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> If you're a Theranos investor, blame yourself for not doing the proper due diligence. Remember that blame is not a zero-sum game. You can accept your respons

• wpietri 11y ago
  This is perhaps too far afield, but I think blame really is a zero-sum game, in that people work actively to shift it around, and only stop playing when allocations become set. It strikes me as a very primate thing. I think we can only get people into non-zero-sum behavior when we talk about things like, cause, power, and responsibility. For example, I'd accept no blame here. But I do feel responsibility in a couple ways. As a participant in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, this event will effect me. Even if I didn't make the mess, I'm going to have to help clean it up. And looking back, I think about the power I might have had to cause a different outcome. What if I had spoken up more against the hype cycle? What if I had said more clearly that this was a bubble? I'm only one person, but there were a lot of people who could have spoken up more. If we had done it together, could we have reduced the damage of the bubble? Hard to say, but next time I'll try harder and see what happens. If this sort of thing interests you, you might enjoy Dekker's "Field Guide to Understanding Human Error," which is a brilliant book about airplane safety investigations. I thought it had a lot of applicability in tech.