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Jesse's avatar

I think brittle is a good word here. Strong until it isn't, and then fails catastrophically.

Like to tightly optimized just-in-tume supply chains as well.

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Critical Uncertainties's avatar

Exactly, engineers tend to focus on robustness, which is defending against what you expect, but tend to overlook system fragility against overlooked or disregarded scenarios.

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Jesse's avatar

Engineers tend to optimise what is in their scope. If not one really owns the ‘system robustness in the face of non-local failures’ then no one will be really designing the system to at least fail gracefully.

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