What’s wrong in my thinking about Errors?

After my previous post about why we accept human errors but are harsher on machines, two longtime readers and pillars of the resilience engineering community reached out to point out the error of my ways. Courtney Nash of the Resilience in Software Foundation wrote a long response, pointing to errors in my thinking and framing. John Allspaw, the former CTO of Etsy who also worked at Flickr in the Yahoo years and at Friendster, made the same point in an email to me. Your premise isn’t an accurate one and the research you’re citing to support your argument actually undermines it. I have yet to talk with John, but Nash’s response has me revising my thinking and reading more before I revisit the conversation. In my own defense, I should have started with the caveat that I lack expertise in some of the topics I was wading into. If you read a book, sometimes you don’t become an expert. You just come to your own conclusions. I suppose that is the case here. If I understand correctly, or at…