The Deadly Consequences of Logical Inversion

In the Western tradition, there are certain rules of logic that are universal. The reason I am able to write routine criticisms of fields like astrophysics and evolutionary biology - fields in which I have no credentials other than the rudimentary education that all engineering majors are exposed to - is that they contain similar patterns of logical errors. As long as you can gain enough understanding of the domain to understand the lingo and general premises, you can pick up on the major logical mistakes pretty quickly. In short, it is much easier to be a critic than a creator, thus it is easier to shoot holes in the existing theories than to create your own and validate them with evidence. That is a universally true in all domains. It is easier to destroy a building than to architect one. It is easier to write buggy software than foolproof software. It is easier to kill the patient than to save him. If an amateur is able to blast holes in the prevailing theories, then either (1) the amateur is mistaken, or (2) the professionals are not holding themselves to the proper level of logical rigor.

Fundamental to the order of logic is that an argument is a claim supported by evidence. It is not proper to say that an argument is a claim supported by the promise of evidence, or that an argument is any claim which has not been disproven, or that an argument is a claim where all competing claims have been disproven. In the civilized world, the burden of proof lies on the prosecution, and so is the same in science and virtually any other profession. If I theorize that unicorns exist, it is not your duty, as a skeptic, to prove me wrong. I must prove my own claim. Similarly, manufacturers do not list all the specifications that a product does not satisfy. It is a list of claims about the vehicle which can be verified through inspection and testing.

Failing to abide by such fundamental tenets of logic leads inevitably to disaster. In 1986, the highly touted Challenger launch ended in a tragedy that was viewed live by 17% of the country. It is well known that one of the booster engineers urgently presented data to his superiors showing the dangers of a launch in such cold temperatures. The story I was told as an engineering freshman (I was originally an Aerospace Engineering major) was that the error was an inability of the engineers to present their technical advise in a way that could be understood by the less technical launch managers. However, these paragraphs from the Wikipedia article explain the situation very well.

After his team agreed that a launch risked disaster, Thiokol immediately called NASA recommending a postponement until temperatures rose in the afternoon. NASA manager Jud Lovingood responded that Thiokol could not make the recommendation without providing a safe temperature. The company prepared for a teleconference two hours later during which it would have to justify a no-launch recommendation.

Clearly, the engineers were operating from a proper technical perspective. The behavior of the seal at the predicted launch temperature was, at best, undetermined, therefore they could not support the claim that the flight schedule was safe. The management tried to coerce them into a logical inversion and prove that conditions were not safe. They demanded a negative design spec for the space vehicle.

Thiokol management initially supported its engineers' recommendation to postpone the launch, but NASA staff opposed a delay. During the conference call, Hardy told Thiokol, "I am appalled. I am appalled by your recommendation." Mulloy said, "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch—next April?" NASA believed that Thiokol's hastily prepared presentation's quality was too poor to support such a statement on flight safety.[14] One argument by NASA personnel contesting Thiokol's concerns was that if the primary O-ring failed, the secondary O-ring would still seal. This was unproven, and was in any case an argument that did not apply to a "Criticality 1" component. As astronaut Sally Ride stated when questioning NASA managers before the Rogers Commission, it is forbidden to rely on a backup for a "Criticality 1" component.

The motivation is clear. Career reputations are made by production numbers, not by playing it safe. The NASA managers were under great pressure to get the bird in the air. Even waiting until the afternoon is providing a window for additional failures to cause further delays. They emotionally sided with their career prospects rather than rationally siding with logical analysis. In effect, they chose the sins of pride & greed over the path of truth.

No one was ever charged with a crime for the inadvertent public execution broadcasted worldwide. It was dismissed as a communication error, and the incident is used today to educate engineering students on the importance of communicating effectively to management. That conclusion is false and practically amounts to a coverup of the real error. It is not overly harsh to expect the people entrusted with some of the most critical technical jobs in the country to be held accountable for the fundamental aspects of logical reasoning. In fact, it's not too much to expect that anyone holding a college degree, or working in a position that normally requires one, to understand them. The men who maliciously concocted a logical inversion to keep their careers progressing along should have been tried and convicted for manslaughter. The people who hired them should have been strongly reprimanded for hiring men who did not understand logical principles to positions of extreme technical importance. None of this should be remotely excusable in a first-class space-age nation. A country that cannot appoint rational people to those positions has no business in manned space flight, and that's exactly where we are now nine years after the termination of the shuttle program - hitching rides with the Russians.

Prediction: the USA is out of the manned-space business for good. We're now too woke even to build pedestrian bridges. Speaking of that, NTSB released its final report on the FIU feminist bridge disaster (pdf). In addition to highlighting the circus of errors that lead to the deaths of several commuters and workers, it includes the following suggestion to the engineering firm.

Train your staff on the proper use of P_c (the permanent net compressive force normal to the shear plane) when calculating nominal interface shear resistance.

It's a stiff retort, basically calling the outfit a bunch of amateurish clowns, but where are the criminal charges? It should not be legal to practice engineering without knowledge of the craft in an advanced nation. The report is all in the the spirit of suggestions for improvements moving forward. In woke America, education is the solution to all problems, and no one is ever held accountable for incompetency. Most of the recommendations were towards providing more oversight.

The OSHA report (pdf) was similarly scathing.

EOR should have known that the truss was a non-redundant structure and if one diagonal member failed, the entire bridge could collapse.

It reads like explaining the concepts of bridge-building to children. Just as the NASA launch managers falsely believed they could rely on a secondary O-ring, the empowered engineers thought they could fall back on design redundancy. The whole point of redundancy is that you design the primary system to work alone! None of us here (most likely) are experts of bridge building or space rocketry, but we can see clear as day the common logical failure that led to disaster in both domains. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand it.