Originally Posted by
quentinc
They might notice that the stick shaker was operating on a single side only. Reality is though the point of these devices is to encourage immediate action by the pilot (to avoid an impending stall), not to enter into some slow careful fault diagnosis.
There were actually two failures on the MAX: The faulty AOA sensor data which triggered a whole range of spurious warnings, put the pilots in a high workload situation, which on its own was hazardous. Then MCAS comes along, and administers the coup-de-grace while the pilots are busy trying to make sense of the aircraft and their checklists.