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> It comes down to the fact that a poorly educated public and a ruling class of parasites has made it so NASA has negative room for failure. Both basically tru

by gumby 3y ago

> It comes down to the fact that a poorly educated public and a ruling class of parasites has made it so NASA has negative room for failure. Both basically true yet overdone. Fundamentally the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture. Too strong, in that it is a distraction, a spectacle, and inhibits resolution of an actual problem, if one even exists. I don't mean this just in government: it's a fundamental part of the American Weltanschauung, one oddly rarely discussed. It seems to be so fundamental that it's simply taken as a given, like the old "fish doesn't know it's wet" metaphor. FAA is a good example of an organization that implements an opposite approach: crash investigations follow a "what happened so we can address it, not punish" in air crashes, sometimes causing people to complain that "nobody was punished." But without the threat of punishment people are more willing to speak freely, so that hardware or procedures that need changing can actually change.

ordu 3y ago
I don't know about USA politics to have an opinion on the matter, so I'd rather believe you assesment. But I want to add another point of data. Or rather point of view from outside. My experience of communication and collaboration with individual Americans points to the opposite direction. They are focused on a problem solving, not on a blame assignment. I can compare with my fellow Russians, I can't play games with them, because they kill all the fun looking for someone to blame. But at the same time, if we take a look at our Russian politicians... If they even look for someone to blame, they look for a blatant scapegoat. So, I mean, it seems like a complete reverse. Probably it is a coincidence or a result of a flawed methodology, but still...
- smcin 3y ago
  The discussion here is specifically about US (political) oversight of government agencies like NASA, specifically after a failure. Not private companies, or tech, or problem-solving in general, or scenarios where positive incentives outweigh the likelihood of blame. Compare the huge public scrutiny of Space Shuttle failures vs the FAA being out-to-lunch on oversight of Boeing 737MAX for over a decade. Some people have commented that excessive scrutiny (e.g. at NASA) has resulted in changes in culture and the rise of risk-averse 'professional administrators'.
  - gumby 3y ago
    True, but my comment was intended to point out that the punitive nature of political oversight of government agencies is a consequence of a more general attitude of the public, and thus probably impossible to broadly change.
    - smcin 3y ago
      I don't think the more general US attitude of the public towards private, non-govt entities is very critical (absent any scandal/ coverup/ bribery). Here's the obvious counterexample which I didn't even think was necessary to include in my previous post: if SpaceX has quite a lot of (unmanned) launch failures that cost them (or their insurers) a lot and set back their plans for demonstrating manned launch, the general public don't care and think that's overall a net positive and cost of SpaceX making progress on its plan (as long as the debris lands at sea and doesn't cause injuries or significant pollution). If SpaceX did too much of this, it would collapse, lose its launch contracts and its investors would lose their money. Compare to Facebook/Meta's failed Connectivity division [0], Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, et al. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/meta-unplugs-connectivity-division-home-of-satellite-and-drone-internet-experiments/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/meta-unplugs-connectivity-...
panick21_ 3y ago
[flagged]
- gumby 3y ago
  > > Fundamentally the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture. > Unless its about people in cars murdering people. Sadly I disagree. Blame is almost inevitably assigned...to the victim. In NYC if you drive a truck you can flatten cyclists with impunity because the consensus is always that it was the cyclist's own fault. >> what happened so we can address it, not punish > I agree that addressing issue is first most important. But we should also hold people accountable too. What we need is for motor vehicles to stop crushing the innocent. That's what I mean when I talk about punishment as a distraction.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    A cycle is far, far easier to maneuver to avoid an accident than a truck. Some years back in Seattle, a truck driver was charged with murder because he hit a cyclist that crossed in front of him. It was established in the trial that the cyclist had darted out from between two cars, and it was impossible for the driver to have noticed, reacted, and stopped in time. He was acquitted. Around here, they painted stripes for a bike lane. Good. Then the cyclists like to ride on the stripe, and randomly weave back and forth across it. As a driver, I have to spend all my attention trying not to hit those suicidal cyclists, who never look back to see if it is clear when they drift into the car lane. It's madness. I don't understand them at all.
    - gumby 3y ago
      Well in California law cyclists have the same right to the road* as a motorists (sadly the same does not apply to the laws of physics). And if you ride in the bike lanes, as I do, you discover they are often populated with debris (unsurprising due to road camber and automotive bow wave and wake) and untrimmed branches from live bushes, which one must move leftwards in order to avoid. Many motorists act as if roads were built for cars and all others get to use them on sufferance, if at all. * Excepting controlled-access roads, i.e. freeways.
WalterBright 3y ago
If people are threatened with punishment for making mistakes, they'll hide the mistakes. I've heard of cases where a company would not fix a mistake, because by fixing it they were implicitly admitting the mistake, and would be liable in a lawsuit.
LAC-Tech 3y ago
[flagged]
- gumby 3y ago
  Really? You just have to look at how many people are locked in US prisons compared to elsewhere, and how little substantive discussion there is as to why that should be the case. When they catch a mass shooter they lock them up (or execute them) rather than take steps that might reduce the incidence.
- defrost 3y ago
  Compared to the rest of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prison_population_rates_from_World_Prison_Brief.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prison_popul... Your comment literally reads as "person from country with near highest incarceration rate globally feels that not enough people are being punished". Any thoughts on why the USofA is so punitive (compared to damn near every where else)?
  - LAC-Tech 3y ago
    Prison population by itself doesn't tell us much. You'd have to compare it against some sort of measure of crime victimisation (crime rates are always a bit flawed, because if police don't respond to crimes -> people stop calling -> no crime officially happened). At the opposite end, the lowest prison incarceration rate of any non-microstate is the Central African Republic. According to worldpopulationreview (first search engine result, happy to look at better sources if you have them), the CAR prison population per capita is a mere 2.5% of the USAs. The wikitravel article for this jurisdiction gives us this helpful warning: Most Western governments have issued explicit warnings to not travel to the Central African Republic under any circumstances. Violent crime, such as armed robbery, aggravated battery, and homicide, is extremely common. Large parts of the country are controlled by armed warlord groups who regularly kidnap, injure, and/or kill civilians. In the event of unrest, airport, land border, and road closures may occur with little or no notice. Consular services are often either extremely limited or non-existent. In short, stay away, and if you have no choice be sure to exercise war zone safety. So it's really not as simple as single statistic.
mncharity 3y ago
> the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture Fwiw, here's a related outlier. I long ago had an anthropology professor who described his thesis on a small South American fishing community culture as, AFAIR very fuzzily ... Sh-t happens wasn't a concept. Anything goes wrong, it's some individual's intentional fault. So not long-ago pacific island "let's war on the neighboring island - this was so unusual, they must have done it to us". And not even Papau's ongoing "let's gossip together to decide who here is the witch causing these notable problems". It's "everything", all the time, intentionally, by family members and coworkers and neighbors. Some fish escaped the closing group net? Stop, figure out who intentionally let them go, and... I no longer recall the "and then what". But stub your toe? Rain harms your crop? Pay the local witch doctor to find out who put the whammy on you. And pay him to whammy them back. Resulting in interpersonal relationships that, pervasively, were toxically hostile. Singularly so in his experience. An antithesis to community warm fuzzies, charity, and blameless postmortems. Exploring broader context can be fun. In addition to saying, say, "extremely corrupt", there's "more corrupt than this other, less than that other, and similar in this way, different in that way". Nifty high-dimensional spaces. Are there Ashby-ish charts for subcultures? Is principle component clustering of culture surveys available? In customer design discussions, the differences between multiple proposals create a vocabulary for discussing the space. Sometimes having a "yay, we're better than that" touchstone can be useful. Like perhaps the USA lost something valuable when the USSR folded - it seemed a helpful set of "that proposal would make us too much more like them - that's not who we are" and "they're making us look bad" arguments faded out.

by gumby 3y ago

ordu 3y ago

I don't know about USA politics to have an opinion on the matter, so I'd rather believe you assesment. But I want to add another point of data. Or rather point of view from outside. My experience of communication and collaboration with individual Americans points to the opposite direction. They are focused on a problem solving, not on a blame assignment. I can compare with my fellow Russians, I can't play games with them, because they kill all the fun looking for someone to blame. But at the same time, if we take a look at our Russian politicians... If they even look for someone to blame, they look for a blatant scapegoat. So, I mean, it seems like a complete reverse. Probably it is a coincidence or a result of a flawed methodology, but still...

smcin 3y ago
The discussion here is specifically about US (political) oversight of government agencies like NASA, specifically after a failure. Not private companies, or tech, or problem-solving in general, or scenarios where positive incentives outweigh the likelihood of blame. Compare the huge public scrutiny of Space Shuttle failures vs the FAA being out-to-lunch on oversight of Boeing 737MAX for over a decade. Some people have commented that excessive scrutiny (e.g. at NASA) has resulted in changes in culture and the rise of risk-averse 'professional administrators'.
- gumby 3y ago
  True, but my comment was intended to point out that the punitive nature of political oversight of government agencies is a consequence of a more general attitude of the public, and thus probably impossible to broadly change.
  - smcin 3y ago
    I don't think the more general US attitude of the public towards private, non-govt entities is very critical (absent any scandal/ coverup/ bribery). Here's the obvious counterexample which I didn't even think was necessary to include in my previous post: if SpaceX has quite a lot of (unmanned) launch failures that cost them (or their insurers) a lot and set back their plans for demonstrating manned launch, the general public don't care and think that's overall a net positive and cost of SpaceX making progress on its plan (as long as the debris lands at sea and doesn't cause injuries or significant pollution). If SpaceX did too much of this, it would collapse, lose its launch contracts and its investors would lose their money. Compare to Facebook/Meta's failed Connectivity division [0], Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, et al. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/meta-unplugs-connectivity-division-home-of-satellite-and-drone-internet-experiments/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/meta-unplugs-connectivity-...

panick21_ 3y ago

[flagged]

gumby 3y ago
> > Fundamentally the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture. > Unless its about people in cars murdering people. Sadly I disagree. Blame is almost inevitably assigned...to the victim. In NYC if you drive a truck you can flatten cyclists with impunity because the consensus is always that it was the cyclist's own fault. >> what happened so we can address it, not punish > I agree that addressing issue is first most important. But we should also hold people accountable too. What we need is for motor vehicles to stop crushing the innocent. That's what I mean when I talk about punishment as a distraction.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  A cycle is far, far easier to maneuver to avoid an accident than a truck. Some years back in Seattle, a truck driver was charged with murder because he hit a cyclist that crossed in front of him. It was established in the trial that the cyclist had darted out from between two cars, and it was impossible for the driver to have noticed, reacted, and stopped in time. He was acquitted. Around here, they painted stripes for a bike lane. Good. Then the cyclists like to ride on the stripe, and randomly weave back and forth across it. As a driver, I have to spend all my attention trying not to hit those suicidal cyclists, who never look back to see if it is clear when they drift into the car lane. It's madness. I don't understand them at all.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Well in California law cyclists have the same right to the road* as a motorists (sadly the same does not apply to the laws of physics). And if you ride in the bike lanes, as I do, you discover they are often populated with debris (unsurprising due to road camber and automotive bow wave and wake) and untrimmed branches from live bushes, which one must move leftwards in order to avoid. Many motorists act as if roads were built for cars and all others get to use them on sufferance, if at all. * Excepting controlled-access roads, i.e. freeways.

WalterBright 3y ago

If people are threatened with punishment for making mistakes, they'll hide the mistakes. I've heard of cases where a company would not fix a mistake, because by fixing it they were implicitly admitting the mistake, and would be liable in a lawsuit.

LAC-Tech 3y ago

[flagged]

gumby 3y ago
Really? You just have to look at how many people are locked in US prisons compared to elsewhere, and how little substantive discussion there is as to why that should be the case. When they catch a mass shooter they lock them up (or execute them) rather than take steps that might reduce the incidence.
defrost 3y ago
Compared to the rest of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prison_population_rates_from_World_Prison_Brief.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prison_popul... Your comment literally reads as "person from country with near highest incarceration rate globally feels that not enough people are being punished". Any thoughts on why the USofA is so punitive (compared to damn near every where else)?
- LAC-Tech 3y ago
  Prison population by itself doesn't tell us much. You'd have to compare it against some sort of measure of crime victimisation (crime rates are always a bit flawed, because if police don't respond to crimes -> people stop calling -> no crime officially happened). At the opposite end, the lowest prison incarceration rate of any non-microstate is the Central African Republic. According to worldpopulationreview (first search engine result, happy to look at better sources if you have them), the CAR prison population per capita is a mere 2.5% of the USAs. The wikitravel article for this jurisdiction gives us this helpful warning: Most Western governments have issued explicit warnings to not travel to the Central African Republic under any circumstances. Violent crime, such as armed robbery, aggravated battery, and homicide, is extremely common. Large parts of the country are controlled by armed warlord groups who regularly kidnap, injure, and/or kill civilians. In the event of unrest, airport, land border, and road closures may occur with little or no notice. Consular services are often either extremely limited or non-existent. In short, stay away, and if you have no choice be sure to exercise war zone safety. So it's really not as simple as single statistic.

mncharity 3y ago

> the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture Fwiw, here's a related outlier. I long ago had an anthropology professor who described his thesis on a small South American fishing community culture as, AFAIR very fuzzily ... Sh-t happens wasn't a concept. Anything goes wrong, it's some individual's intentional fault. So not long-ago pacific island "let's war on the neighboring island - this was so unusual, they must have done it to us". And not even Papau's ongoing "let's gossip together to decide who here is the witch causing these notable problems". It's "everything", all the time, intentionally, by family members and coworkers and neighbors. Some fish escaped the closing group net? Stop, figure out who intentionally let them go, and... I no longer recall the "and then what". But stub your toe? Rain harms your crop? Pay the local witch doctor to find out who put the whammy on you. And pay him to whammy them back. Resulting in interpersonal relationships that, pervasively, were toxically hostile. Singularly so in his experience. An antithesis to community warm fuzzies, charity, and blameless postmortems. Exploring broader context can be fun. In addition to saying, say, "extremely corrupt", there's "more corrupt than this other, less than that other, and similar in this way, different in that way". Nifty high-dimensional spaces. Are there Ashby-ish charts for subcultures? Is principle component clustering of culture surveys available? In customer design discussions, the differences between multiple proposals create a vocabulary for discussing the space. Sometimes having a "yay, we're better than that" touchstone can be useful. Like perhaps the USA lost something valuable when the USSR folded - it seemed a helpful set of "that proposal would make us too much more like them - that's not who we are" and "they're making us look bad" arguments faded out.