O-Ring Automation

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34639

23•jandrewrogers•5d ago

Comments

MisterTea•5d ago

What is an O-ring in this situation? I was expecting an article on sealing but this has me confused.

teraflop•5d ago

It's referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_deve...

The name is a reference to the Challenger disaster, which was caused by a failure of actual sealing O-rings, but the theory itself is abstract.

Basically, it's modeling complex production chains where the quality of the "weakest link" is the limiting factor of the quality of the whole process.

observationist•5d ago

So a multivariate Laffer curve?

laffOr•4d ago

Completely unrelated. Laffer curve is total tax returns as a function of tax rate (usually used to show that at some point T = t*Y(t), where t is the rate and Y is the taxe base, dT/dt < 0).

This is about how Y works, not as a function of t but of, well, everything else.

crispyambulance•5d ago

OK, but isn’t the key take-away from the Challenger disaster all about the consequence of organizational dysfunction and fear of speaking up?

It wasn’t really a “design flaw” or “weak link” as much as it was management disregarding the warnings of engineering staff. The cold temperature limitation was known in advance by the Morton Thiokol engineers but their management refused to relay the warnings of engineering to NASA and NASA was under pressure to fly. IMHO this was a failure of multiple, mostly organizational, systems rather than “one weak link”.

Did the economists mis-name their own theory?

sidewndr46•5d ago

Likely yes, because NASA and other agencies were able to portray the incident as an O-ring failure. It was in fact just that management was indifferent to the risk to the astronauts on board. The only individual who accurately reported on the disaster was Feynman.

jjk166•3d ago

The o-ring was still the weak link, a small part that decision makers assumed was insignificant whose failure caused the complete destruction of a massive system and tragic deaths. The organizational failures are just why the weak link wasn't addressed. We can say with hindsight that things should have been better communicated and the warnings should have been heeded, but the fact is they were dealing with a complex system where the risk was sufficiently non-obvious that they could disregard the warnings.

meanmrmustard92•5d ago

It's a reference to a model of growth that in itself is a reference to the challenger disaster. Basically something like a "weakest link" theory of growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_deve...

Was surprised to see this here; i think it is a good model for thinking about tech productivity

baxtr•10h ago

Richard Rumelt has a nice article about this:

> The strength of a chain depends on the strength of its weakest link. When activities have chain-link logic, the strength of the weakest, or least efficient, part limits the performance of the whole. Thus, a solid rubber O-ring was the weakest link for the Space Shuttle Challenger. Falling out of the winter sky in 1986, it shattered onto the ocean below, killing the crew President Reagan called “pride of our nation.” For the Challenger, making the booster engines stronger or improving its communications systems would be foolish investments if the O-ring remained weak.

https://strategeion.substack.com/p/the-logic-of-the-chain

w10-1•5d ago

dead simple: (AI) automation gains can't be modeled via linear task-savings due to "the structure of bottlenecks and how automation reshapes worker time around them"

Nothing in the article about targeting the rate-limiting factors.

And on the first line of the first page, this gem of gratitude: "We thank Refine.ink, ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5 for research assistance"

And on this government-sponsored paper, a warning that copying ANY portion of the text REQUIRES I accompany it with full credit, including the copyright notice, so that quote above puts me into noncompliance.

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