Blog post argues hazardous states — not root-cause hunting — are the real danger

The gist

It has been reported that a recently reposted blog entry on EntropicThoughts by an author known as “kqr” takes aim at root cause analysis, calling it a “crap technique” for learning from failure. The claim: accidents happen only when a system is in a hazardous state and the environment turns sour — H ∧ E ⇔ A, in symbolic form. In plain English: you can control the system, not the weather, so stop treating hindsight blame as a safety strategy. Harsh? Maybe. Useful? Absolutely.

Examples that land the point

It has been reported that the post points to a recent commercial flight that landed with less than 30 minutes of fuel as a textbook hazardous state — not a benign use of reserves. If a plane is in that state, only a change in conditions is needed to turn a landing into an accident. The author also uses a simple, human moment — a child playing near cliffs — to make the emotional case: promises to “not have an accident” are hollow. You can’t promise fate. You can promise to avoid the hazardous spot.

Why this matters to designers and operators

The post argues that safety is really about maintaining constraints against a meddlesome environment. That makes it a dynamic control problem: multiple controllers, ongoing feedback, mental models and corrective actions, not a static checklist you can tick after the fact. Think less root-cause autopsy, more active monitoring and constraint enforcement. That’s a subtle but crucial shift for designers, SREs and anyone building systems meant to survive the real world.

The takeaway

So what's the headline? Fault-finding feels good. It’s tidy. But it can lull teams into trusting the environment to bail them out — until it doesn’t. The writer urges a shift toward designing systems that never sit in hazardous states in the first place. Sound familiar? It echoes modern reliability thinking across aviation, software and safety engineering — a nudge from theory into practice.

Sources: entropicthoughts.com, Hacker News