I think this depends a bit what class of safety issues we’re thinking about. [...] Many other technological ‘accident risks’ are less social, although never entirely non-social (e.g. even in the case of bridge safety, you still need to trust some organization to do maintenance/testing properly.)
I’m not sure I agree with this. While they haven’t been selected to be representative, the sense I got from the accident case studies I’ve read (e.g. Chernobyl, nuclear weapons accidents, and various cases from the books Flirting With Disaster and Warnings) is that the social component was quite substantial. It seems to me that usually either better engineering (though sometimes this wasn’t possible) or better social management of dealing with engineering limitations (usually possible) could have avoided these accidents. It makes a lot of sense to me that some people prefer to talk of “sociotechnical systems”.
I’m not sure I agree with this. While they haven’t been selected to be representative, the sense I got from the accident case studies I’ve read (e.g. Chernobyl, nuclear weapons accidents, and various cases from the books Flirting With Disaster and Warnings) is that the social component was quite substantial. It seems to me that usually either better engineering (though sometimes this wasn’t possible) or better social management of dealing with engineering limitations (usually possible) could have avoided these accidents. It makes a lot of sense to me that some people prefer to talk of “sociotechnical systems”.