
Incident Pit - v4n4d1s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_pit
======
gaius
Long time member of BSAC here. The classic example I use when describing this
to students is torch batteries. If you're at home and you notice that your
dive light batteries are flat, no biggie, just swap them out. If you notice
while on the boat that's a bit more annoying, but the chances are someone will
have a spare you can borrow, and if they don't, you will have to miss the
dive, which is unfortunate but you're not in any danger. If you're in the
water, you can still call the dive (abort and return to the boat). But if
you're at 50m and entered a wreck and your buddy has just swum round a corner
taking their light with them and you switch yours on and nothing happens, then
you have the rest of your life to try and find the way out.

Same, seemingly trivial, failure, but very different consequences depending on
at which point of the dive you notice it.

By the way I mainly dive with GUE now who mandate a primary light and two
backups as part of standard kit!

~~~
aaron695
Wouldn't it be, underwater you find out your batteries perhaps are low in
power, but you continue on since even if they go out you still have all your
companions as backup.

But you just stared down the incident pit?

You still have multiple layers of security, but normalizing the removal or
weaking of one goes against the point of having the multiple layers in the
first place.

In your example you seem screwed immediately?

~~~
gaius
It's just an illustrative example. A real incident pit is dangerous because
you need the experience to recognise one, and you need the courage to be the
one that aborts a dive that people might have traveled a long way, paid money,
etc to do. Fortunately you can just say "incident pit" and everyone will
immediately perform their own independent analysis, if they're experienced.

The "problem" with modern regulated torch designs is that they don't
appreciably dim as the power runs down; they're bright and then they just stop
over the course of a few seconds. Old designs you could easily spot when the
batteries were ready to be replaced/recharged well in advance.

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networked
Related is William Gibson's idea of "the Jackpot", or a "multicausal
appocalypse", where a large catastrophe is caused not by a single major factor
but by several smaller ones accumulating and interacting over time. Gibson
talks about it in [https://vimeo.com/116132074](https://vimeo.com/116132074).

If this is the kind of thing you find interesting, you should also read How
Complex Systems Fail
([http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...](http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf)).

~~~
impl
A good book in this space is Normal Accidents[0], which describes (among
others) the impressive cumulative failure that caused the Three Mile Island
incident. Fascinating read and applicable to software systems as well.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents)

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JshWright
There is a specialized application of this concept that is sometimes used in
airway management during anesthesia (specifically endotracheal intubation). It
is referred to as the "vortex" approach (i.e. you don't want to get get pulled
into the vortex as the longer you spend there, the harder it is to get out).

There is a well produced reenactment of an anesthesia team falling victim to
the "vortex" (resulting in fatal injury to their patient):
[https://vimeo.com/103516601](https://vimeo.com/103516601)

In fire and EMS we generally refer to the concept of an "accident chain". In
any event where rescue personnel are injured or killed, there is a chain of
events that had to take place leading up to that accident. Breaking the chain
at any point would prevent the accident from occurring, and many of our
procedures are built around the idea of breaking accident chains as early as
possible. This is a concept that (as far as I know) originated in the aviation
industry.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_events_(aeronautics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_events_\(aeronautics\))

It's the same basic idea though... The further along the chain you allow the
event to progress (even if you don't know the end result), the less margin for
error you have.

~~~
nbadg
Wow, that video was tough to get through (excellent link!). As soon as her HR
started dropping with low sats she was circling the drain on what should have
been a routine, relatively straightforward surgery.

It's interesting to me that, also coming from an EMS background, my (armchair)
reaction to that situation is to escalate the intervention much, much more
rapidly (I would have tubed the patient as soon as her HR started dropping,
and tried an OPA much sooner). I suspect that this has a lot to do with my
internal mental framing of airway management: in the field, airway problems
can quite quickly lead to death -- the framing emphasizes risk -- but in a
hospital setting, especially a surgical one, mild-to-moderate airway problems
are frequently encountered, and the framing emphasizes minimizing negative
impact to the patient.

~~~
JshWright
Yeah, in a prehospital setting we are a lot more sensitive to the fact that
there is no cavalry coming.

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mjw1007
Having a name for the concept seems helpful, but I don't find that diagram in
any way enlightening.

~~~
1_2__3
Likely because you're viewing it more than 45 years after it was drawn. Our
ideas about information visualization - and the tools available for creating
or - were a lot less sophisticated back then.

I actually think the graph is great, once explained. It gives a good visual
summary of both things it's trying to convey (the overall point, and the
different speed at which incidents can develop).

Also interesting to think of this writ large. How many companies do you know
of that are hanging out in the middle section without realizing how close they
are to a point of no return?

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drakenot
I've been reading a sci-fi novel, "Pushing Ice" by Alastair Reynolds, and the
"Incident Pit" term is used a lot in it.

~~~
PuffinBlue
I'm just about to start this book. It's loaded up on the Kindle right now
ready to go having aborted 'Man in the High Castle' about a third of the way
through.

As a big fan of Alastair's work I'm hoping for a good read to get over the
last failure!

~~~
kpil
If this is marketing for the book (also mentioned in the Wikipedia article)
it's bloody well done.

It's probably not, since the book is 10 years old, but this is how it's done
properly, I think.

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api
I think this accurately describes American history for the past 15 years and
explains why establishment hate is so mainstream.

Iraq war, housing bubble, housing collapse, bailouts, rise of ISIS, student
debt explosion, ...

Eventually there is a point where confidence is lost.

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teh_klev
For years I've used (and I'm most likely not the first to have coined this)
the "Gravity Well of Fail" to describe situations that become increasingly
more perilous due to badly chosen decision paths as time passes. I didn't
actually know about the term "Incident Pit", or perhaps only vaguely remember
this or a similar term from a couple of pals who are scuba divers.

~~~
mseebach
It seems like "pot committed" (the poker term) is in the same vein.

~~~
jdietrich
"Pot committed" has a subtly different meaning. A player who is pot committed
hasn't necessarily made a mistake and isn't necessarily in a bad situation;
the pot has just grown so large relative to their stack that it's worth
calling even with a very weak hand. If the pot is offering you 15/1 and you
think your opponent has a 10% probability of bluffing, it's worth calling with
ace high. It's a slightly tricky concept to apply, because a lot of players
who _think_ they're pot committed are just falling prey to the sunk cost
fallacy.

Many startup founders are effectively pot committed. The potential reward of
an acquisition is very high; the cost of staying in business is just the
opportunity cost of your time. Running the company until either bankruptcy or
acquisition often has a higher expected value than quitting to do something
else, even if the situation looks dire.

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rdtsc
Accidentally delete some data. Panic, reach for backups. Restore fails and it
removes more data and takes service off-line.

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beefman
This Quanta article on research into predicting disease outcomes strikes me as
related

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160830-who-will-die-from-
in...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160830-who-will-die-from-infection/)

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baking
[http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol3iss41.pdf](http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol3iss41.pdf)

~~~
mseebach
[pdf]

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maxerickson
That's also a great visualization of how we build our society.

Don't fall off the track.

