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‘You Better Go to Raw Data’
People operating complex machines and systems–ships, aircraft, and nuclear power plants, for example–are often dependent on information that has been processed or filtered in some way. The same is true of people exercising their responsibilities as citizens in a large and complex society, inasmuch as they cannot directly and personally observe most of the relevant facts and events. Disasters that occur in complex physical systems can serve as a metaphor to help shed light on disasters–actual and potential–in the political sphere.
On June 9, 1995, the cruise ship Royal Majesty was on a routine voyage in good weather. The vessel was equipped with GPS, which displayed latitude and longitude position…which the crew diligently plotted..and also drove a moving map overlaid on the radar scope.
Unfortunately, the information being displayed and plotted bore little resemblance to the actual reality.
As the gray sky turned black veil, the phosphorus-lit radar map with its neat lines and digital indication seemed clearer and more inviting than the dark world outside. As part of a sophisticated integrated bridge system, the radar map had everything–from a crisp radar picture, to ship position, buoy renderings, and up to the last bit of data anyone could want–until it seemed that the entire world lived and moved transparently, inside that little green screen. Using this compelling display, the second officer was piloting a phantom ship on an electronic lie, and nobody called the bluff.
The bluff was finally called by reality itself, at 10 PM, when the ship jerked to the left with a grinding noise. It was hard aground on the Rose and Crown Shoal, and could not be backed off.
It was quickly determined that the cable to the GPS antenna had come loose, and the system was not actually obtaining the real, current positions. The captain ran to the LORAN unit, a completely separate electronic navigation system. The position accurately displayed on the LORAN differed from the displayed GPS position by 17 miles.
The GPS unit had in fact honestly disclosed its lack of current information: it did this by displaying the characters ‘DR’…for Dead Reckoning, ie, extrapolating the current course and speed..but the annotation appeared in small characters and was not noticed. The crew thought they were getting an actual portrayal of the current reality, rather than an estimate that would progressively become a guesstimate with the passage of time.
To use the term which has become common in media and political circles, the GPS and its associated display units were creating a convincing narrative…a narrative so convincing that no one, evidently, took the trouble to cross-check it with the LORAN, or to do a celestial fix.
How many American citizens live in a media and information environment which is as closed and as convincing as what the crew of the Royal Majesty was seeing on their bridge? Consider how quickly overwhelming media narratives were put together concerning, for example, the Hunter Biden laptop or the murders of the women in Atlanta. In most such cases, you could watch CNN, MSNBC, and some of the old-line tv networks, you could listen to NPR, you could look at the memes being circulated on social media–and they would all be telling you the same story, an overall narrative which for most people will be as consistent and as convincing as that phantom world displayed on the Royal Majesty‘s radar scope and plotted on the paper charts was that ship’s Second Officer.
As disasters go, the Royal Majesty affair was a fairly minor one: embarrassing and expensive, but no one was killed or injured. Here’s a case that was much worse–the approach of a Delta Airlines flight into Boston Logan Airport, on July 31, 1973.
At 11:40:07, the Captain advised the First Officer, who was doing the flying for this approach:
You better go to raw data. I don’t trust that thing.
“That thing” was a Flight Director, an instrument that displays the calculated actions needed to follow a desired flight path. Both Captain and the FO had become concerned about indications on this instrument which didn’t seem to make sense.
It was too late. 25 seconds later, the plane slammed into the seawall. There were no survivors.
The NTSB determined that the Flight Director’s ‘mode’ switch was incorrectly set: while the Captain and the FO believed it was displaying the calculated actions required for the airplane to follow the Instrument Landing System radio beam down to the runway, it was actually doing no such thing. “Raw data” refers to the display of the plane’s actual, physical vertical and horizontal deviation from where it should be on the ILS beam…and would have shown that the airplane was not where it needed to be. The Raw Data was not, however, so prominently displayed on the instrument panel as were the Flight Director commands.
Convincing displays, convincing narratives, can be very dangerous. New information tends to be absorbed into the overall picture. When the navigating officer of the Royal Majesty observed the radar reflection of a buoy on his radar screen, and, shortly thereafter, the passage of a buoy was reported on the ship’s port side, it confirmed in his mind that it was the ‘BA’ buoy, which marks to entrance to the Boston traffic lanes…and the whole GPS-derived picture became even more convincing. But it wasn’t really BA–it was actually the Asia Rip buoy, anchored to a sunken wreck, which marks the Rose and Crown Shoal.
In the political/media sphere, the misleading narratives that are convincingly presented are not the matter or mechanical or human error, they are a matter of human design. Some of the people and organizations propagating these narratives know they are false, some would rather–for career or social reasons–not think about it too deeply, and some actually believe the narratives. It happens on both/all political sides, but happens a lot more, and more effectively, on the Left, because the Left/Woke dominance of media is so nearly complete. And the narrative-protection by the Left has become extremely aggressive; it is no longer a matter of subtle shading.
The pilot and copilot of Flight 723 had only a matter of seconds to question and cross-check the ‘narrative’ that they were seeing on their Flight Director. Citizens, operating in the political/media sphere, have less time pressure…but the time available is not infinite. Multiple sources of information are more available than at any point in history–but the Narrative of the like-thinking media and its influence strategies is overwhelming, especially for people who don’t have a lot of time to follow political matters. Confirmation bias, too, plays a strong role. And the very nature of social media, I think, tends to reduce attention spans and adversely affect the kind of thoughtful reading and analysis skills which are essential in forming independent judgments of facts and policies.
The key question:
In our present era in America, will a sufficient number of people, metaphorically speaking, check the displayed GPS position against the LORAN, or check the Flight Director command bars against the raw localizer and glideslope data? And will they do so before it is too late for recovery?
(More on the Royal Majesty incident at my post here. Detail on the Delta Flight 723 accident is provided in the NTSB report.)
An earlier version of this post was published at Chicago Boyz, where there is a good comment thread.
Published in General
Liberals and progressives don’t matter. That is, we don’t have to change their minds. So it doesn’t matter if they are willing to listen.
The people who create the liberal agenda are a minority. Normal Americans outnumber them. We need to reach normal Americans.
And I believe (from memory, I’m not going to go look for the exact quote) when asked to provide information on the models and his adjustments, he replied “Why should I give that to you? You’re just going to look for problems with it”.)
Liberals and progressives are a minority, but they are a minority that controls the vast majority of media and the schools.
Yes, and this is what is chilling. This is how they are winning.
Well, yes. And all we have going for us is that what we have to say is true, sane, leads to a better life for most people, and resonates with what most Americans actually think and believe.
That’s a lot.
But we need to up our game.
Sounds like the GPS manufacturers need to make it more clear when this is happening, such as by changing the whole color scheme of the display, and/or the backlighting or something, so that it’s clear even from a distance.
The GPS unit was separate from the radar, which displayed both GPS position and radar data: the GPS transmitted a continuous stream of position messages, which could be used and interpreted/display by other devices, including presumably those from other manufacturers. When the GPS went into Dead Reckoning mode, it flagged those messages accordingly…instead of sending a message like “GPS, 12:10:34, latitude, longitude, valid”, it sent “GPS, 1:11:46, latitude, longitude, invalid.” The assumption was that whatever device was receiving these message would be programmed to look at the valid/invalid flag, and to notify the operator to use caution in the latter case…because the accuracy of the position would be continuously degrading. The radar and map system on this ship, however, was not programmed to look at the relevant part of the message. The people doing the manual plotting did not notice the tiny messages warning that DR mode had been entered, and the people looking at the radar/map unit were given no indication whatsoever that anything was abnormal.
That’s what I mean, instead of just showing DR in little letters, there should be a clearly noticeable change to the GPS display even if other units didn’t pick it up.
Or using words.
I dunno, ship bridges tend to be rather poorly lit it seems, especially at night. Changing color would be very obvious.
I often catch myself wondering why some annoying minor feature of a program or product is such-and-such, and thinking how easy it would be to fix it. Then I think about the software I create, and the number of sub-optimal details that I really wish I had time to revisit. But there’s always something more pressing.
The failure to clearly communicate the GPS status was obviously an expensive oversight — and should have been a cheap one to fix. But, had the procedure for verifying that the GPS was connected been documented in the operating manual (it wasn’t), that might have achieved the same result.
Then again, had the ship’s fathometer been set correctly, to three meters below the hull rather than zero meters, that might have prevented the accident. Had the crew correctly identified the harbor buoys, that might have prevented the accident. Had the crew responded correctly to the unexpected appearance of shallow water ahead, that might have prevented the accident. Had the crew set the harbor radar to the normal 12 miles, rather than half that, that might have prevented the accident.
A lot went wrong. But it’s entirely possible, likely even, that all of the sloppiness that contributed to the accident was the direct result of reliance on a single piece of “self driving” technology.
Self driving….
Nah. It’ll be fine.
Yes, if they didn’t think the GPS was taking care of everything, they probably would have been giving more attention to physical buoys and other backup methods.
There’s never just one thing that goes wrong that causes these kinds of incidents. It’s always a chain of events.
And yeah, I continue to maintain there will not be ubiquitous fully autonomous self-driving vehicles in my lifetime (I’m 59). At least not under other than closely controlled conditions – meaning not running around a typical city. You might see them on controlled access situations like interstates.
It’s harder to distinguish colors in low light.
That would make sense, but I think there are enough people who are sufficiently gung-ho on the idea that they will be permitted sooner than they should be, and the left may even be willing to shrug off the inevitable deaths as being in the service of “progress.”
Maybe like painted colors or something, but ILLUMINATION colors? You think if the GPS display was normally glowing green, and switched to glowing red if it wasn’t getting valid data, it wouldn’t be noticed in the dark?
Possibly not illumination colors, but possibly those, too. I’d have to ask my former colleague had was somewhat red-green colorblind. Most of the work-related difficulties had to do with difficulties in distinguishing colors of wires in low light. (As I got older, I sometimes had troubles in low light, too, with things like blue vs green.) He had difficulty distinguishing color-coded information on a computer monitor, though. And I think people with this difficulty rely more on the position of lights in a stop light than the color. Guidelines for designing web pages for people with visual difficulties urge designers not to rely on color codes. Use color, sure, but don’t rely on it as the only way to distinguish information.
Well, last I heard, wires don’t glow to make it easier to see what color they are.
But, fine, make the color scheme customizable if there are a lot of color-blind or color-limited ship captains/pilots. Even car stereos have customizable color schemes. And if a ship has a color-blind navigator, make the display flash when there’s a problem. That sill has to be better than a little “DR” in the corner.
Heck add a Braille thing too, for navigators/pilots/captains that are totally blind. They’ve got drive-thru ATMs with Braille, so why not?
About 8 percent of males of northern European descent have some form of red-green colorblindness, though it is more severe in some cases than in others. It’s far less prevalent among females of the same population.
My colleague could distinguish colors in good light if he concentrated hard on it, but he’d sometimes ask me to confirm. He did grumble about computer displays of data some times, if they relied only on color coding.
He was an artillery instructor in the Army Reserve the first time I hired him. I suppose it was not an issue there.
I’m particularly interested in seeing how autonomous vehicles perform in winter weather in northern climates, not just tooling around cities in Southern California.
I’m not!!!
Nor am I.
So I imagine this curmudgeonly sort, getting on in years, who doesn’t ever want his car to do the driving. Someone like me, basically. Every few years, as the self-driving technology improves, he moves north, to places where the cars aren’t yet mandatory. He finds himself in way-upstate New York, where the winters are long and the snowbanks are high, but even here (where I live) the cars are getting smart enough to navigate the snow-packed streets. And so he moves north, into Canada, and on and on, always trying to stay ahead of the mandatory self-driving cars. Grumbling as he goes.
If I have to choose between snow-packed streets and self driving cars, I might just cave in to the cars. I left Maine after college for a reason.