Series
The Signal Problem
A sequential reading route through related essays. Subscribe to this page's RSS feed from your reader.
AI · Psychology · Systems
What Calibrated AI Looks Like
In 1965, a meteorologist at the US Weather Bureau named Allan Murphy began studying a question his colleagues considered strange: not whether weather
Technology · Psychology · Organizations
What Production Incidents Actually Teach
On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch. The immediate cause was an O-ring seal failure in a solid rocket
Systems · History · Organizations
How Systems Learn to Ignore Their Alarms
In the early hours of March 28, 1979, operators at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant faced a confusing control panel. Hundreds of alarms were going off
Technology · History · Systems
The Dashboard That Lied
In 1931, the London Underground released a new map of the tube system. It was immediately controversial among transit engineers: the map was geographically