“Cracks were the centerpiece of the investigation. They could not be eliminated. They were everywhere, permeating the structure, too small to be seen. The structure could not be made perfect, it was inherently flawed, and the goal of engineering design was not to certify the airframe free of cracks but to make it tolerate them.” So too, the essence of algorithm design is not to eliminate all error, but to make results robust in the face of error. The fundamental question to ask is not whether Facebook should be curating the newsfeed, but how.
