Ask HN: Thai Cave Rescue – tech to elicit/rank rescue ideas?

by craigdalton on 7/8/2018, 2:58:03 AM with 4 comments
The plight of the trapped Thai soccer team has taken the world’s attention and every day there is speculation on possible rescue methodologies, ranging from waiting for months till the water recedes to teaching the boys to scuba dive. Thai authorities are being bombarded with offers of physical and intellectual assistance. Even Elon Musk is proposing a novel “air inflated walk through tunnel” idea. So I ask HN – is there a software application, existing or ready to be built, which can collate and rank crowd-sourced ideas in novel situations like this? Something with more features than up and down voting platforms.Some features I would propose:

1.Crowd review and voting would necessarily help make the ranking of ideas more efficient. 2.Ranking of ideas by the idea submitters level of expertise, both self and crowd assessed, would be important. 3.Idea submitters should highlight their level of confidence and potential gaps in their knowledge to aid others to review and or improve upon their idea 4.Crowd reviewers should be able to evolve or modify the idea. 5.When significant dependencies change, the ideas rank should change or be able to be changed through filtering. E.g. should there be a need to rapidly remove the children, then more rapidly implemented ideas would rank higher.

The idea submission could be structured in an online form as below: - Idea Title - Idea Description - Knowledge Gaps - My Expertise/Qualifications/Highest Level of Achievement in the relevant fields

The application would allow annotations on both the idea itself and the knowledge gaps – either to confirm or deny the feasibility of the idea or to evolve the idea and allow the online crowd reviewing the idea to modify according to new information added to the idea. Ranking would incorporate expertise. Such an application may have application in other settings. Anyone already built this or something like it that could be modified?

  • by rgbrenner on 7/8/2018, 3:19:26 AM

    So your idea is that the people at the site, with the most information on the conditions, should ignore what they know and carry out the wishes of internet commenters who have no direct information about what's happening.

    And further, the people with the most at stake.. whos full attention is on accomplishing it safely... should instead use ideas from people with no real attachment to its success, and no real consequences to its failure, who came up with an idea on a whim.

    I think it's a waste of time to build anything like you suggest. The experts on the ground, with all of the information at their hands about current conditions, who's full attention is on this issue... can handle it without the internets help. The people on the ground aren't dummies either. Maybe instead work on trusting that they really do want to help, and they're doing the best work they can considering the resources and conditions they are working under.

  • by viraptor on 7/8/2018, 3:07:48 AM

    > Crowd review and voting

    We haven't even "solved" internet comments yet, so applying this to any real life critical situation seems weird. Why crowd? People doing actual engineering do this process inside companies all the time: collecting requirements, processing ideas, evaluating solutions.

    I feel like the last thing you want to replace them with is a vague internet crowd. See YouTube comments under a random "I made this thing" video for reasons why...

  • by craigdalton on 7/8/2018, 3:04:17 AM

    An example below of admittedly last resort option :

    Idea Title: Anaesthetise boys and remove from cave.

    Idea Description: The boys would be anaesthetised, intubated (tube down throat to protect airway) placed in waterproof bag and pulled from cave by diver. Portable battery operated ventilators can ventilate a sedated patient for well more than 3 hours required to extract them. Ideally a long acting sedative/anaesthetic could be used and readministered at the rest spots on the route out. This idea would be a last resort for boys who were unable to use scuba equipment.

    My level of expertise: While I am a doctor I am not trained in anaesthetics and have forgotten everything I learned in a PADI diving course 25 years ago.

    Gaps in my knowledge: 1 I don’t know what equipment would be required to ensure stabilisation of an endotracheal tube in a patient being dragged through a cave. E.g. If the endotracheal tube leaked or came out of the trachea, then 1. The patient would no longer be ventilated and would die within minutes, and 2. The thick plastic bag they are held within would begin to inflate making them difficult to manoeuvre and potentially trapping them in narrow crevasses. 2. Susceptibility of battery operated ventilators to minor water infiltration is an unknown. 3. Availability of large thick waterproof vinyl dry-bag required to protect the patient.