Feel free to press me for more detail, clarification or even just to continue elaborating. I'm also happy to recommend reading if you're interested.

It's a matter of interpretation, and while I do see the hubris in it, I think people often mistake what the hubris is. It's often seen that, with sufficient regulation in place, everything would have turned out fine. I think the takeaway is no matter how far we come, even our best can be and will be subject to failure.

A "common sense" approach to the events surrounding Titanic is they did every last thing wrong. They didn't have enough lifeboats. They didn't have vigilant enough lookouts. They took off with a coal fire. Etc etc.

What if I told you they did nothing wrong according to the experience of those involved, from legislation to the able seamen? My line is often "Titanic did nothing wrong, and that was the problem." Titanic's demise would not have been so influential if it were abnormally bad. It had such a widespread effect because it was an exemplar of being the best and still failing.

As a direct response to the above, the Olympic Class exceeded every law in effect at the time and every last thing about them was signed off on by the Board of Trade over the course of hundreds of individual inspections, the BoT being a branch of the British government who oversaw each vessel operating under their control. The lookouts were operating as they would have on any other vessel in such a situation. Coal fires were common because coal has a habit of combusting when placed in the tall coal bunkers on ships because of friction under its own weight.

Captain Smith was the Commodore of the White Star Line, having been at sea since he was a young boy. The lookouts were career seamen themselves, as were the 7 officers. Many testified at the inquiries into the disaster they would have done the same as the men in charge of Titanic's navigation.

The vessels were supposed to be their own life preserving system in the event of a ship-to-ship collision or a grounding, which the Olympic Class could survive (and did) with trivial ease. I like to point out 3 accidents in the White Star Line fleet leading up to Titanic that gave them the impression the compartmentalization would be sufficient if not to prevent the loss of the vessel, to delay it long enough for help to arrive and everyone to evacuate. It's not as if the attitude came from nowhere.

The first is the SS Suevic in 1907. She ran aground and was nearly declared a total loss, but the salvage company decided to do something drastic to save the stern which housed all the vital equipment. They used dynamite to cut the ship in half, using her internal compartmentalization to prevent the stern from flooding, and then take her stern back to Belfast while leaving the bow to the elements. They built a new bow, connected it to the surviving stern and put her back into service. This operation was successful and she remained in service until being scuttled in 1942 to prevent her from falling into the hands of the approaching Nazis.

The second is the RMS Republic in 1909. She was struck amidships by another vessel, yet took a full 38 hours to sink. Apart from a few individuals killed directly by the impact, there were no casualties.

The third is the Olympic herself in 1911. She was struck by a small Admiralty vessel at the stern but remained not only afloat, but sailed back to Belfast under her own power with minimal repairs. She was back in service within 2 months.

These three ships were built using the same design philosophy as Titanic. The problem is they didn't envision a full third of the vessel being compromised in one go. This is why there's now the popular speculation of what would have happened if they hit the iceberg head-on. This issue was solved in Olympic's 1912-1913 refit and on Britannic before she set sail by building a second hull along most of the length of the vessel. You may respond that Britannic sank in 52 minutes with these improvements, but I'll point out that's because she struck a mine when the watertight doors and a good number of portholes were open, rendering the safety features ineffective.

On the other hand, there is a failure of legislation that permitted a failure to properly account for safety. For example, I'm going to state a fact that is often given without thought towards the implications of it.

The Olympic Class was designed to be equipped with 64 lifeboats.

I don't know how else to interpret that fact without coming to the conclusion the White Star Line believed the laws would change within the lifespan of these vessels and made it so they could be made compliant with the upcoming laws with minimal effort. They (like everyone else at the time, I shall add) didn't suspect their ship would be the reason why. The reason Olympic (and consequently Titanic) only had 16 full-size lifeboats with 2 cutters and 2 collabsables is due to the regulations last being updated in 1894(!), when the largest vessel afloat was about 12-13,000 GRT. At the time, the regulations around lifeboats centred around Gross Register Tonnage, with each GRT (100 cubic feet) requiring a proportional amount of space in the lifeboats. Problem is, since it was written in 1894, they had very specific requirements until they got to 10,000 GRT, at which point it was merely indicated as "10,000 and up." Olympic was over 45,000, with Titanic coming in at over 46,000. The laws were clearly inadequate, the WSL (and other companies) knew they were, but still saw fit to not properly take proper precaution.

That being said, it would be irresponsible of me to not point out the considerable discussion surrounding whether more lifeboats would mean more lives saved. Sure, they would have had enough space for about 3,600 people when there were only 2,200 on board at the time, but the crew only managed to organize and launch 18 boats before the ship took her final plunge and made any further effort fruitless. So here's where the interpretation comes back in and mine is thus; they should have had more lifeboats, and they wouldn't have made a difference. For all our efforts, we can and will still fail. Even our best.

/u/PainInTheAssInternet did an incredibly eloquent job of answering this question but i'd like to throw in my two cents as well.

I very, very strongly believe the "man's hubris" theme is unfairly applied to Titanic both in fictionalized depictions of it and in the general public zeitgeist. A lot of the reason it is seen that way is because it's such an easy explanation. We're always looking for a quick, disposable "what's the bottom line" way to understand things.

"Mankind builds giant ship they claim is unsinkable and then, those over confident dummies run into an iceberg and sink it" is a very ironically satisfying (from a narrative perspective) and uncomplicated way to digest a famous piece of history. But it's just not a fair assessment of what actually happened (imo).

As PainInTheAssInternet pointed out, from a safety perspective the White Star Line met or exceeded what was required by the board of trade. You have to understand in that golden age of trans-Atlantic crossings, the term "unsinkable" was an advertising buzzword that was applied to pretty much every new, more advanced ocean liner. That was true for Titanic- but it was also true for ships both before and after Titanic. Titanic was not unique in that- and even then the shipping line was careful enough to always have qualifier in front of the term ("...as far as it is possible to do so, these vessels are designed to be unsinkable" is how it usually went).

The qualifiers got dropped after the sinking because the story is even more sensational if the shipping line literally claimed the ship would never go down.

Titanic was famous because of the disaster but even then it was "the biggest ship in the world" only by a small margin. She was only slightly heavier then her sister ship the Olympic which gave her the title. One that even then, she would only keep for less then year as the German Ocean Liner SS Imperator was soon to take the title. Ocean liners at the time were constantly one upping each other in size, speed, and luxury.

As for why Titanic didn't see the Iceberg, there are lots of reasons but it comes down to (most people believe) very unique weather patterns. It was a very dark, moonless night. The sea was calm, which made it difficult to spot icebergs- part of the way they were spotted was by the the moon/stars reflecting in seafoam and plankton that would lap up against the bergs. It was so calm and dark, there was none of that. And there was phenomenon called "cold water mirage" which is basically, a layer of cold artic air under warm air causing light rays to bend downward making the horizon appear higher than it actually was.

After the point the iceberg was spotted, there was nothing else that could be done. The look outs did their job. The man at the wheel did his job. The Captain did his job. The crew did their job. When the iceberg was spotted, the bridge had 37 seconds to react. That's how close it was. There was nothing that could be done. Captain Smith had the crew preparing lifeboats before he even knew the ship was doomed and it's kind of fucking miraculous that they were able to get off all the lifeboats they did. Contrary to popular imagination, there are very very few instances where a sinking ship gets off all it's lifeboats in any scenario. In fact, most ships not only sink much faster then Titanic did, but capsize rendering half the lifeboats unusable at all (see the Costa Condordia). There is a whole different set of small miracles to explain why Titanic didn't capsize that I won't go into.

At the end of the day- Titanic was an absolute 100% freak accident that no one could have seen coming. More lifeboats wouldn't have helped. Everyone did their duty, everyone did their best, and people still died. The only thing i'd argue in PainInTheAssInternet's post is I don't think anyone failed in the case of Titanic. Under the circumstances it's a triumph of human will and bravery as many people survived as did.

Titanic isn't a story of hubris. It's a story of how chaotic and unpredictable life can be. You can be as prepared as you want but the universe can always throw some crazy shit at you that you never could have anticipated. All you can do in that scenario is load the boats. And that's what they did.

Anyways, I run /r/rms_titanic so if you ever have any questions feel free to drop in. I love these kinds of questions and as I said at the top, i'm very passionate about 'man's hubris' not being the main take away from the tragedy of Titanic.