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use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility No, it's use of the passive voice to more accurately communicate the outcome of a system designed so that nobo

use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility No, it's use of the passive voice to more accurately communicate the outcome of a system designed so that nobody has responsibility. Saying that using passive voice is dishonest and evasive is a special case of shooting the messenger.

rjeli 10y ago
Except for especially insidious cases: https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu
- tbrownaw 10y ago
  I don't see the issue with that. Shortened headlines are supposed to have words elided (so I'd read it as "[is being] paid"), and newsy stuff tends to be about now which means that "paid" as past tense doesn't make sense and it would say "pays" (like the main headline does) if she was the one paying. The sentence ordering (Melania first, Daily Mail last) is to put the thing people are most interested in at the beginning. It's not a case of dishonesty, it's a case of forgetting that most people don't usually use words that way.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I think it's an ugly example of bad headlining, though not 'fake news'. I did parse it backwards at first because so much had been elided. BBC does this constantly because their mobile news app uses such short headlines - they elide all the specifiers and half the verbs, to the point where what's left is word salad with a handful of key nouns. Annoyingly often, it's necessary to read a piece just to see what the headline meant in the first place.
rocqua 10y ago
I think that often, this speech is the result of how the perpetrators felt. They are thrust into a situation, fall back to training that says 'just follow the rules / orders'. In that frame of mind, they indeed had no choice. Had they taken any other action, they'd have gone against policy as a simple lowly employee. That is terrifying and thus not an option.
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
> ... the outcome of a system designed so that nobody has responsibility. Ironically, you said that in the passive voice, which hides the question of who designed the system that way.
- tbrownaw 10y ago
  Probably nobody identifiable, or a large class of people. It pretty clearly causes increased organizational fitness in the current social / regulatory / legal environment. . The solution is not increased punishment for customer-facing people, since that would just put them in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Something along the lines of RICO or Sarbanes-Oxley might help, since it would give strong personal incentives to the people who actually have power to set procedures and organizational culture. Something that has definitely hurt, is the demonization of (and organizational liability for) individual initiative and discretion. There does seem to be something a bit odd in making both leadership personally liable for bad outcomes of following policy, and the organization liable for bad outcomes of not having a strict enough policy.

rjeli 10y ago

Except for especially insidious cases: https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu

tbrownaw 10y ago
I don't see the issue with that. Shortened headlines are supposed to have words elided (so I'd read it as "[is being] paid"), and newsy stuff tends to be about now which means that "paid" as past tense doesn't make sense and it would say "pays" (like the main headline does) if she was the one paying. The sentence ordering (Melania first, Daily Mail last) is to put the thing people are most interested in at the beginning. It's not a case of dishonesty, it's a case of forgetting that most people don't usually use words that way.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I think it's an ugly example of bad headlining, though not 'fake news'. I did parse it backwards at first because so much had been elided. BBC does this constantly because their mobile news app uses such short headlines - they elide all the specifiers and half the verbs, to the point where what's left is word salad with a handful of key nouns. Annoyingly often, it's necessary to read a piece just to see what the headline meant in the first place.

rocqua 10y ago

I think that often, this speech is the result of how the perpetrators felt. They are thrust into a situation, fall back to training that says 'just follow the rules / orders'. In that frame of mind, they indeed had no choice. Had they taken any other action, they'd have gone against policy as a simple lowly employee. That is terrifying and thus not an option.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

> ... the outcome of a system designed so that nobody has responsibility. Ironically, you said that in the passive voice, which hides the question of who designed the system that way.

tbrownaw 10y ago
Probably nobody identifiable, or a large class of people. It pretty clearly causes increased organizational fitness in the current social / regulatory / legal environment. . The solution is not increased punishment for customer-facing people, since that would just put them in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Something along the lines of RICO or Sarbanes-Oxley might help, since it would give strong personal incentives to the people who actually have power to set procedures and organizational culture. Something that has definitely hurt, is the demonization of (and organizational liability for) individual initiative and discretion. There does seem to be something a bit odd in making both leadership personally liable for bad outcomes of following policy, and the organization liable for bad outcomes of not having a strict enough policy.