A while ago someone (unfortunately I forget who it was!) gave an example for how problems look different when you’re operating at different scales. It’s stuck with me, and I find myself using it over and over again: Imagine that you have an external hard drive with a failure rate of 1 in 100 years. So over the course of a hundred years, it’ll fail once. As an individual, that’s probably an acceptable rate: you likely wont’ use the hard drive for 100 years, and its point of failure probably won’t happen in any given year during which you use it.
Challenges are different at scale
A while ago someone (unfortunately I forget who it was!) gave an example for how problems look different when you’re operating at different scales. It’s stuck with me, and I find myself using it over and over again: Imagine that you have an external hard drive with a failure rate of 1 in 100 years. So over the course of a hundred years, it’ll fail once. As an individual, that’s probably an acceptable rate: you likely wont’ use the hard drive for 100 years, and its point of failure probably won’t happen in any given year during which you use it.