Started by Pete Lindgren (@petelindgren) ·
Three Mile Island was partly an interface problem
A relief valve stuck open, but the light on the control panel only showed that the valve had been told to close, not whether it actually had. The operators trusted the light while alarms went off by the dozen. Afterwards the industry got a lot more serious about control room design and human factors.
6 sources · 54 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- Was Three Mile Island caused by bad design?
- Ended at
- Charles Perrow
The Trail
- “three mile island control room indicator light” (google.com)
- Three Mile Island accident (en.wikipedia.org)
- Pilot-operated relief valve (en.wikipedia.org)
- Ergonomics (en.wikipedia.org)
- Normal Accidents (en.wikipedia.org)
Perrow's argument: in tightly coupled complex systems, some accidents are basically inevitable
- Charles Perrow (en.wikipedia.org)
Keep going
- the decoy effect, and why it's weaker than the books say · Pete Lindgren · 5 sources
- 800 people guessed an ox's weight and the median was within 1% · Pete Lindgren · 5 sources
- why Japanese train staff point at things and say them out loud · Lin Chen · 4 sources
- the guy who invented infinite scroll regrets it · Hazel Park · 6 sources