't safety be the first thing to consider rather than the first thing cut back on?
@@Filboid2000 please don't twist my words: with an infinite budget, it still will not be 100% safe. There will always be unforseen issues that arise
@@ThuhOthers As I said, I understand that, but safety shouldn't be treated as something that we can afford (or can't afford) but something that should take priority in a budget. Case in point: Japan building tsunami walls for a 100-year flood but getting inundated anyway. I understand that they are now upgrading the walls for a 1000-year flood. Clearly you can't plan or predict everything but it shouldn't depend on a "school bus on the railroad tracks" mindset. According to Grady's info, spending $12.5 million dollars more now will save at least one life later.
Capitalism keeps us from having automated cars because that would eliminate insurance companies and car repairs.
@@Filboid2000Safety & Security expert here.
The problem is that companies need to make profit, one of our hardest challenges as safety expert is to convince managers, ceo's and directors that spending 20k on a safety measure will save them more money than it costs, let alone 12,5 million.
Companies are not eager to spend money that may reduce future costs (the cost of damages after an incident), because it may also not have been required at all and in this case it is wasted money. Providing evidence that says "you do need to spend this money to reduce risks, because it will cost you otherwise." is complicated and often controversial.
At least most companies will try to adhere to the regulations, but since regulations are vague this can also spark debate.
Furthermore, imagine that you can reach acceptable risks by taking safety precautions worth 10k, at that point there are not many organisations that are willing to spend an additional 5k to drop the risk down even further.
It's sad when a company doesn't take care of its employees safety properly, but it is reasonable when a company has provided a lot of safety and says no to diminishing returns.
At its simplest neglecting safety is cruel, but chasing it to the end of the world can be naive, unnecesary and too costly to sustain.
At the end if the day it is always a heated debate full of complexities that I can not do justice with a few lines on a youtube comment.
I teach Engineering Ethics at a large public technical school, and hundreds of rising engineers take my classes every year. I've been sprinkling Grady's videos throughout my syllabus for years because they're a fantastic educational resource, and his case studies give a real world perspective on the importance of safety in everyday engineering practice. Still, I've been secretly wishing Grady would do a more explicit presentation on engineering ethics. I've even thought about reaching out to Grady directly to help motivate and coordinate such a project. While I've been enjoying Grady's latest videos with the sewer pipe install quite a lot, I selfishly worried that it signaled a more hands-on direction for the channel, making my dreams of an ethics-focused video seem less likely.
What a fantastic surprise to find this video in my feed this morning! The final product is really more than I could have hoped for, a showcase of Grady's skills as a video essayist and public educator. A dash of theory, some compelling historical examples (TIL about the Golden Gate Bridge net!), and an overall extremely reasonable and clear-eyed perspective on a challenging ethical issue that is absolutely central to real engineering practice. From my own experience, the question "why is there a price on human life" is one I hear regularly from students when we discuss cases like the Ford Pinto fires, where this "conversion factor" actually influenced a decision that cost real human lives. Explaining this situation to students has always been a challenge for me, since it has no neat philosophical or technical or ethically satisfying answer. This situation is a product of the messy realities of engineering in the real world.
No one is better at giving a level-headed presentation of the messy realities of engineering than Grady and Practical Engineering. Thank you so much for this video and for your work! This video is definitely going in my syllabus. =)
Sounds like a request for a guest lecturer :) Would love to see it.
Those poor kids. Typical of western "academics" to seek out misinformation for their students. If you're actually a teacher, most likely are just a liar, I would hope you would be fired sooner rather than later foe your students sake.
IIRC the project engineer who decided on the net later resigned because of the backlash, but predecessors still did the net.
I scrolled down to the comments to mention that this should be a day 1 video in engineering 101. Glad Grady's work is being shown to our youth.
Also, I second the engineering ethics videos. As a PE in MN and other states in the area, I need 2 hours of ethics PDH's for a PE renewal. I have had a PE for nearly 12 years and almost all the ethics videos are some boring professor reading out of an ethics textbooks. The real world problems are a much better lesson.
Ethics case studies were some of my favorite material in undergrad. I'm grateful for instructors like you who take the curriculum seriously and don't simply treat it as a checkbox for accreditation.
According to my mom I'm priceless... I mean, that's not the wording she used, but potato, potato. Worthless, priceless. What's the difference?
😂😂😂
Not gone lie he had us on the first half 😂🤝🏽
As an insurance broker, I can change that...
😂😅bruh
Either way, no one wants to buy you
A loss of life is a very difficult thing to forget. I can say I am still haunted by the loss of someone who was not very much younger than I was.
The young man climbed down into a tank that was lit only by the flashlight he was carrying. At the bottom of the ladder, he turned left took one step, and fell to the bottom of the tank. Had he turned right he would still be alive.
During the plan approval process, I rejected the arrangement and the lack of a railing. I rejected each drawing until I was instructed by the vice president of engineering to stamp the drawings approved.
A life was lost for the cost of a handrail. A trivial cost in a multi-million dollar project. During construction the shipyard had a temporary handrail in place for OSHA compliance.
I still feel responsible for the loss, although I had no control over the decisions that were made.
This is a horrible story, made worse by the last passage about OSHA compliance.
makes me think of the Sampoong Department Store, The reputable construction company refused to do unsafe work so the owner of the building being built fired them and used their own company.
Reminds me of the Challenger disaster, those who fought against the launch were left feeling guilty, wonder how the management felt.
This reminds me of the Merrimack Valley gas line failure (which Grady also has a video on)
In hindsight, it's clear that the problem was caused by poor design and/or documentation of the company's infrastructure and was merely triggered by the workers, but I imagine they can't help but feel somewhat responsible for such a massive disaster.
Of course the ideal solution is to design things with the minimum probability of failure, but as @filanfyretracker mentioned, at some point the customer will just have someone else do it for the cost they want, or it won't happen at all.
That must be a tough feeling from a tragic experience. I honestly hate that the VP of Eng at your company forced you to put YOUR STAMP on a drawing you felt was unsafe.
12:11 The aeronautic's version is "I can design a plane that never crashes! Unfortunately it won't be able to take off"
haha
If it can't take off, it can't crash.......goal met!
Safety during construction is just as important as safety after construction. We need to keep those workers safe.
And we need to or we just won't have workers anymore lmao
I don't comment that often and I hope you see this. This was really well done and gave information I had no idea about. I work in construction but not the engineering side. I find all your videos fascinating and I learn something every time.
Just wanted to thank you for putting in the time you do to make these. We really do appreciate it.
Insurance companies have determine the value of a human life at 100 thousand dollars, for over a decade.
Apparently those in the position to make these decisions have little morality.
Extremely well balanced way of explaining this idea and this problem. I think it's a decision most of us would never be comfortable making, in all seriousness. Some folks are willing to joke around and mock the trolley problem, but even they would flat refuse to accept responsibility for such a decision in real life. And yet - as you said, when something is constructed RIGHT, the engineer is the one getting the praise - for a little while at least. Maybe the best praise though is when no one says a word? Because then, you know they aren't even noticing an issue enough to worry about it. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of people cross the Golden Gate Bridge every single day, and how many of them think as they approach it "hm, is this safe?" Of course they mostly don't, because they've learned to trust the bridge, and the engineers who built it. I think ALL of us in the developed world implicitly trust the engineers, even if they don't know it. We've been trained to that expectation, that whoever is designing and building a thing knows what they're doing on SOME level. Surely I never wondered if a road was actually "built right" until I understood what goes into making one in the first place. And roads were something I saw being built all the time, I've never lived in a place where big structures like bridges or huge buildings were being constructed! I can't even imagine what it would be like to have some massive skyscraper going up "next door" as it were. But folks see that all the time in the biggest cities, don't they? And no one seems to spend much time worrying if the giant crane is going to fall over on them. I think that speaks to the consistent ability of modern engineers to look out for the safety of everyone, even when you do factor in the many accidents and disasters it's still incredibly rare for such things to happen. Otherwise we wouldn't be so shocked about it, would we!
Exactly. Philosophers and Ethicists present Trolley problems as some kind of awful extremes, and Engineers just frown as they're required to solve them very frequently. No engineer thinks "I'm killing a child" when they make a poor design choice on a road near a school... but in a lot of ways they are.
The trolley problem in the video has a simple solution. The workers aren't tied to the tracks, so you just yell at them to get off the tracks because there's a trolley coming.
It really depends on your personality. I don't have this problem. But I also am basically "one work interaction away" from people who make these decisions on a daily basis.
In general, the key is to have certain rules on how to do stuff and then stick to it. As soon as it's not you making the decision, but the decision is already made and you are just implementing it, most people are fine. That effect is very pronounced in typical roles where one person makes the decision and commands another person do do something: The first one can say "I didn't do anything" or even "I didn't know all the details" and the second one can say: "I only did what I was told to".
Just imagine the trolley problem, but you have a dedicated person whose working orders are: "If you see a train coming, divert the trolley to the track with the fewest workers on it". Then most people will be fine pulling the lever.
@@ParaSpite They're wearing hearing protection and you have no way to communicate with them.
at 5:20 in the example of the highway, I'd like to note that a lot of these end up increasing the speed people travel, largely because they feel safer and thus more comfortable taking risks like driving faster, or using phones, or being otherwise inebriated.
adding safety to a system can allow users to behave less safely and trust in the system to catch them.
this is not a reason to *not* build safety into a system, but it is something to consider when claiming the changes will reduce danger.
Helmet laws for bicycles save less people than predicted, because drivers give them less space since they don't look as vulnerable, and probably the cyclists also behave differently.
The best safety measures are those which are invisible to the user.
As a professional doing risk analyses, I really like your comments on white area in your graph at 10:44. Even my colleagues have a hard time understanding that just multiplying probability with effect isn't always giving a good value to the risk.
Its interesting to hear how engineers consider safety. I work in medicine and everything we do is a risk/benefit analysis. No treatment is guaranteed and side effects and adverse effects are always to be considered. Thanks for sharing the engineering version of this!
"Side effects and adverse effects are always to be considered". Except when we gave $30 billion to pharmaceuticals companies and forced our citizens to get the jab without any other considerations and forced them to sign "no-liability" waiver.
@@dimas.2381 I’m a student in healthcare sector (not a doctor btw) so I can tell you that research and development process is more complicated and costly than most people think, also regulatory authorities are making sure that those big pharma aren’t out there to harm people. Everything has pros and cons medications , building methods, material choices, personality traits, etc. and that’s ok. If all the things are well managed, right person on the right job and right stuff in the right place, everything will turn out alright 😊. I love learning the management aspects from different disciplines, it’s a great fun 🤩
@@dimas.2381 When benefits outweigh the costs by a significant margine . . .
@@dimas.2381 Sometimes "consider" can mean "accept". ;)
We do it in diagnosing illnesses as well. With every test there is the probability of figuring out if the patient has problem X or not. There is also the probability of the test saying problem X exists when it really doesn't. For many things there are more accurate and much more expensive tests, but usually we don't need them to have a high enough probability of being right. But we also need to have a good idea of when the cost of those more accurate tests is justified. If we use them for everyone, we don't have the money to treat everyone. So you always have to pick and choose your strategy. Resources in the real world are always finite.
Everything in life is a cost-benefit-analysis whether people can accept it or not. Ignoring the fact only leads to poor decision making.
The issue of matching a dollar value with human life is one of the main reasons why healthcare finance is such a cluster. Lots to say, of course. One example that stuck with me (in becoming a health insurance actuary) is along the lines of the difference between an otherwise healthy 8 year old who needs a heart transplant vs. a 95 year old with dementia diagnosed with aggressive cancer. Both are lives. But they are not the same, particularly in terms of the "kind" of life you're saving; that is, if they go through the life-saving treatment, what is their quality of life afterwards? Some would say a life is a life no matter what. Others see the grim, yet real, difference. Some studies even quantified QALYs, or Quality-Adjusted Life Years, based on various factors, and it's as complex you like. Someone with perfect health as a QALY of 1.0, and someone dead is 0.0. Stay at home for 3 months with TB, .68/year. Hospitalized for life with a contagious disease, .16/year. And so forth. That's just the starting point. Fun stuff. :)
Thank you! I never heard of QALY, but it sounds like a very interesting topic. Haven't really looked through it, so maybe I'm wrong. But it sounds like I often do calculations like these for decisions around covid etc. I'll definitely read into that.
"Fun stuff".
You do have a dry humor
pay for your own treatment
Dementia messes up things because that person is halfway gone (or completely)
But everyone always gives special attention to children, makes no sense to me. Your grandma has 80+ years of experience and, depending on how alive her friends/relatives are a lot of connections she has had. It's a realized life. When she dies, all that is done and gone. Of course QALY comes in and it's easy to say, that there isn't much point in keeping someone in a barely alive state for a limited amount of time with the same resources you could have used for greater effect.
But also if you have a baby and it dies, well the baby is essentially just a bunch of potential and not much realized. It would be also equally easy to say that there is no point in saving a newborn when you can make a new one in 9 months, compared to someone who had already done 50 years of living.
@@Limrasson Part of the reason is that Dementia has no cure.
For everyone saying "the trolly problem is simple because of this workaround"
1) that's not the point of the problem, and
2) look at "The Greater Good | Mind Field | S2:E1" by Vsauce for a more thought-out problem with testing. (the tests begin at 14:34)
Thanks for making this awesome video! This video reminds me of some of the engineering courses I took in college while pursuing my Mechanical Engineering degree. It is morbid, touchy, and feels wrong to calculate, but it must be done to make any engineering choice.
My professor made a great statement: No matter how much money you put into a project, it will never be 100% safe. Calculating the "cost of a theoretical life" allows companies and engineers to determine what safety measures can be used and what warnings need to be shared with users.
Some great examples that were taught in "Engineering Ethics & Disasters" included:
- Ford Pinto Lawsuits
- Flight 191 crash out of Chicago on a DC-10
- Citicorp Center building in New York
Interesting case studies, thank you
One thing that stands out to me is how inaccurate the Ford pinto and the Ford's valuation of life was reflected into the public consciousness. It was a generic, I'm not sure what the exact term is but it's where the senate consults industry leaders on the impacts that their legislation would have in the real world. As a result, it's probably just a paper that got kicked around to some small team and no one of importance would have ever known about it, but the general public treats it like it's some conspiratorial evidence. Another strange thing was that the Pinto wasn't even unsafe compared to its competitors and was pretty average. A lot of it was pop culture that lifted it into the stratosphere kind of unfairly. One thing we learned that should have been pretty obvious, was that back in the day cars were just more dangerous to drive, and they continually improve. It's interesting to revisit some of these topics retroactively and discover how we were wrong about things in public perception and how they're passed down and just accepted.
There's a quote from the railroading industry that's very similar to what you said about how rules are written in blood. Now days railroading is a much safer job than the late 1800s, but back then, you could "Tell how long a brake man has been on the job by how many fingers he had on his hand." You take a guess what that means. Back then they used link and pin. A link was held into a socket while the engineer switched the train into another train. Once close enough, the brakeman could put a pin into both sockets. This of course, many times have a brakeman got his fingers trapped between 2 sockets. Back then, any job was grim, but railroading was harsh.
OHS rules/laws are written in blood because corporations will happily kill workers in exchange for profit.
Nowadays all jobs could be done by machines but capitalism still needs wage slaves!
@@3nertia That makes no sense.
Bots rarely do.
@@3nertia there is no way in hell I'm getting replaced by a robot. I didn't get my mechanical engineering majors for nothing.
Grady, once again you haven't shied away from difficult subject matter, and have put forth thoughts and concepts that serve to explain quite well WHY things are the way they are. I love what you do, and the care you put into your narrations. They are gold.
Great job Grady! A couple of things I might add are:
Adding safety features is adding layers of protection. In the "swiss cheese model", you have to ensure there are no holes in those layers that line up and eliminate the safety features.
Risk is the multiplication of Consequences x Probability.
The layers protection work to reduce either the consequences or the Probablity like this:
Design features: Location of the road, The roughness of the road, the curvature radius, width of the road, slope etc. , design of the cars
Administrative and Passive controls: qualification (drivers tests), procedures, standards, operating instructions that people follow (like stop signs and road rules), maintenance, ..
Active engineering Controls: Like rail road gates that close when a train is crossing a road, stop lights, air bags, (things that could fail, but have engineered systems to prevent their failure
Emergency Response: Things that reduce the consequences, but don't affect the probability of the event, location of hospitals and availability of ambulances etc.
I had a girlfriend for several years that graduated from the University of Oklahoma-Norman. Her job was to figure out how much dead people were worth. She only told me a few stories that bothered her. Don't fight the insurance company unless they think you're dead loved one is worth less than you think . Otherwise the money that would be going to you will stay with the insurance company and their lawyers. She had a big heart but a big courtroom battle was more important.
“Anyone can make a bridge that lasts for a hundred years. Only an engineer can make a bridge that barely lasts for a hundred years.” -engineering proverb on trade offs and cost optimization.
However, engineers don't generally build bridges.
@@hhiippiittyy good thing, too. ;)
@@hhiippiittyythis is just wrong who do you think designs a bridge
@@jum3628
It was just a joke about the actual physical process of building the bridge, which is done by labourers and tradespeople.
I didn't mean much by it, just kidding around :)
this is something which was recently touched on in my engineering course at uni, and i feel as if you've dealt with the topic with more grace than they did
I think it's also important to mention, that the values differ greatly. I think I saw 2016 values of 9-16M, depending on who is doing the calculation and how. Things which may factor in are:
1) If you are in an accident while you are driving, you are statistically more valuable than someone getting hit while walking. Because the fact that you can afford a car correlates with having a job and generating value for society.
2) There are often secondary effects like grieving family taking extra vacation or needing therapy or even the fact that your job will not run smoothly if you take out one person of a team without prior notice and a means to transfer knowledge.
Indeed. People often forget that their lifelong economic contribution to society is worth more than what they make in their lifetime - precisely because their presence enables those around them to make more than if they were absent.
I personally never saw the train question as a moral dilemma. Once I am there decided to not throw the switch, that is just as much a conscious decision as throwing it. At that point I am involved and responsible for any outcome, and as such its simple. 5 lost lives, 5 shattered families, etc ... or 1. Throwing is the switch is the only option since you saved 4 lives.
The trolly problem includes multiple iterations, such as what if the one was your child, spouse, loved one. Or what if the five were elderly and wouldn’t last much longer.
Obviously you’re willing to kill one to save five. Not everyone is.
@@jimmypatton4982 I am familiar with the different iterations, but I dont look at it as I am killing one -- there will be loss of life no matter what I do, so to me its a matter of saving as many people as possible in an impossible situation.
it has also been limitly tested and some people just freeze up thinking that someone else will make the call for them, or simply out of fear. So depending on a time limit or not, the answer can change.
I know that wasn't really a part of the original question, but it's something to consider.
@@interesting9688 That is fair and a good point. I have been in the situation being the first person on the scene of a car accident and I had to make a hard call. I made that call at that time without thinking, but the aftermath took me some time to accept despite it being what I think as the correct decision even now.
As another person commented, the discussion of this dilemma often adds ...but what if...
What if it's 5 elderly people vs one child prodigy?
What if the 5 had terminal cancer vs a healthy person?
What if the 5 were serial killers vs a doctor?
What if the train was going so fast that throwing the switch cause a 40% likelihood of derailment killing all 6 workers?....AND YOU?
Does anyone have the legal and/or moral obligation to act (or not act) in the original scenario? You didn't cause the crisis, but your decision could have legal consequences either way.
It's amazing how we distinguish the value of killing someone by accident or doing it on purpose.
You CANNOT prevent murder unless you catch someone in the act.
The bridge fire example is interesting -- of course it's not a risk to human life, but I would like to think they also calculate the financial risk of losing that roadway for 6 weeks.
It might be that the road would have to be closed regardless even if it were made of fire resistant materials. Just because something is fire resistant doesn't mean it's unaffected. Just because it doesn't collapse doesn't mean it's safe for use after a big fire.
@@alex2143 Exactly, it would have to be rebuild anyway. And the materials used might be worse for the environment than the ones we use now.
There are just so many factors.
@@alex2143 That's why i said "calculate" rather than "eliminate". Essentially, I'm saying that the cost of failure is more than the replacement cost of the structure. (Replacement cost plus loss-of-use), and I hope that was at least evaluated at design time. It's quite possible that the additional cost of a 30-minute resistance to fire at N degrees is prohibitive.
@@alex2143 I think rebuilding is just an accepted risk because no lives are lost. Also of course in this area its easy to shunt through traffic over to 295 and NJTP and SEPTA/PATCO can pick up some slack to carry commuters into Philly itself.
you also have to consider the probability of the event happening in the first place. Its possible the economic / financial penalty of losing that roadway is larger than constructing a fireproof bridge, but the cost of making every bridge fireproof vs the probability of fire might not be worth it. I'm pretty sure they do this analysis (plus others) in real-life, just this video shows a simplified explanation on how human costs apply.
Always excited for a new Practical Engineering. Thanks for the great content!!
I have had some experience in the nuclear industry in the UK and the term "As Low As Reasonably Practicable" or ALARP is used a lot, and covers a similar theme to this video. Essentially, you need to demonstrate that your design has considered the various features, functions and design options that effect safety and argue that the risk is as low as can sensibly be achieved. This is usually tied to a potential amount of radioactive dose that could be experienced by operators or the public in general. For example, it may be possible to make a design that reduces dose to operators by some amount, but it worth the extra millions in cost? Or is there something that only has a slight improvement to safety but only costs peanuts to implement? There are some guides and precedent to help but at some point you need to draw the line somewhere and have an argument for why the design's risk to safety is ALARP.
It is quite an interesting way to consider engineering in safety critical applications, but can also be applied to other sectors, businesses and life in general.
IEC 61508 quantifies the acceptable risk on the basis that a 1/100,000 chance of an individual dying at work per year is acceptable. A 1 in 2,000,000 risk of killing a member of the general public offsite is also acceptable.
For comparison your probability of dying at work of random health problems (heart attacks and strokes) is 1/10,000 per year.
You never fail to draw me in Grady. Really appreciate all the thought that goes into how you educate.
This video makes me feel old... When I was in school (MS Eng Mgt) in 1983 we discussed this. I don't remember the value then, but I would have guessed more like $100k.
This is such a great watch. Its like old school History/Discovery/PBS all into one.
One major exception at 1:30 to people not having to consider the safety of a structure and not being to blame: leasehold apartments in the UK. Just look at how innocent apartment owners have been forced to pay to fix structures that were badly built in the wake of Grenfell Tower. Building a block of flats in the UK is one of the few cases where the victims are made to pay.
It is not just a tradeoff between financial costs & risks, but between risks and risks.
If you keep increasing the financial cost, that financial cost equals human labor, and putting more and more human labor into a project to ensure safety is maximized only distributes/spreads/shifts the physical safety risk onto somebody else,
as more stressed workers have to worry about getting to work more.
@0:42 That problem continues to plague us 2000 years later.
Another way to think about this topic is to realize that people have already died in accidents, so we as a society owe it to those souls to learn as much as we can from those situations, otherwise their deaths were for nothing.
The problem of risk is a lot like the problem with authority. Maybe if I sit in my basement with the lights on and try to breathe as little as I can I could probably be both safe and law abiding.
One of my better friends is an insurance broker, we disagree greatly as to the purpose of insurance. Being an insurance broker he wants me to live as safe a life possible so we can get the best deal on insurance and not have to use insurance. I personally believe insurance is meant to allow you to live and take risks you otherwise wouldn't or wouldnt be able to.
Thank you again for a wonderful video. I plan on using this in class and shared with 2 of my other colleagues who also teach ethics. As a prior engineer and now philosophy professor this video meets both my interests.
It makes me so happy to attach a value to a human life.
It is dangerous to avoid this subject:
-Save a certain group of people for any cost, is only virtue signalling.
-Not paying any cost to value life, is very expensive as well.
Acting on an accurate value of life makes for the best decision making.
Definitely agree. I think with most ethics courses, there's a lot of studies and discussions on moral dilemmas, but no tools or measurements given to actually make a definite decision.
Absolutely! So many people morally grandstand about life being priceless yet if that were the case, you would never fly on a plane if your life was of seemingly infinite value. Our society is built on risk management, not emotions and sentiment.
You have to be careful in what context you use this value though. Is it okay to apply the value for safety measures that may or may not be utilized to prevent accidents? Yes. It is not okay, however, in instances where companies like Ford try to apply this to their legal bills to justify not fixing design flaws that will most definitely cause deaths. And that's the law too because of cases like the Pinto, not just an ethical guideline.
"-Save a certain group of people for any cost, is only virtue signalling"
Not really. Sometimes inaction represents such a destabilizing moral hazard that for a government to justify itself, it must spend "any cost"
This is the crux of most of the criticisms of VSL. There are special occasions that must be measured specially. Some people have tried to square the circle by suggesting a fine (pigovian tax) but that would require admitting that market failures could occur which is verboten as it is blasphemous to our civic religion
The problem of attaching a value to a human life in essence is that there is always rich people who are so rich that paying this price for them is affordable and post that then they think they can decide what to do with the life they paid the money for.
I don't know if the existence of the VSL comforts or disturbs me more, but I'm glad I know about it now. Thanks, Grady!
Grady, I have liked all your videos but this one was an unexpected topic that I had no idea I would be so interested in. Great job and nice idea to cover this topic. I have 40 years experience in electrical maintenance & construction in positions that have let me see the plethora of changes both to structure safety and worker safety and I often wondered how the choices where made. (As a side note the bubble wrapped highway made me LOL for real) Thanks for the interesting video(s) Bob
There is a right answer to the trolley problem: switch the track between the wheels & get the trolley to do a sick drift into both sets of tracks to hit all people and maximize the point value, bonus points if you do a kickflip afterwards.
It always stuck with me ever since I had watched your Hyatt Regency Collapse video on Tom Scott's channel-that there is an implicit handshake that the engineer has with the public, that the public never should worry about the integrity of every ceiling they walk under. I found the lesson pivotal in my view of our built world, and I'm glad to see this video expand on the topic so effectively.
Good video. On the trolley problem, it is the manager's fault. He laid off the engineer and delayed vehicle maintenance for 5 years. Bridges that I designed and built 35+ years ago, do not appear to have ever had the recommended maintenance. Good Luck, Rick
I never thought that 😂😂
And the solution is to half switch the points, derailing the trolley which likely at most injures people
The place I worked had a complex chart with multiple parameters to determine what safety measures/equipment was appropriate for each task. 1. Severity of injury 2. Frequency of injury 3. Likelihood of injury/accident 4. Cost of prevention.
Each parameter was rated on a Zero to Maximum, or 0 to 5 scale. Each parameter also had a priority multiplication factor.
Management, staff, and floor workers all did individual assessments. It was rare to have consensus. In reality, whatever the manager wanted was what was usually chosen.
Absolutely fascinating topic. It's an amazing perspective that few will ever know. Thank you
Awesome channel and vids! Would love to a video on tailings dams management and failures. Keep up the great content!
The first documented case of money changing hands for an engineering disaster involved a Roman named Insuruns Claimus.
I think the law office defending the engineering firm was Dewey Cheatum & Howe.
If Wendover Productions and Practical Engineering went out to dinner the conversation would start well, but would devolve into an endless loop of references to airplanes and dams.
When my mom was young and fresh out of college, she used to work for an insurance adjuster. She got to figure out what people's loss of life was worth. For instance, a college basketball player who was already scouted by the NBA was hit by a drunk driver and had to have his arm amputated. She had to figure out how much his arm was worth given he was going to make a lo5 of money off of it.
that's crazy
Thanks, was just thinking about this very subject this week having never pondered it before and had been wondering where and how I’d research it!
You're just about 3 dollars and 80 cents if you were spliced into elements. Remember this when you think you're worthless.
Aviation has a very similar model to this. Safety Management System constantly evaluates risk to keep things safe. That’s part of the reason of a decade-plus of domestic fatality-free flying. It’s not foolproof, but it is amazing to see in operation.
The "Legal Price" for a Human life is not just about doing something or not doing something, it is about comparing different methods.
Should we design stair wells so they are fire proof and well ventilated to help evacuation, or install sprinkler?
How many people should be allowed in a particular space, and how can we increase that number with more and wider evacuation doors or other safety measures?
If we have a million dollars to spend on health care, should everyone get a vaccine or should we invest in five more beds in the hospital? (Or whatever the trade-off would be.)
So when we say that "a human life is cheap" when it comes vaccines, what we really say is that vaccines is a cheap way to save a lot of people.
Yes, having a currency allows easy comparison and efficient decision making. Now if only each private entity were allowed to make its own decisions, we would have an efficient free market around safety, rather than a centrally planned one that only suits the average (i.e. no one).
What you describing isn't the price of a life, you're discussing the most efficient way to spend money to save lives... That's not the same discussion.
To reword it, it's a difference between how much would you spend to save a life, or how can we save as many lives as possible with this amount of money, they're different questions.. one's a maximum and one's an efficiency question
Included in that calculation must be the effectiveness, risks and side effects of that vaccine, and they vary widely from one to another.
Well unfortunately the recent pricky things precipitated a higher overall mortality instead of reducing it according to a recent comprehensive study. So not all pricky things 'save lots of people'.
Would you believe I've tried to p o s t the link, the title and even a vague description of how to find the study several times here and every comment gets d 3 l 3 ted. Really gets the old n o g g in jo g g in doesn't it?
You don’t need an actual dollar amount on a human life to do those comparisons. If you already have a budget of $1 million then you just look at how many lives each option would save at that price point. Whether a single life is worth $12 million or $120 million doesn’t matter since it would cancel out of both sides of the equation.
I used to work on a ferry that didn't have enough rafts for the rated capacity for many reasons, but my favorite was that we were in a place where EMS response time was FAST and very rarely was the ship even 1/2 full.
This was a great video
@PracticalEngineeringChannel It's crazy how far this channel has gotten over the past few years, I subscribed when I was studying for my Civil Eng. degree when you barely had a few thousand subscribers. Happy that you bring knowledge of our field to so many people!
I literally just left a yearly winter flight ops seminar where the phrase "regulations are written in blood" was used
It's very true, tho. Until someone dies, nothing will make it into law. And even then, it can take multiple escalating incidents for the law to actually be enforced.
For a bubble wrap popping enthusiast, the bubble wrapped highway sounds amazing!
Very interesting! As an MD I am familiar with the topic. It comes up more and more with new medicaments that are very expensive: Howvmuch is society willing to pay for a gain of one „good“ year? What is a good year? How much for a month? Difficult questions …
I have thought about this for myself. When I get cancer, not if but when, I may not fight it. The cost is high. If I go through the treatment, well, they go through that aspect. Then there is the financial burden of the cost of that treatment. Let’s say I may get a few more years, is it worth it for me to put my family through that again only to pass away & leave insurmountable debt in my wake. While I’m on the treatment, I may not be able to eat stuff I want to eat or do things I want to do. Hardly sounds like living. Kinda morbid but we don’t tend to want to think of reality of the situation.
When I started this video, I said $10M. That's what my engineering economics professor taught me in 2017. Seeing your chart, he was spot on.
Regulations that are written in blood, a 398 part series. Part one: Don't stick your finger where you wouldn't stick your ding dong.
I think the issue at the present point in time is maintenance costs. You mentioned that someone designed the trolley brakes, but someone also failed to maintain them properly.
That's probably more likely, but if it is poorly enough designed, no amount of maintenance will help.
Yes, but that is less realistic to the current train derailment issues, so it seems worth mentioning.@@Elrog3
@@LoboPal A single cart trolley though? Those don't really exist much in the modern day. Given the fictitious nature of the problem I was more concerned with the logical scenarios of the problem than trying to fit a real scenario to it.
While it is true that 19 people survived falling to the net of the Golden Gate bridge. It is not necessarily true that it saved 19 people. It might well be that many of those accidents were the result of carelessness brought about in part from the knowledge that the net was there to catch them if they did fall. There was also one incident where a cart fell along with 12 men, which broke the net, killing 10 of them. It's possible that this incident might also have been in part due to carelessness associated with an inflated perception of safety.
I'm guessing you'd refuse to wear a seat belt if that was an option. it's equally likely that ANOTHER 19 workers were reminded of the fall hazard by the presence of the net and worked more carefully.
I've heard that most pedestrian road accidents happen at designated pedestrian crossings, where the pedestrian has an elevated sense of safety because they're on a crossing. Same idea.
So what you're saying is that those 19 people were saved by the net, after they fell, possibly because they were careless. So the net saved 19 people, but may not have reduced the total number of deaths.
@@guyincognito. most vehicle v. pedestrian accidents happen at pedestrian crossings for the same reason most bank robbers rob banks. because that's where the money is.
@@kenbrown2808 You'de guess wrong. I vehemently advocate for wearing seatbelts as it's one of the most effective means of reducing risk in day to day life. I'm just pointing out the nuance of unintended consequences.
this one gets a lot of points for being surface level shocking, but you treated this rough subject very tactfully.
And in the road-specific case starting round 4:58: how much safety margin is appropriate for the kind of traffic that you want? Maybe the whole point is to produce a risky environment, so drivers are inclined to drive more carefully.
For a motorway, more safety is generally a plus.
For a residential street, building in little safety to make drivers drive carefully may very well be the entire point.
Having a more curvy residential street makes that street safer, exactly for the reason you mention. Having extra wide roads has the opposite effect.
It's called traffic calming.
And pointing to its existence was the point of my comment
@@ironlynx9512 Yeah, and like I said, you must be an engineer, you sure explained it like one.
Some combination of going through engineering courses, as well as an NJB viewer, and living in a country that mostly does that stuff right.
@@ironlynx9512 Ah, so likely European with an overinflated sense of self, and jist enough engineering knowledge to either butcher the concept, misapply it, or simply fail to explain it properly for the average person.
Funfact: the structural codes in switzerland explicitly value a human life between 3-10 Million Swiss francs (almost same as US dollars)
Thought i was clicking on legal eagal with that title. Definitely more intriguing to see this topic on this channel instead.
I love that you had the courage to address that subject. It's something I always thought about and tried to discuss but it's too taboo to speak about.
Hopefully it informs the rest of the public that we're not just some heartless engineers !
Keep in mind, that the LEGAL price he 's talking about. on the black market, prices can be very different, depening on what kind of professional you are dealing with.
all i could think about throughout the video
5:23 The most effective way to make roads safer is to reduce the number of cars on said roads - and the most effective way to do _that_ is to remove lanes.
Induced demand, after all, means that more lanes = more cars, and more cars = more accidents.
Also increase spending on public transport, like buses and trains, and make cycling more feasible as well. These are all way more beneficial than "wider roads".
"Safety First" is rarely true - otherwise we wouldn't make much of anything we make, often it's "Money First, Safety Second". If someone can make enough money to justify the inherent risk, they will.
I've seen it "Safety Third". First is accomplishing the goal, such as travelling from point A to point B, second is cost, because people need to be willing to pay to use it, and you need to make a profit (or justify spending public money), third is safety. It reminds people to pay attention, because their safety isn't the sole concern. Put up "Safety First" signs, and people can get complacent about their own safety, because they think other people have taken care of the danger.
I like NileRed's approach: "not safety first; stupidity last"
This is a very great information and well put together. I really like how you find the tiny facets and aspects surrounding engineering.
We had a similar thing; the city had two places to put a walking overpass to save lives. In one area they determined they could save 10-30 lives over 10 years with the overpass, plus 50-200 injuries. In the other area the numbers were 5-15 fewer deaths, 20-80 fewer injuries. They built it in area two because it was a richer area, so those children were worth more.
That is disturbing, but not surprising.
“Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyse so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.”
Ok, that's amazing lol. As a practicing engineer, I feel each of those statements intensely, and I wish more architects and contractors understood this.
As another has mentioned here, I would LOVE for you to develop ethics vidoes like this for those of us that need the PDH's. Your relatibility, quality, and entertainment vaule are vastly superior to anything else out there.
You could add the Millenium Tower in SF (which you already did) and possibly the Citibank building in NYC which had some very interesting ethical developments which are almost the opposite of the Millenium Tower (they fixed the issue under cover of night instead of alerting the public and losing money).
Great video Grady! Electrical engineer from Aus here. Maybe you can expand this series into another episode(s) based on weight up other (non human/safety) risks - environmental, etc?
One thing you missed on the highway safety bit is that of drivers education.
The barrier to entry could be set higher such that only the really good drivers get to drive.
Many countries around the world goes that route alongside making much safer roads. The US have very open roads with less sharp bends but they still seem to have plenty of accidents. That's mainly due to poor drivers (and no, not everyone who is involved in an accident is a poor driver but they share the roads with unsafe drivers) and it could be mitigated by having stricter passing grades in drivers education and stricter laws and penalties for doing something that is unsafe or driving a vehicle that shouldn't be driven.
Just look at such channels as "Just Rolled In" to see examples of the types of cars that share the road with you... It's HORRIBLE and in my country those vehicles would be red flagged and disqualified from driving on roads until fixed. And most of them can't really be fixed and would therefore be permabanned from the roads.
Driving such a vehicle is akin to attempted manslaughter.
If you think about it, that choice would also cost a lot of lives. The US is enormous and most of it is designed around cars. In a lot of places, there is no good public transportation.
Banning lower-quality cars would overwhelmingly hit the poor, and make it so many of them couldn't work. That would have huge consequences for lives.
Also, we *do* ban bad drivers, we just do it through insurance premiums.
You can say, great, that's encouragement for public transit, but that's much, much easier said than done.
Things like this are paid for and run at the local level. It would take years and years to get this in place even if you could get everyone to agree to do it.
Or you can require standard safety features on new cars and in the same time allow normal attrition to take the old ones off the road.
Honestly, it's rare to see a really old car on the road here. Don't confuse an entertainment show that's deliberately showing something rare for what's actually normal.
That channel showcases the worst of the worst, with examples taken from across the globe. Even then, a good portion aren't safety-related issues.
Of all vehicle crashes that result in injury (in the US), only a very small minority were caused by a mechanical issue that could've been prevented by programs that countries such as yours have.
With the US being so enormous, and so unwelcoming to pedestrians, the cost of such programs would be higher than the VSL.
Fantastic video, you really make dry engineering topics real and interesting. As an old practitioner i can say that it took me some time to really understand how important issues such as this are to how we go about designing and building infrastructure, they are often overlooked or not sufficiently emphasised in education programmes, in favour of the technical side.
One could say that nearly everything could be avoided in hindsight.
Yep, just don't be there.
@@notahotshot just don't be on the planet when a meteor hits lol
@@interesting9688 that's the plan. 😂
After watching many 'shorts' about everyday problems with guardrails on another RUclips channel, I would be interested in a video about guardrails.
Hi Brady, could you do a video about traffic calming? I was wondering how engineers make roads so that people can only drive to specific speeds. Thank you
Yes please!
I'd love to show my class a video on that premise "building codes are written in blood," highlighting stories of really basic things like GFCI outlets, door push bars, and fire escapes.
There are plenty of stories on RUclips covering individual rules resulting from specific incidents, but overviews are rare.
When I was in a internship in a big company, I found myself in a meeting with people discussing the risk of decapitation using a costly machine that needed repairs (a safety glass was missing basically). They evaluated the percentage of the risk, the cost of reparation for the machine and how much money they would have to pay if someone was killed using the machine. They finally decided, based on all those numbers and some other decisions factor that the reparation could wait. I was shocked to see them talk about human life as merely cost on a spreadsheet.
Companies have saved tremendous amounts of money because a human life, valued by insurance companies, has been evaluated at about a hundred thousand dollars. Most high quality machines cost more.
It's hard to believe that you were old enough to get an internship but still naive enough to be shocked at such a discussion. What, did you honestly expect that the value of saving a human life was infinity dollars?
@@far2ez You know, with my cursus I've started internships at 15, and it was my last internship at 24 and it was the first major company that was pretty cold about it, so yeah, it was a bit of a shock. Plus my field doesn't not generally involve those kinds of meeting.
7:16 Though, quite often the more neurotic people have imagined the potential disasters before they happen, sometimes even voice concern, but it's usually not taken too seriously before it actually happens. And even worse, some disasters have to happen at least once in each country for laws to change. It seemed to me like in the 80s and 90s there were several fires in overcrowded nightclubs leading to trampling disasters in several countries in Europe, but it seemed like they the laws only changed in each country after they had had a high profile disaster; rather than everyone realising this is a problem when it happened in another country; after all they were major news stories in all countries.
Well said.
driving on bubble rap: my dream
I love the animation of the trucks! When are you making a game with those trucks where we get to engineer the highways and build them step by step?
Better yet, engineer the trucks!
It depends on the person, many are worth $0
Another great vid Grady. Keep em coming. Thanks btw
I would hope that all construction projects come with annual maintenance requirements so those costs can be included future budgets.
my mom says i’m priceless
1:01 “Engineering didn’t even exist at the time” this is a crazy statement, you’ve clearly no idea what the Romans and the Greeks built before 27a.d., some engineering masterpiece without using any power tool: arches, temples, theaters.. and before them the Egyptian built the pyramids and in Mesopotamia people built ziggurat
One man built an arena to seat 50,000 people, now that is an exaggeration.
Ey, finally a topic I can relate to. I am currently studying for a Ms.Sc.Eng in systems engineering with a focus on dependability (includes safety) with the study area of aerospace engineering. It is interesting since I have deep dived into aeroplane and road vehicle development and safety standards (ARP4754A toward CS25, ARP4761 and iso26262), where they do not place an inherent dollar value on human life, but instead classifies the effects of failure conditions and specifies how often the different classifications are allowed to occur. Do not have the standards right now but an example from ARP could be the the classification "Catastrophic" which is allowed to only occur 10^-9 times per flight hour, where Catastrophic entails the effect of, for example, loss of hull (Is specified in ARP). From my understanding of them, there is no variable for cost in the equation of "Are we allowed to build it" but rather in the equation"Can we afford to build it".
Don't really know what I wanted to say but maybe gives a very small windows into safety in other disciplines and that they are slighley related in this. Hope someone found it insightful.
My answer to the trolley problem is to leave the switch alone. Five workers mean five brains and ten eyes to see the trolley coming, and the law of self preservation takes over. We're all stronger as a team.
Absolutely fascinating! Thank you so much for all the great videos Grady!
Nice way to call people callous
human life is worth nothing nada
A wealthy human is worth slightly more.