There is no point in placing blame on a part of system that is not under your direct control, because you have no ability to make that part to behave in some ot

There is no point in placing blame on a part of system that is not under your direct control, because you have no ability to make that part to behave in some other way so the outcome would be different next time. No point to blame gravity for your fall from the cliff, gravity will be unmoved by it and next time gravity will do exactly the same: it will pull your down and smash against rocks. It is not my own idea, I read it from Yudkowski, but I cannot find it on lesswrong.com to give you a direct link. DDG finds nothing on LW, and lesswrong.com now is drowned in third-party scripts and it's own search doesn't work for me. So I reproduced it by memory. But I'm not quite agree with Yudkowski. Gravity is a very real cause of some effects, so nothing wrong to hold it responsible for it's actions. The mistake we might make is to stop after blaming it. Just stop believing that the finding a scapegoat removes a responsibility from you. Somehow we tend to believe that cause is something very real and objective, that any effect has one cause, but it is not. Cause is a mental construct, it is very fuzzy. For any effect Y we can find dozens of causes in a sense "if there was no cause X, then there would be no effect Y". And our task is not to find just any X and forget about it, our task to find such an X that we can wriggle and to change outcome. It doesn't mean that you (and Yudkiwski) are not right, it is just another perspective leading to (mostly) the same outcomes. But when you think about social problems (or maybe more general: about really complex systems?) it is not enough to find one good cause X, you need to find as many as you can, and deal with all of them at once. You need explicitly search for all the ways to change the outcome, never allowing yourself a luxury of placing blame on something/someone and stopping there. There is one good reason to place blame: when you are dealing with people, "blame" is a well understood construct by everyone allowing a group to inform some member that avoiding some outcomes is his responsibility. It doesn't just inform about it, it reminds all others about what comes with a failure to be responsible. When you deal with a system made of objects (not subjects) then blame has no value at all, you need to work with causes. And yeah, in this case you are the only subject in the system, so if you pulled blame into the picture, then you and only you would be responsible for everything.