Amanda Askell · Anthropic · 2020-06-15
A short philosophy post that lands harder than its length suggests. Askell takes Stigler's airport quip and turns it into a calibration tool: zero failures means you're under-risking, near-total failure means you're reckless, and the sweet spot depends on the asymmetry of payoffs. The framing applies to research bets, deployment decisions, and personal life with equal force.
Worth a learner's time because it makes risk-tolerance legible. Most safety thinking implicitly assumes failure is bad; Askell shows why a culture that never fails is a culture that's stopped trying. Useful priming before reading anything else she's written about Claude's character.
> If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport.