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Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow

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This book review has been prepared for Tier III 415 A, "Entropy and Human Activity." It includes much of the material presented in class and further commentary. A normal accident occurs in a complex system, one that has so many parts that it is likely that something is wrong with more than one of them at any given time. A well-designed complex system will include redundancy, so that each fault by itself does not prevent proper operation. However, unexpected interactions, especially with tight coupling, may lead to system failure. System operators must make decisions, even with ambiguous information. The process of making a tentative choice also creates a mental model of the situation. When following through on the initial choice, the visible results are compared to those expected on the basis of that initial mental model. Provided that the first few steps' results are consistent, the fact that the mental model was tentative is likely to be forgotten, even if later results contradict it

Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, by Charles Perrow, Basic Books, NY, 1984. This book review has been prepared for Tier III 415 A, "Entropy and Human Activity." It includes much of the material presented in class and further commentary. Introduction Perrow investigates normal accidents in high-risk systems. He uses these and a number of other words in a technical sense that we will understand better after reviewing the whole book, but let us start now: High-Risk This term encompasses risks "for the operators, passengers, innocent bystanders, and for future…

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