> I agree with all that you said, except that we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make.

> The best evidence for recklessness would be a pattern of similar failures.

There was a pattern of similar failures though as the article points out. OceanGate had only been doing deep dives since 2021 and every year of deep dive operation there was at least one serious mechanical malfunction (at least that was caught on camera). In 2021 the system that was supposed to drop the sub's weights failed. This one one is not quite as egregious in that it only points at some engineering difficulties and therefore only indirectly at recklessness (although the fact that Rush seemed unsure that the mechanical backup would work and suggested the final failsafe of 24 hours at the bottom of the ocean before finagling the mechanical backup is worrying).

The 2022 malfunction is much more egregious. One of the thrusters on the sub was installed in the wrong direction. Not only was this not caught until the sub was on the ocean floor (which hints at a very worrisome pre-check procedure), the worst part was when it was caught Rush didn't abort the mission. This seems to be a level of risk-seeking far beyond what is appropriate for a deep-sea mission. When you have such a major mechanical oversight, which would easily suggest that other problems might exist, and decide nonetheless to continue, that is a level of risk-seeking I'm willing to say exceeds what is appropriate for manned deep-sea operations.

If you're looking for literally repeats of a manned sub imploding and people dying, well... that gets to happen once when your CEO is the one manning the sub so almost by definition you can't get repeats of that.

I think I know where you're coming from. Which is even if you had an extremely safe operation, with only a 1 in a million chance of failure, over a long enough period, you will have a catastrophic loss of life. And when that happens people are going to come out of the woodwork saying how unsafe everything was leading up to it and news articles are going to be written about it and it's going to seem like a fiasco after the fact, because people are going to come up with all sorts of post-hoc explanations talking about how obviously bad everything is.

This isn't that. All of the concerns that the article airs were "pre-registered" so to speak. They weren't people after the fact saying "oh yeah I definitely knew that was a bad idea" or people after the fact exaggerating how serious their warnings were to make themselves look good. These were all people putting in writing their concerns and telling Rush straight up that he's going to kill people without mincing their words.

> we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make.

There is a place for epistemic humility and recognizing that some things are beyond our grasp and especially that a news article is potentially just cherry-picking quotes to create a narrative, but you're swinging too far the other way. Insiders are not the only people who have the standing to have an opinion on what they're doing. Otherwise, e.g. fraud would be definitionally impossible (did they intend to do x? Well you'll never know because you're an outsider!).