With all due respect, (B) is logically unsound in my mind. You may have meant considering the hypotheses, and then using available data and only available data to rule in or rule out certain scenarios. In my mind, based on decades of studying engineering defects and failures, starting with a conclusion is not a way to solve a mystery at all. Rather, it is only a way to convince oneself of a falsehood. To give an example that is familiar to the HN audience, how many times have you had to debug a bug or problem in a complex system that you initially thought was caused by one thing only to discover it was caused by something completely different?
>With all due respect, (B) is logically unsound in my mind.
That's because you're concerned about finding out what happened. Not everyone thinks like that, namely some (many) are concerned about creating what happened.
Very interesting. Thank you for making the distinction explicit and for helping me to understand the other mindset. You are totally right, in that my mindset is closer to a forensics mindset in such instances, trying to get as close as possible to the "truth", so as to avoid future similar defects and improve system reliability. I do agree that some people prefer to manufacture truth. Any advice on how to get along with these?
Much like how you can't convince a businessman to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it, it's next to impossible to "find out" a mystery if the powers-that-be do not want that and/or want a more desirable-for-them conclusion.
