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546,143 Views ⢠Oct 17, 2023 ⢠Click to toggle off description
Comparing costs and safety is an enormous challenge. On one side, you have dollars, and on the other, you have people. Sometimes you need a conversion factor. It sounds morbid, but itâs necessary for good decision-making to put a dollar price on the value of a human life.
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Views : 546,143
Genre: Education
Date of upload: Oct 17, 2023 ^^
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YouTube Comments - 1,309 Comments
Top Comments of this video!! :3
As an engineering manager, I've pushed to add an additional 15% to our safety factor for our structures (we design heavy industrial machines). Our sales guys hated it initially, because our prices were 2 to 5% higher, but after a few years, we earned a reputation for reliable machines that stand up to abuse, our customers love us, and we are doing better than ever.
We as engineers have been pushed into increasingly thinner and thinner safety factors by cost cutting focused executives, but they fail to realize there is a limit and by putting so much pressure on the engineers, they are inviting trouble when unforeseen circumstances eventually come knocking. What is foreseeable though, is that there will always be unforeseen circumstances. It's important to push back, and when appropriate, to hold them accountable.
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According to my mom I'm priceless... I mean, that's not the wording she used, but potato, potato. Worthless, priceless. What's the difference?
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Honestly, $12.5 million is more than I thought they would evaluate for a human life...
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"Your public arena for gladitorial fights can always be made safer by spending more resources on design and construction" is a hilarious sentence out of context đ
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I was a young electrical engineer in a Russian city near the Polar circle.
One of my main projects was designing an internal power supply system to one small school. I worked alone in a very limited conditions doing my best to find an optimal ratio and to provide the best solutions for available time for designing.
Even at a scale of a small distant school all the processes were full of mess, corruption and incompetence from Russian businessmen and official authorities.
I decided to leave my job after their decision to not complete tests of reliability and personal security to installed electrical equipment due to their desire to finish construction in terms to please higher authorities with a good reports.
You cannot work with electricity without respecting its noble and dangerous nature.
Nobody there had really thought about this school and about all these risks for little childs who will study there for decades.
I feel myself much better living in poverty and studying german language to find my own place in this world one day.
I feel myself much better when I don't support corruption and risks for common people by participating in these dirty games with my skills and labour.
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Humans: âYou canât put a price on a life!! Itâs priceless!â
Lawyers: â12.5 millionâ
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At 1:44 Grady says "If safety were paramount we wouldn't engineer anything". That is so true. Here in British Columbia I've seen many jungle gyms removed from school playgrounds because they're SO risky. Instead, the children sit around developing cardiovascular disease, which is much more acceptable, apparently.
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I teach Engineering Ethics at a large public technical school, and hundreds of rising engineers take my classes every year. I've been sprinkling Grady's videos throughout my syllabus for years because they're a fantastic educational resource, and his case studies give a real world perspective on the importance of safety in everyday engineering practice. Still, I've been secretly wishing Grady would do a more explicit presentation on engineering ethics. I've even thought about reaching out to Grady directly to help motivate and coordinate such a project. While I've been enjoying Grady's latest videos with the sewer pipe install quite a lot, I selfishly worried that it signaled a more hands-on direction for the channel, making my dreams of an ethics-focused video seem less likely.
What a fantastic surprise to find this video in my feed this morning! The final product is really more than I could have hoped for, a showcase of Grady's skills as a video essayist and public educator. A dash of theory, some compelling historical examples (TIL about the Golden Gate Bridge net!), and an overall extremely reasonable and clear-eyed perspective on a challenging ethical issue that is absolutely central to real engineering practice. From my own experience, the question "why is there a price on human life" is one I hear regularly from students when we discuss cases like the Ford Pinto fires, where this "conversion factor" actually influenced a decision that cost real human lives. Explaining this situation to students has always been a challenge for me, since it has no neat philosophical or technical or ethically satisfying answer. This situation is a product of the messy realities of engineering in the real world.
No one is better at giving a level-headed presentation of the messy realities of engineering than Grady and Practical Engineering. Thank you so much for this video and for your work! This video is definitely going in my syllabus. =)
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A loss of life is a very difficult thing to forget. I can say I am still haunted by the loss of someone who was not very much younger than I was.
The young man climbed down into a tank that was lit only by the flashlight he was carrying. At the bottom of the ladder, he turned left took one step, and fell to the bottom of the tank. Had he turned right he would still be alive.
During the plan approval process, I rejected the arrangement and the lack of a railing. I rejected each drawing until I was instructed by the vice president of engineering to stamp the drawings approved.
A life was lost for the cost of a handrail. A trivial cost in a multi-million dollar project. During construction the shipyard had a temporary handrail in place for OSHA compliance.
I still feel responsible for the loss, although I had no control over the decisions that were made.
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12:11 The aeronautic's version is "I can design a plane that never crashes! Unfortunately it won't be able to take off"
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This is a tough topic to explain to the public (especially as an engineer) and you did a fantastic job of it. There is no such thing as something perfect, infallible, 100% safe no matter how much we dream, but we can always strive to make things as safe as possible and as cost effective as possible to meet the client's needs and putting ethics first.
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There's a quote from the railroading industry that's very similar to what you said about how rules are written in blood. Now days railroading is a much safer job than the late 1800s, but back then, you could "Tell how long a brake man has been on the job by how many fingers he had on his hand." You take a guess what that means. Back then they used link and pin. A link was held into a socket while the engineer switched the train into another train. Once close enough, the brakeman could put a pin into both sockets. This of course, many times have a brakeman got his fingers trapped between 2 sockets. Back then, any job was grim, but railroading was harsh.
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Safety during construction is just as important as safety after construction. We need to keep those workers safe.
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The issue of matching a dollar value with human life is one of the main reasons why healthcare finance is such a cluster. Lots to say, of course. One example that stuck with me (in becoming a health insurance actuary) is along the lines of the difference between an otherwise healthy 8 year old who needs a heart transplant vs. a 95 year old with dementia diagnosed with aggressive cancer. Both are lives. But they are not the same, particularly in terms of the "kind" of life you're saving; that is, if they go through the life-saving treatment, what is their quality of life afterwards? Some would say a life is a life no matter what. Others see the grim, yet real, difference. Some studies even quantified QALYs, or Quality-Adjusted Life Years, based on various factors, and it's as complex you like. Someone with perfect health as a QALY of 1.0, and someone dead is 0.0. Stay at home for 3 months with TB, .68/year. Hospitalized for life with a contagious disease, .16/year. And so forth. That's just the starting point. Fun stuff. :)
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Extremely well balanced way of explaining this idea and this problem. I think it's a decision most of us would never be comfortable making, in all seriousness. Some folks are willing to joke around and mock the trolley problem, but even they would flat refuse to accept responsibility for such a decision in real life. And yet - as you said, when something is constructed RIGHT, the engineer is the one getting the praise - for a little while at least. Maybe the best praise though is when no one says a word? Because then, you know they aren't even noticing an issue enough to worry about it. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of people cross the Golden Gate Bridge every single day, and how many of them think as they approach it "hm, is this safe?" Of course they mostly don't, because they've learned to trust the bridge, and the engineers who built it. I think ALL of us in the developed world implicitly trust the engineers, even if they don't know it. We've been trained to that expectation, that whoever is designing and building a thing knows what they're doing on SOME level. Surely I never wondered if a road was actually "built right" until I understood what goes into making one in the first place. And roads were something I saw being built all the time, I've never lived in a place where big structures like bridges or huge buildings were being constructed! I can't even imagine what it would be like to have some massive skyscraper going up "next door" as it were. But folks see that all the time in the biggest cities, don't they? And no one seems to spend much time worrying if the giant crane is going to fall over on them. I think that speaks to the consistent ability of modern engineers to look out for the safety of everyone, even when you do factor in the many accidents and disasters it's still incredibly rare for such things to happen. Otherwise we wouldn't be so shocked about it, would we!
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Its interesting to hear how engineers consider safety. I work in medicine and everything we do is a risk/benefit analysis. No treatment is guaranteed and side effects and adverse effects are always to be considered. Thanks for sharing the engineering version of this!
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I had a girlfriend for several years that graduated from the University of Oklahoma-Norman. Her job was to figure out how much dead people were worth. She only told me a few stories that bothered her. Don't fight the insurance company unless they think you're dead loved one is worth less than you think . Otherwise the money that would be going to you will stay with the insurance company and their lawyers. She had a big heart but a big courtroom battle was more important.
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BTW, I bought 2 of your books for our local schools. They loved the fact that a San Antonio boy wrote those incredible books! Highly recommended for any kid who loves to play in the back yard with a tonka truck
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For everyone saying "the trolly problem is simple because of this workaround"
1) that's not the point of the problem, and
2) look at "The Greater Good | Mind Field | S2:E1" by Vsauce for a more thought-out problem with testing. (the tests begin at 14:34)
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@PracticalEngineeringChannel
6 months ago
This one is a little touchy, but I think it's a really important part of engineering that is often overlooked. Do you think I struck the right tone?
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