jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #80 on 25 Jun 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Systems: Incident Handling, Technical Leadership: Systems: Other
Counterfactuals are not Causality - Michael Nygard
When you’re digging into the (likely multiple) causes of a failure, Nygard reminds us that things that didn’t happen can’t, necessarily, be the cause of something. To steal an example from the post, ”The admin did not configure file purging” is not a cause. It can suggest future mitigations or useful lessons learned, as ”we should ensure that file purging is configured by default”, but looking for things that didn’t happen is a way for blame to sneak in and takes our eyes off of the system that lead to the bad outcome.
