[gnaffle]

Thanks, I hadn't read this before.

For those that haven't read it, here's Levesons article on the Therac-25: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

[thaumasiotes]

This one made me think about public outrage against tobacco companies.

One minor theme in this article is that AECL denied knowledge of any reports of Therac-25 malfunctions even when, looking at a timeline of publicly-known events, such ignorance might be described as "implausible".

They don't seem to have been punished for this, and while I agree that it isn't laudable I also agree that it's not the greatest infraction. AECL really did care about the proper functioning of their machine. They really did look for problems. They cooperated with the FDA to a very great extent. It's hard to fault them for not thinking of testing "what if we enter incorrect configuration information, and then correct it within 8 seconds?"

But tobacco companies are routinely vilified for sitting on cigarette mortality data, as if this was by itself enough to make them irredeemable. They didn't even get off with a light punishment, much less the zero punishment AECL received. I suspect the difference, in the minds of many, is that AECL was a benign company advancing a useful purpose, while tobacco companies sold a product whose only use was to kill the operator. But that was legal then and remains legal today -- how can it be the justification for punishing them extra-hard for otherwise minor problems? AECL's misrepresentedly-unsafe product didn't even kill the operator; it killed random sick people who trusted the hospitals.

[gnaffle]

Didn't the tobacco companies also spend money to discredit scientists and peer-reviewed articles and seed misinformation about the real risks of smoking, all while they were sitting on that mortality data? I think that was the real problem.