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So, what you are expressing is one perspective on accidents, and it's true - the one guy who cares about cleaning up a spill is a good guy, the one guy who hose

So, what you are expressing is one perspective on accidents, and it's true - the one guy who cares about cleaning up a spill is a good guy, the one guy who hoses it into a drain is a bad guy. I would like to offer another one. The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination. On the other side, although an individual person can decide whether they're going to make disposing of those batteries easy or a bureaucratic power trip, when you are at the top and are going to fill 1,000 positions like that, you know in advance that some of them are going to be awful about it. So, from the top like from below, individual personal decisions become fixed quantities. Sending out 1,000 people and allowing 250 of them to make the independent personal decision to do it wrong is really the same thing as doing it wrong yourself, because it's guaranteed to happen. That's essentially the story behind why you should think about accidents as an institutional problem even when they involve bad personal choices on the part of the people who did them. That One Guy is actually hundreds of people and although you can't tell in advance whether one person will do it you know that out of thousands, hundreds will.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination. I imagine that batteries, for one, would tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean (if not gulped up by a large animal), and would thus cause highly concentrated local contamination. It would really depend on exactly where the batteries were thrown overboard on how much damage each one caused. Otherwise I agree with what you're saying.
tcmart14 4y ago
There definitely are roots that can be traced to institutional problems. The case with a certain DC1 who thought being a pain would make him feel better, it is an institutional problem that someone like that was able to get to a position they were in. If someone with that kind of a personality rose up to being a DC1 and supervising the trash crew (although these kinds of duties are usually when someone is sent TAD because their division doesn't want to deal with them), that is a problem. So yea, you can boil it down to institutional problems, however it can be a little tricky because those institutional problems sometimes do not correlate directly.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago

> The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination. I imagine that batteries, for one, would tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean (if not gulped up by a large animal), and would thus cause highly concentrated local contamination. It would really depend on exactly where the batteries were thrown overboard on how much damage each one caused. Otherwise I agree with what you're saying.

tcmart14 4y ago

There definitely are roots that can be traced to institutional problems. The case with a certain DC1 who thought being a pain would make him feel better, it is an institutional problem that someone like that was able to get to a position they were in. If someone with that kind of a personality rose up to being a DC1 and supervising the trash crew (although these kinds of duties are usually when someone is sent TAD because their division doesn't want to deal with them), that is a problem. So yea, you can boil it down to institutional problems, however it can be a little tricky because those institutional problems sometimes do not correlate directly.