Peak Reality

“The normalization of deviance” is a sociological term describing how groups of people become accustomed to ignoring safety rules and best practices, becoming plagued with (sometimes fatal) problems that no one can seem to fix.

Normalized deviance has been blamed for the Shuttle Challenger disaster, and crises in “healthcare, aviation, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and civil engineering.”

Dan Luu uses a paper on normalized deviance in healthcare as a jumping-off point to describe how tech shops make the same kinds of mistakes, with the same kinds of disastrous consequences, and the same inability to fix those mistakes until they pile up so high that they threaten the whole enterprise.

Tech companies are especially vulnerable to this kind of corner-cutting, because of the emphasis on growth for early stage firms. When a company is small, it has nothing to lose and everything to gain by breaking the rules to get big fast. But once it’s big, the culture of crossed-fingers-and-praying instead of methodical processes causes repeated disasters that end when the company melts down or (sometimes) fixes its culture.

Luu is interested in how companies cal learn from each others’ mistakes, rather than making fresh mistakes for themselves at every turn.

Cicada, Stages of Conventionalization

The 15 Best Photoshops Of Shia Watching #AllMyMovies

Shia LaBeouf just spent three days watching all his movies in reverse chronological order while livestreaming his reactions. Reddit turned it into art.

The Eiffel Tower didn’t go dark in honor of the dead. They shut the lights off every night.

Thousands of people did not go out into the streets holding up a lighted sign reading “NOT AFRAID.” That was from the Charile Hebdo March.

There was a fire at a refugee camp in Calais but it was not an anti-refugee action. Eyewitnesses report it as small inconclusive.

There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of instances of each of these posts on every platform that I’ve searched.