#decision-making

A blog post by Hugo Landau argues that a 98% success rate is often insufficient in practice, using the analogy of cleaning up pine needles to illustrate how even a tiny remaining mess can render the effort unacceptable. The post challenges the common assumption that high percentages are sufficient, highlighting that context matters greatly in determining acceptable thresholds, which is crucial for software reliability, quality assurance, and risk assessment. The author uses the example of removing 99% of pine needles—while numerically impressive, the remaining 1% is still visually distinct and unacceptable. The post also points out that percentages can be misleading near their extremes, where a change from 98% to 99% cuts the failure rate in half.