> Basically, the line of causation of the mishap has to pass through a metaphorical block of Swiss cheese, and a mishap only occurs if all the holes in the cheese line up.

The metaphor relies on you mixing and matching some different batches of presliced Swiss cheese. In a single block, the holes in the cheese are guaranteed to line up, because they are two-dimensional cross sections of three-dimensional gas bubbles. The odds of a hole in one slice of Swiss cheese lining up with another hole in the following slice are very similar to the odds of one step in a staircase being followed by another step.

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jibal 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

No, it's a metaphor.

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psunavy03 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And there's the archetypal comment on technology-based social media that is simultaneously technically correct and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand.

	▲	mrguyorama 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Actually the pedantry is meaningful! You cannot create a swiss cheese safety model with correlated errors, same as how the metaphor fails if the slices all come from the same block of swiss cheese! You have to ensure your holes come from different processes and systems! You have to ensure your swiss cheese holes come from different blocks of cheese!