Great post.

While a lot of people have discussed what has happened after the explosion, here’s an interesting congressional report that looks at what DOI and MMS were focusing on before the oil spill:

http://robbishop.house.gov/UploadedFiles/salazar_timeline_final.pdf

This timeline seems to raise some troubling questions about whether Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and MMS officials were distracted by the Administration’s political agenda instead of focusing on the ongoing dysfunction within MMS.

Fascinating article, Vladimir. Oddly, I was in a Borders store last month, happened to see the Taleb book on a paperback table, read the summary, and immediately thought, “BP.” Thanks to your post, the book is now on my reading list, though I’ve been so swamped that I’m only able to read in bite-sized chunks right now. It strikes me as one of those works that would allow one to see a good deal of history through a fresh and, frankly, valuable lens.

My understanding is, from those I’ve talked to and the reading I’ve done that cbs is on to something in asking what MMS was thinking. In fact, there are a multitude of questions to ask about where our government contributed to the domino chain. For example, MMS and the EPA apparently have conflicting standards: Being in compliance with one leads to non-compliance with the other in certain regards. Aside for being an interesting question about where things went wrong here, that point would seem to serve double duty as an argument for slashing bureaucracy and restoring more limited government.

for putting this stuff in terms I can understand.

I’m not surprised the spill is the result of “gun-decking” *. I deal with it all the time. All those little variables tend to add up to a deck stacked against you.

*(from dictionary.com) gun-deck(ing) is a term used to convey that one has endangered the safety of the vessel equivalent to pointing the guns at the deck such that when they are fired the obvious catastrophic result will occur.

of which you are probably aware but did not mention in your time line. According to the Tech Support Manager (whose name escapes me at the moment), days prior to the blowout, they conducted a test of the BOP. While the BOP was closed someone, unnamed, caused about 15 feet of drill rod to be hoisted through the BOP. In the following days, again according to this manager, pieces of material of which the BOP was made began circulating to the surface in the drilling mud that is continually circulated in the well casing. When these chunks of material were presented to management with the warning that it was pieces of the BOP the manager (another individual whom I believe was a BP employee) refused to take action to address the damaged BOP.

It was already known that the backup controller for the BOP was inoperable. With these pieces of the BOP washing to the surface, BP knew or should have known that the BOP was, for all intents and purposes, non-existent.

This is thoroughly documented and was reported by 60 Minutes a week or so after the explosion and fire in an interview with the Tech Manager.

In other words, rather than rolling dice, BP was playing Russian Roulette with a Colt 1911A1 with 6 rounds in the magazine and 1 chambered only they were aiming it at the heads of those 11 men who were incinerated instead of their own.

You have “impaled” BP with their own bad choices.

And “Black Swan” is in my laptop bag – I’m slowly working my way through it. Highly recommended reading.

I think we’re in for quite a few swans in the coming years.

Mew

“We look forward to continuing to work with the Administration…”

That disclaimer on “forward-looking statements” sure won’t shield them either.

…It’s exactly what happens when the lies pile up. It’s kind of the “inverse butterfly effect” that everyone recalls from their early readings in chaos theory: the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in some far flung location could cause a hurricane somewhere else.

It doesn’t usually work that way. But systems that have been engineered so that all the parts depend on the other parts are vulnerable to an inverse version of that effect if there are significant flaws in a large enough number of places.

At some point in a long chain of faleshoods, one of them “flutters” and sets the rest of them off; up until that point all the little fluttering butterflies didn’t have any effect but suddenly, one of them become much more critical than the rest and pretty soon it’s nothing but butterflies all over the place in a cascade.

If you string together a long enough series of improbable events, eventually you’ll have one of these cascades because they are bound together. Then the whole thing goes off like a string of firecrackers.

I’m being very loose with my terminology here but the longer I look at this disaster the more it looks like a gradual accumulation of failures – independent of each other – at a large number of points. Then something touched the fuse and they all fell over, more or less together.

The amazing thing is that I don’t know whether you can stop that from happening in the real world, at least not completely. You can do a better job at preventing it at each step, but I don’t think it’s ever possible to completely prevent it, unless you just decide to crawl into a spider hole and never do anything ever again.

In another sense, the digital world has had an impact on our consciousness that’s not entirely good: we expect absolute certainty far, far too much, and we demand it of our machines and our institutions to an increasing degree. Either the website is there or it isn’t, either the picture is there or it’s not. The phone doesn’t have static, it just stops working. The picture on the screen is either there and playing or it stops entirely. It’s 0% or 100% and nothing in between. Either we can stop the oil or we can’t. Either dumping rocks into the passages will stop the flow and save the marshes or it will eventually destroy them.

Somehow, we’ve lost the fundamental idea that everything we do is to try, and mostly to fail. If Thomas Edison had to live in our world today, he couldn’t have made it. Most of what he did was to try things that didn’t work until he found something that did. A mile beneath the water in the Gulf of Mexico, basically the same thing is happening right now. I don’t envy them.

Just as the hammer specialist sees nails everywhere, so do the authors of long books where ten pages would do, smell profits from vast oversimplification.

Taleb’s idea of logical argument is to disparage people who know more than he does. But I exaggerate. He also thinks non sequitor anecdotes about his wonderful life are a substitute for the scientific method. The man has found more black swans than Bernie Madoff found suckers.

Rigor, shmigor. Unfounded inductive reasoning? Paranoid narratives? Funny how the logical errors he sees in the work of his inferiors abound in his own work.

The theme of the book is that it is dangerous to misunderestimate the probabilities of bad events. What an insight! No serious statistician thinks you can just assume normal distributions whenever you feel like. it. There is no Medicrostan; no Extremistan. There is only a world with all kinds of events and levels of information. Like any tool, probability theory can be mis-applied to the real world. Taleb never tells you how to tell which “stan” you are in at any given time.

Predicting the future, as he freely admits, is hard to do. Just ask Yogi Berra. Or anyone.

The whole subject boils down to the the observation that if you use the conclusion of a mathematical theorem without verifying its hypotheses, you may not be correct. Who’d have thunk it?

I thought this was an oil “leak”, not a spill.???? Just having fun with you…

My impression of a black swan event is something that has never happened before……”nobody’s ever seen a black swan, therefore there are no black swans”. The blowout in the Gulf was not a black swan event. There have been zillions of blowouts…Red Adair made a good business out of blowouts. BP gambled and lost.

Fooled by Randomness and the Black Swan are both worth reading, though they could have been much shorter books and just as effective. But, who is gonna pay $25 for a 25 page book?

If “highly improbable events” – defined as being five or more standard deviations from the norm – are truly more frequent in reality, then they aren’t really so far from the norm, are they?

Humans do tend to recall the outliers, the unusual and extraordinary events, while the memory discards the overwhelming majority of events which fall within expected norms. Our minds then can be easily convinced that these event occur more often than they actually do.

If BP took too much risk here – leaving aside the easy assessment that they must have since they lost their bet – it was probably due to the institutionalized decision-making process, which divided responsibilities perhaps too narrowly, thereby minimizing them in the perception of the planners. If no one were ultimately responsible for the level of risk assumed, each section would tend to take on the maximum level of reasonable risk. But if every section is taking on its highest risk tolerance, the effect for the whole project is multiplied, with no one apparently designated to say, “Hey, wait a cotton-pickin’ minute here!” This seems close to what actually happened.

In making the case for gross negligence, (a civil cause of action) who are the plaintiffs besides the feds, with whom BP has already “settled” out of court, so to speak? From other reports I’ve been led to believe that drillers can’t break wind without M&M signing off on it, so I assume then that these strings of improbable events were were done with the knowledge (and signature?) of M&M. If done behind M&M back, or contrary to their orders (a record of that would have surfaced by now) a real, and serious crime has been committed.

though I’m aware of the notion. I have however actually dealt with a couple of Oh S#$t situations. I was heavily involved in the HR/LR side of the Exxon Valdez, I did the administrative investigation of the grounding of the Alaska ferry M/V LeConte, I’ve dealt with several plane crashes including one that for several hours I thought my wife was on. So, I know a little bit about both how things go to Hell and how people manage, and usually don’t manage, when things are going to Hell.

Two things seem to be constant when things go to Hell: It happens a little bit at the time and it isn’t apparent that things have gone to Hell until things have gone to Hell, and; if somebody notices in time to do something about things going to Hell, they either aren’t empowered to say “STOP,” or because of the organizational culture aren’t empowered to say “STOP.” There’s a deriviative of the second in the malicious refusal to say stop because you’re slavishly following the rules and chain of command, but I don’t think that’s the case here, it could be though. It does sound like there wasn’t exactly peace, love, and harmony on that rig.

This was an incremental crisis; everything that happened was something that it could be predicted MIGHT happen and certainly everybody in a responsible position had at least thought about it happing and had some notion of a plan if not a formal plan for it. What there wasn’t and never is, is a plan for is when the incremental crises stack up to the point where the sum of them is no longer manageable. I think that is a very, very hard thing to see. If you’re good, you can see it, you can handle it, and you’re handling it – and you let yourself get more and more balls in the air, and then a ball drops and in trying to retreive that ball, you drop another, and then the balls come cascading down, and things have gone to Hell.

I think everybody has a plan for what to do when one big thing makes things go to Hell, even if the only plan is say a prayer and kiss your butt goodbye. But when things go to Hell from one manageable thing after another happing until nobody can manage them all, there isn’t a plan and in the few instances where people have handled things like that and prevented things from going to Hell, the person who handled it has his or her name in books and on buildings.

but you are describing the opposite of a black swan. You are talking about bad planning for a likely and predictable accident. I admit, that Taleb himself seems to want it both ways, but I take his definition as being a really low probability event with dire consequences. The BP spill certainly has had dire consequences, but it was wholly expected that this sort of thing could happen. You are rightly critical of those whose responsibility was to prevent or mitigate such accidents.

An earthquake in San Francisco is not a black swan. Maybe one in NY is.