Professor A. L. L. Baker (Member) opened the discussion by saying that he agreed entirely with what the authors had said in their presentation but not with what they
had written in the paper. He agreed with the statistical, probabilistic approach. It was obviously the only logical way of dealing with the variations of strengths of materials and the variations and vagaries of loading. There were one or two points in the paper which Professor Baker found slightly misleading. First of all, the matter of basing a design entirely upon a probability of failure-10-7-and a minimum cost, and saying that one could not entirely guarantee a structure against failure, needed some qualification. He thought this was rather a dangerous statement.