It seems like this is turning into a statement about human technical politics.
Yes, I am highly confident that this is in fact safe.
No, I couldn’t identify any way in which this will kill us, though that doesn’t mean it won’t kill us.
The latter is stereotypically something a cautious engineer in cover-your-ass-mode is likely to say no matter how much quality assurance has happened. The first is something that an executive in selling-to-investors-and-the-press-mode is likely to say once they estimate it will have better outcomes than saying something else with the investors and the press, perhaps just because they know of something worse that will happen outside their control that seems very likely to be irreversible and less likely to be good. Between these two stereotypes lays a sort of “reasonable rationalist speaking honestly but pragmatically”?
This is a hard area to speak about clearly between individuals without significant interpersonal calibration on the functional meaning of “expert”, because you run into Dunning-Kruger effects if you aren’t careful and a double illusion of transparency can prevent you from even noticing the miscommunication.
There are conversations that can allow specific people to negotiate a common definition with illustrations grounded in personal experience here, but they take many minutes or hours, and are basically a person-to-person protocol. The issue is doubly hard with a general audience because wildly different gut reactions will be elicited and there will be bad faith participation by at least some people, and so on. Rocket scientists get this wrong sometimes. It is a hard problem.
It seems like this is turning into a statement about human technical politics.
The latter is stereotypically something a cautious engineer in cover-your-ass-mode is likely to say no matter how much quality assurance has happened. The first is something that an executive in selling-to-investors-and-the-press-mode is likely to say once they estimate it will have better outcomes than saying something else with the investors and the press, perhaps just because they know of something worse that will happen outside their control that seems very likely to be irreversible and less likely to be good. Between these two stereotypes lays a sort of “reasonable rationalist speaking honestly but pragmatically”?
This is a hard area to speak about clearly between individuals without significant interpersonal calibration on the functional meaning of “expert”, because you run into Dunning-Kruger effects if you aren’t careful and a double illusion of transparency can prevent you from even noticing the miscommunication.
There are conversations that can allow specific people to negotiate a common definition with illustrations grounded in personal experience here, but they take many minutes or hours, and are basically a person-to-person protocol. The issue is doubly hard with a general audience because wildly different gut reactions will be elicited and there will be bad faith participation by at least some people, and so on. Rocket scientists get this wrong sometimes. It is a hard problem.