More From Michael Lewis Article

As a boy, John Seo learned everything he could about the Titanic. “It was considered unsinkable because it had a hull of 16 chambers,” he says. The chambers were stacked back to front. If the ship hit something head on, the object might puncture the front chamber, but it would likely have to puncture at least three more to sink the ship. “They probably said, What are the odds of four chambers going?” he says. “There might have been a one-in-a-hundred chance of puncturing a single chamber, but the odds of puncturing four chambers, they probably thought of as one in a million. That’s because they thought of them as independent chambers. And the chambers might have been independent if the first officer hadn’t gambled at the last minute and swerved. By swerving, the iceberg went down the side of the ship. If the officer had taken it head on, he might have killed a passenger or two, but the ship might not have sunk. The mistake was to turn. Often people associate action with lowering risk or controlling risk, but experience shows more often than not that by taking action you only make the risk worse.”