There have been some interesting posts made here while I have been off rattling some cages in another thread.
To understand risk, use your imagination
Imagination is just as fallible as thinking, however. It is no panacea.
This transition will require us to increase the diversity of world views involved in creating and assessing our technological activities.
This made me laugh. How does the mere increase in diversity increase safety. Not all ideas are created equal, not all probabilities are equally likely. Diversity is unhelpful if it leads us down blind alleys and over steep cliffs. Shuttling the onus from thinking to imagination to values all the while looking for the silver bullet that will solve the problem of human fallibility is nothing but an academic shell game unworthy of honorable men.
My honest disagreement with PBL and others stems from my firm conviction that there are some events we can never predict and thus there is no rational way to quantify them; when we hear phrases like "the odds of that are 1 in 10e5 hours" we need to treat this as a best guess and not anything certain.
The follow-up point is that generally human beings do a bad job of estimating odds and the more unlikely an event the worse we are at estimating it. Quantifying events with numbers often gives us a false sense of security. Once we put a number to it we think we understand it and thus we feel we control it. Until it all falls apart....then statistician runs into a corner and says, "well don't blame me if the one in a million event happened on your watch. It's not my problem you were unlucky."
Hand flying specifically, doesn't just improve one area of one's ability, it attunes the pilot to the nature of the environment he is operating in
This is true. The problem is that with airplanes the mistakes are often costly. That's the motivation behind my posts in the Ryanair thread: experience is costly.
Human learning is costly. The question then becomes at what point does the cost of the experience become more than the flying public will bear and it's simply cheaper to automate the flight deck and get rid of the pilots entirely.
People like to pretend they know things when they really don't and they like to pretend things are free when they are not. All it takes is someone to put his nose up in the air, stick a number on the problem, and put his hand in the other guys pocket and the rabble in the crowd will give him a cheer.
