One of those hypotheses is easily testable: bridges can collapse and you will hear about it.
And yet.. it rarely happens? There was one in Italy and one in the US recently but, to a decent approximation, it’s a non-issue.
Maybe we should have more trust in people and their work. Maybe our bridges are fine, our food is kosher, but what’s rotting on the inside is society, eaten alive by cynicism and distrust.
I think thus can and perhaps should be refuted as the bridges are not fine. The 2019 report of bridges in WA found 6.6% to be in poor condition and more than half of the approximate 8000 bridges need repair. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/state-item/washington/
Seattle has about 6 or 7 very major bridges. One of the largest, the west seattle bridge has been closed for over a year because it was suddenly in danger of collapse. This is a bridge that carried over 100k cars per day. (https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...)
I think the point of grimacing while crossing a bridge is that the engineers know the problems and how pervasive they are. As a user of websites, you may think some are really solid. Having worked for one (a website virtually everyone has used), when you see the bug queues, all the outages, and all the problems, you realize it's not the steel fortress that it would appear to be from the native outsider
I’d also like to see some evidence that people familiar with bridge construction actually avoid bridges or hesitate before using them. I suspect they might say something like that if the conversation goes in that direction, but I doubt they actually modify their behavior.
We know consumer software has bugs – that can make them unreliable, insecure and slow. They can become worse over time with more usage (more data/state accumulation). Unless we proactively find and fix them, they can continue to hurt users. We know this. We know critical software systems (medical, industrial, infra) have specially hardened software that are more reliable (but not yet secure).
We also know buildings, bridges etc – can weaken over time due to material deterioration, foundation shifting, earthquakes, machinery induced vibrations, excess load etc. and fail (fall apart). They need to be monitored for signs of structural stress/failure (cracks, leaks, tilts etc) and corrected/repaired or else they fail. When these maintenances are not done correctly, due to incompetence or corruption, they will fail, no doubt.
That sounds like the road to complacency. The reality is that there are many backup systems that work much of the time. Have complacency in all of them and forget society.
The bridge has engineers and architects who know material stats and add tolerances. The restaurant has patrons with immune systems that survived worse times in human history, usually, unless the patron is undergoing serious medical treatment or something.
They're only fine until they're not; there's plenty of instances of rotting infrastructure that one day will fail, and it's not like these issues are unknown, there's just not enough money or people to fix it.
Meanwhile the US government is going to spend another trillion on its military.
There was very nearly one in central London a couple of years back (Hammersmith) and it’s still closed to traffic.
But nearly is good, the situation is being rectified before it turned into a disaster. From the noises coming out of TfL this was a little close for comfort though.
And yet.. it rarely happens? There was one in Italy and one in the US recently but, to a decent approximation, it’s a non-issue.
Maybe we should have more trust in people and their work. Maybe our bridges are fine, our food is kosher, but what’s rotting on the inside is society, eaten alive by cynicism and distrust.