13 ms·

Accountability Sinks

• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  > Concentrating the Jews was thus crucial to the success of the genocide Oh interesting. Maybe I should be moving out to the country and not among other trans women then.
• CommenterPerson 1y ago
  All the Republican Senators and Congressmen/Women .. I am looking at you.
  • bdangubic 1y ago
    Democrats too :)
• gsf_emergency 1y ago
  Related discussion (517 pts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694 https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/unaccountability-machine https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/unaccountability-machine (A very short overview of Dan Davies' book, quoted in TFA, that came up with the term) EDIT: complementing book mentioned in that thread Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin Random House) is a good companion to this concept, covering the "accountability sink" from the other side of those constructing or overseeing systems. Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41892299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41892299
  • divan 1y ago
    Great post and discussion as well! I learned from that about two just cultures and their different views of what "accountability" even is.
    • gsf_emergency 1y ago
      >If you combine those two frameworks, you could conclude that to be accountable for something you must have the power to change it and understand what you are trying to accomplish when you do. You need both the power and the story of how that power gets used.
      • divan 1y ago
        This, and I think it gets deeper. I started reading more about history of "just culture" and it seems like historically it was the dominant culture of justice in the tribes and smaller communities. It's the _just culture_ focused on repairing the damage – for the victim and for the community – and trying to fix the reasons and integrate the offender back into life (otherwise community would end up being a bloodbath of revenge and dies out). What wasn't obvious to me is that switch from restorative justice culture to retribution justice culture happened for economic reasons. At some point of nation states formation, crime became an act of offence against the king, not the community. You didn't do wrong to the community, you "disobeyed the rule of king" and thus has to be punished. The whole "justice transaction" became a deal between an offender and the state/king, instead of community and victim and offender. Paying retribution fee became a source of income for the kingdom, incentivising this type of justice culture. Victim and community was largely left untouched by this new type of "fixing justice". Pretty dramatic change.
        • gsf_emergency 1y ago
          My eyes opened a little bit! "Sidney Dekker" & "lese majeste" or even "Wilhoit" returned nothing interesting, so that's a new open secret (if I didn't totally misunderstand, that is) Aside: does that make "The United States " a careless sovereign (monarch) in your book? -- most criminal cases are "The U.S. vs ____": not only are community/rehabilitation afterthoughts, nobody looks forward to any pleasure of a Majesty. The Judge+Jury as Middle Finger & Thumb of the Invisible Hand?
          • divan 1y ago
  • immibis 1y ago
    Heh. 6 months ago someone mentioned Deutsche Bahn and Switzerland. Deutsche Bahn is now banned from operating trains into Switzerland, by Switzerland, because they are never on time.
    • gsf_emergency 1y ago
      There's a HN discussion for that too (2 days ago), maybe you're referring to that :)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853663
• majke 1y ago
  I didn’t realize Martin is blogging again! Hurray!
• immibis 1y ago
  It's interesting we always talked about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials when talking about accountability, as if similar atrocities aren't currently happening. It's because breaking an accountability sink of people who are long dead doesn't have any impact other than the explanation itself. Breaking an accountability sink of currently living people and currently active wars is much more dangerous.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • blueflow 1y ago
    Did you imply that there is another Holocaust currently ongoing?
    • Etheryte 1y ago
      There are numerous conflicts worldwide where one side is trying to systematically destroy the other population, civilians and all. Whether they are exactly the same or how you define that is pretty secondary to that fact.
      • blueflow 1y ago
        Whatever. Since my last Wikipedia spree on that topic i feel such comparisons are highly inappropriate.
        • pyrale 1y ago
          That way of saying that the holocaust is a thing of its own, that can be compared to nothing else is simply a way of separating genocide victims into first-class and second-class victims. The only outcome would be to weaken the collective "Never again" outcry against barbary.
          • blueflow 1y ago
            From the perspective of the victims, it was not special, indeed. My "research" focused on the other perspective to learn social patterns.
• CalRobert 1y ago
  As sad as things turned out for the squirrels it’s bizarre to worry too much about 440 squirrels dying in a country with lots of meat farming…
  • scotty79 1y ago
    They even mention that the shredder was designed for newborn chicks. So something we routinely do to thousands and thousands of chickens is somehow suddenly horrible if they did it to random 440 squirrels that couldn't be accounted for.
    • vemom 1y ago
      You somehow can't apply logical statements to what we choose to kill and eat. Cultures differ on their opinions here. But at some extreme we should all be vegan.
      • scotty79 1y ago
        The logic is simple, we eat what's convenient to produce and we construct our morals around that.
        • Thorrez 1y ago
          Meat costs a lot to produce. We eat it because it tastes good, not because it's convenient.
          • aziaziazi 1y ago
            True. Habits also play an unconscious role and tradition a conscious one. To demonstrate the former: bellow two studies on cats exposed pre, peri and post natal with a specific aroma. From the first abstract: > We conclude that long-term chemosensory and dietary preferences of cats are influenced by prenatal and early (nursing) postnatal experience, supporting a natural and biologically relevant mechanism for the safe transmission of diet from mother to young. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232700921_Prenatal_and_Early_Sucking_Influences_on_Dietary_Preference_in_Newborn_Weaning_and_Young_AdultCats https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232700921_Prenatal_... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40452868_Effects_of_Pre-_and_Postnatal_Olfactogustatory_Experience_on_Early_Preferences_at_Birth_and_Dietary_Selection_at_Weaning_in_Kittens https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40452868_Effects_of... I'll add that habits and taste can change later in the life voluntary or involuntary: There's plenty of people that "learn" to like something they didn't in their youth for many reason: new cultural environment, health, curiosity...
• Tepix 1y ago
  I think this is one of the most fascinating aspects of solo non-stop around the world sailing: You have no one to blame other than yourself. It puts you into a mindset that is unique in this day and age. The sailors, when interviewed after their ordeal, also mention it a lot.
  • nicbou 1y ago
    Same with overland travel. You either caused the problem or allowed it to happen. Either way it's your job to fix it and it's the only way to keep going. It requires preparedness, flexibility and resilience. I remember many messes where I just stood there thinking to myself "alright nicbou, what did we learn today?"
    • rollcat 1y ago
      In 2012 I've spent almost the entire year hitchhiking around Europe. Mostly alone, sometimes in a small ad-hoc group that would part whenever we had to take different turns. Sometimes there is someone else to blame: a driver who dropped me off in a far worse place (like in the middle of a busy highway); a mate who almost blew all of us up when mishandling a gas cylinder; unsolicited exhibitionism; etc. Well, shit happens. Pick your stuff up and carry on.
      • vemom 1y ago
        There is no blame on holiday. Something will go wrong (how can it not?)
• roenxi 1y ago
  Another fun one is asking for a higher salary - for obvious reasons moderately sized companies have formal systems that make it logically impossible to do on an employees initiative (the boss doesn't control salaries, payroll doesn't control salaries and all the formal systems point to the boss and payroll). The real approach is that a worker has to somehow convince one of the people with serious power to overrule the default systems. But the important thing to recognise is there are always people who can overrule a given formal process and they are being held accountable to something. The issue becomes what their incentives are. In the success stories in this article (like the one where the doctor saves a bunch of people) the incentives lead to a good outcome when the formal system is discarded. In the leading ground squirrel example someone without doubt had the power to prevent the madness and didn't because their incentives led them to sit quietly in the background hidden from history's eye. Ditto the Nazi example - obviously there was someone (probably quite a few someones) who could have stopped the killing. They didn't override the system because they through it was performing to spec, and it is probably difficult to prove they were in hindsight because informal systems don't get recorded.
  • amos-burton 1y ago
    If the incentive is the culprit, then the airport employee acted out of her mind because her own survival was more important than to act human... therefore, she is biologically similar, but spiritually guided differently. she would never tell you she gave herself or sacrificed (big word) to it (big word), she never knew anything else really, she saw things through the window all along her life, but never got to really experience it, it is so inconvenient to her, she whispered. she feels more than a children of the cities, she has embodied them.
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    > the boss doesn't control salaries I would call them a supervisor then. It’s not logically impossible for any buyer to decide to pay or not pay more to a seller, it just depends how replaceable the buyer thinks the seller is, and how much they care (the buyer could be retiring with golden parachutes before shit hits the fan).
• CalRobert 1y ago
  Interestingly if you’re denied a credit card in Europe a subject access request can be very helpful for understanding why
• scotty79 1y ago
  Another major accountability sink is employment. Employee is shielded from financial responsibility for the damage he incurs while working. While he may be punished for disobeying orders or acting criminally, he's not financially responsible for the fallout (especially if he was only doing the things he was ordered to do and/or reasonable things). Doing a job is inherently risky behavior. If you are doing it in a context of financial amplifier (a company) in a regulated society that can quickly hunt you down and destroy your life if you misstep then in the absence of accountability sink protections barely anyone would be brave enough to get employed. That's also why LLC exist. To enable risk taking by promising to not hunt you to the bottom if you fail.
  • Muromec 1y ago
    >If you are doing it in a context of financial amplifier (a company) in a regulated society that can quickly hunt you down and destroy your life if you misstep Sir, it's the year 2025 of our Lord. Nobody is out there to destroy your life most of the time.
    • scotty79 1y ago
      The fact that they don't doesn't mean they can't or they wouldn't. Just reading news from USA from last 3 months should make it obviously clear.
  • hliyan 1y ago
    I would say that corporate personhood is a better example. It seems very natural to us, but I'm not sure if it's an idea other intelligent species would also independently arrive at.
    • scotty79 1y ago
      I don't see it natural at all. I think it's quite insane concept. A corporation is obviously not a person and even if you pretend it to be a person why only good things come from it for a corporation? Why isn't it sentenced to death and executed when it kills 11 people? Why corporations are allowed to own other corporations? Isn't it a slavery?
• einpoklum 1y ago
  > Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage. Notwithstanding the rest of the column, this particular example brings the following thought to mind: It could actually be argued that getting angry at the gate attendant is not a "bad people" response. Suppose that under those circumstances, the typical individual passenger would demand the gate attendant to either let them onto the flight, or compensate them reasonably on the spot, and if denied - even with a "it's not within my authority" - inform their fellow passengers, which would support the demand physically to the extent of blocking boarding, and essentially encircling the gate attendant until they yield (probably by letting the original passenger onto the plane), and if security gets involved - there would be a brawl, and people on all sides would get beaten. Now, the individual(s) would would do such a thing may well suffer for it, but in terms of the overall public - gate attendants will know that if they try to do something unacceptable, it will fail, and they will personally face great discomfort and perhaps even violence. And airports would know that such bumps result in mini-riots. So, to the gate attendant, such an order would be the equivalent of being told by the company to punch a passenger in the face; they would just not do it. And the airport would warn airlines to not do something like that, otherwise they would face higher airport fees or some other penalty. And once the company realizes, that it can't get gate attendants to bump passengers this way, it will simply not do it, or authorize decent compensation on the spot etc. Bottom line - willingness to resist, minor ability to organize, and some willingness to sacrifice for the public benefit - can dismantle some of these accountability sinks. a good "collective response" would be to deny the non-agency of the gate attendant. That is,
  • MaxikCZ 1y ago
    Still wouldn't change a thing. The gate keeper has no say into who gets let on the plane and who doesn't, they are there just to enforce the decision. The only way to get this solved is if in the executive meetings one person goes "Our processes that bumps people resulted in xxxxxx cost, that's too much". The way those costs are incurred doesn't matter, if its direct compensation or fines, but unless you can attach a price tag to it, nothing will change.
    • 1y ago
• bflesch 1y ago
  The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks. Only with a healthy dose of cynicism I can understand where he's going. While the topic of accountability sinks is quite interesting, I'm searching for the author's reflection of their own accountability. They worked at google, made a boatload of money for the advertising company and himself, and now philosophically lectures others how to detect and/or design accountability sinks.
  • queuep 1y ago
    So the author gives what, 10 examples, and one of them is about himself and his own experiences, and one of them is from a hospital. And from that you convey that the author must have some kind of ego? I don't think that's justified critique.
    • bflesch 1y ago
      The word "hero" is mentioned twice in the whole article. Once in the section before he talks about his own work, and once in the section directly following it. > As one of the commenters noted: "Amazing! The guy broke every possible rule. If he wasn't a fucking hero, he would be fired on the spot." > ** > Once, I used to work as an SRE for Gmail. SREs are people responsible for the site being up and running. If there's a problem, you get alerted and it's up to you to fix it, whatever it takes. I only know Mr. Sustrik from this one article but had to mention this because it was just a too low hanging fruit in terms of criticism.
      • pcthrowaway 1y ago
        Not to mention, he has awareness of the ways people absolved themselves of responsibility during the holocaust, but fails to take accountability for his work at a company supporting an ongoing genocide (whether or not he had any involvement with Project Lavender)
    • 1y ago
• rwmj 1y ago
  > Eventually, employees noticed a problem: The card design only allowed for 24 characters, but some applicants had names longer than that. They raised the issue with the business team. I'm looking at you, ANA Mileage Club card! 24 characters should be enough for anyone according to their database. They even have a whole page dedicated to how you should work around it (I tried, this procedure & indeed it lets you truncate your name, but then you won't be able to associate any tickets you purchase in your real name with the card). https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/amc/reference/merit/procedure/intro_invalid/ https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/amc/reference/merit/procedure/in...
  • nottorp 1y ago
    That's a .jp site. Is it 24 kanji? That should be plenty of space :)
    • rwmj 1y ago
      Yup, 24 moji :-)
• satisfice 1y ago
  I am deeply suspicious of "blameless" post mortems. I agree that we should work in ways that minimize fear. We should, to some degree, celebrate the learning we glean from our failures. But I keep seeing "blameless" being construed as lying about why something happened. It's construed in such as way that anyone can hide from their misdeeds. People screw up, and we need to hold them accountable, and THEY need to hold THEMSELVES accountable. Not necessarily with "punishment" (what does that even mean in a professional context) but perhaps atonement and retraining.
  • rollcat 1y ago
    Sometimes failure comes from inherent risks. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. You can't account for every possible factor, you'll be stuck in analysis paralysis while the world moves on. If we're speaking of a justice system in more general terms, I agree with your line of thinking. I believe that repairing the damage and reintegrating with society would be far more effective than incarceration or other forms of punishment. Fear is a seed, you reap what you sow. (Yes there are extreme cases. Still the long-term goal should be to minimise harm, not bring punishment.)
  • jldugger 1y ago
    I'm nearly wrapping up Sydney Dekker's book _Just Culture_, and Allspaw has a few pages in it. And preceding that is a section titled "blame-free is not accountability-free." Accountability under Dekker's restorative justice model means providing a complete record of what happened, so the justice system can focus on who was harmed and who needs to repair that harm. In some ways I think they can end up mirroring the typical punitive justice system, when the person who needs to repair harm matches what we would call a guilty party in other circumstances. But the idea is not to lie about what happened! It's to expand the network of causality beyond a simple thought terminating "Bob did it" so we can address the systemic problems that led to Bob doing the wrong thing. > Not necessarily with "punishment" (what does that even mean in a professional context) A few options depending on profession: 1. Demotion 2. Pay cuts or fines 3. Firing 4. Loss of certification, thus preventing this person from ever working in the field again 5. Jail time, preventing this person from even being in society for some time, perhaps forever. Dekker's book is full of examples of professionals facing all of the above consequences. If you don't think these punishments are applied to the SRE community Allspaw addressed when originally describing "blameless postmortems" then you probably want to read the all time highest upvoted post to /r/cscareerquestions, "Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job, and was told to leave, on top of this i was told by the CTO that they need to get legal involved, how screwed am i?"[1] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/accidentally_destroyed_production_database_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/a...
• svilen_dobrev 1y ago
  Here another two of Sustrik's gems.. Anti-social Punishment: https://250bpm.com/blog:132/ https://250bpm.com/blog:132/ Technocratic Plimsoll Line: https://250bpm.com/blog:176/ https://250bpm.com/blog:176/ seems lesswrong has all of them, older and newer: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/sustrik?from=post_header https://www.lesswrong.com/users/sustrik?from=post_header
• throwanem 1y ago
  I'd say he loves the sound of his own voice, but everything worthwhile here is in a blockquote. Oh well, even a poor collator has value as such.
  • dijit 1y ago
    And what value did this comment create? While we’re being unnecessarily rude, and discussing people who enjoy the sounds of their own voice and lacking substance.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • throwanem 1y ago
      "Unnecessarily?" And hon, unlike most in this dawning age of LLM slop replacing human speech, I deserve to enjoy the sound of my own voice. People tell me as much almost every day! Think of me as Wittgenstein's lion. Don't expect to be able to make sense of me.
• cheschire 1y ago
  I always remind myself when I have to go to the DMV[0] that I should plan on leaving with nothing more than another action or set of actions to take. I never enter the DMV expecting to complete a process, and the workers behind the counter always have this visible, visceral response when I DONT lose my fucking mind at their response to something. When I continue to be pleasant and understanding it’s like they suddenly come alive. It’s a depressing state of affairs because I understand exactly what they expect and why. 0: for non-Americans and for Americans from other states that may use different terms, the DMV is the department of motor vehicles in many US states and is the central place to get your drivers license, take the drivers test, register your car, get vehicle license plates, etc. Many processes that have many requirements that often are unfulfilled when people show up asking for things.
  • sails 1y ago
    Interesting distinction is deliberate vs unintentional accountability sinks. DMV sounds more like incompetence than design. Compare with airline where the system is “better” when you have no recourse.
    • mannykannot 1y ago
      Starting in four days, you will need, to board a commercial flight in the US or enter a federal government facility, either a passport, an 'enhanced' or 'real ID' driver's license, or one of a small class of alternatives. This has increased the burden on state DMVs, and any resulting deepening of the accountability sink is at least partly due to not doing anything to mitigate a predictable situation.
    • dghlsakjg 1y ago
      The DMV is frequently just a case of under resourcing. For the most part, once you get to the counter your business can be handled in a few minutes. It’s the fact that it takes a while to get to the counter that’s the issue.
    • tenacious_tuna 1y ago
      I think it's more than incompetence or accountability sinks; The DMV (and similar offices; Service {Canada, Ontario}, etc) are also the points at which the bureaucratic system of government interfaces with actual people as well. Boundary-layer components in any system are complicated because they have to distill complex input into abstractions understood by the system. I recently emigrated to Canada from the States and exchanged my US state driver's license for one in my now-home province, but there were a ton of hoops to jump through to add my US driving history to my provincial record. The process seemed to be somewhat exceptional as the supervisor for the DMV-equivalent had to guide the reps I spoke to on how to append the multiple-states-of-history that I had to offer. That's just a microcosm of what it wakes to distill the complexity of a person's life into pieces of verified information that a government can ingest. That's a lossy, complicated process that relies on both the 'customer' and the agent having a matching mutual understanding of what points of information can be agreed upon or, indeed, offered. In some cases it's not clear, either; my wife was told initially that she would have to hand over her license from two states ago to update her history, because the province's documentation showed it was still active (despite the fact that our immediately-previous state merrily punched a big VOID hole in it, and that it was expired), but when she returned after digging up her voided license they said they didn't even need to see it. That last bit was possibly 'incompetence'; possibly on the part of the Canadian agency, for not being consistent on if they needed to see the license or not, or the US states, for not being up to date on their record keeping, but again: these are complex systems tryng to maintain consistency. It's reasonable to expect noise.
• oleggromov 1y ago
  I once booked a plane ticket from my home town airport to another country. The purchase notification said something like "PVA" instead of "POV". I looked it up and turned out, the newly built airport that had this exact code was about to open. In a week or so, so I assumed that I'm indeed flying from the new one and forgot about it. The purchase was made through a booking aggregator similar to Expedia. On the day of travel I took a taxi to the new airport, which is 40 km outside the city. The taxi driver couldn't care less about where I was going. Upon arrival, there was much fewer people than I expected but I shrugged it off. At the entrance though I was asked where I was going and if I was an employee. Apparently the new airport was still closed and my fight was from the old, still functioning one. The one with the code not shown in the ticket purchase receipts. Panicking since it was only about an hour until departure, I took a taxi back to the old airport, which was a desperate 40-50 minute drive to only realize the plane had already left. I was flying abroad, with a connection the next morning, about 10 hours later. So I thought that the problem could be solved by just arriving there by any other flight, which I booked almost immediately. However, the airline representative (yes, there was a human to speak to that I could reach easily by phone) told me that a no-show for any segment of the flight invalidates all subsequent ones. There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time. I ended up buying 2 new tickets, of course more expensive and less convenient ones. This taught me an important and rather expensive lesson on why connected flights with a single airline are sometimes the worst. Funnily enough, I was bitten by this rule one more time when I didn't show to a flight in to the country due to visa issues (it was covid time) and wasn't allowed on the flight out of it because I didn't show up to the 1st flight, the flights being 1 week apart - but booked in one go. As to the previous situation, I managed to get compensated by the airline (not even the intermediary!) about a year later after posting a huge rant on Facebook and getting their attention to the situation.
  • Pamar 1y ago
    Yes, sorry for your problem but no-shows automatically invalidate everything else. If you decide to cancel part of a trip due to unexpected events, train strikes or whatever that is not directly under control of the airline itself you must contact them and make sure they will not cancel the rest (including the return flight).
• DangerousPie 1y ago
  Interesting article, but picking Johnson and Cummings's handling of Covid as a positive example is a very odd choice, given their falling out and the numerous corruption allegations and parliamentary inquiries into their actions since then.
  • MzxgckZtNqX5i 1y ago
    I 100% agree with you, but it looks like that specific, single instance is a clear example of the famous broken clock being right twice a day.
  • ninalanyon 1y ago
    Surely it is that specific example that counts. It seems perverse to dismiss one sensible decision on the grounds that the persons concerned made many other bad decisions. It's the decision that is the focus not the persons making it.
• ninalanyon 1y ago
  > Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage. I disagree, slightly. We have to expect some degree of ethical behaviour from everyone, even those who nominally have no room to manoeuvre. If everyone in such positions were to disobey unjust orders the orders would eventually have to change. Walking away stewing in rage does nothing except fill you with damaging hormones.
  • lazide 1y ago
    and enables the situation at the expense of your own health.
  • red_admiral 1y ago
    If I ever feel like writing my own "12 Rules for Life", one of them is going to be called "Don't yell at the Barista" or some version of that. You can get angry, but not at the person who would probably get fired for showing initiative. Find the people actually responsible and yell at them.
    • ninalanyon 1y ago
      Being angry is not synonymous with being abusive. Your assumption that they would be fired for showing initiative says a lot about the society that you live in. I'm glad that generally where I live we expect people to take responsibility and their managers to support them. It doesn't always work of course.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• ffsm8 1y ago
  It's only related to what he wrote but it reminded me of something that low-key annoys me whenever I hear Americans talk about the Holocaust. I know he only touches on it very slightly and indirectly raises a related point to what annoys me about most coverage about it. It's pretty simply that the people that were systematically slaughtered during that time period were classified to be Jews, Gypsies and other "undesirables", but they were first and foremost German and identified as such. Nazi Germany didn't kill "other" people, it systematically alienated groups of the population to then eradicate them, by first walling them off to make communication impossible, then spreading enough propaganda to make the average Joe no longer consider them his neighbor. Seeing the social climate all over the world change, chief among them Americas, does make me think this lesson hasn't been taken in whatsoever. The first step to atrocities is always to cut of communication between the groups, and people nowadays are actively doing that themselves now - not artificially enforced like it was back then.
  • lazide 1y ago
    At first yes, because they had control over the German Jews. It expanded of course as their control spread through conquering.
    • ffsm8 1y ago
      Absolutely, the atrocities didn't stop there. That was only the beginning. I didn't mean to insinuate that only Germans were mistreated. The sociopaths running the government in Nazi Germany were very methodical about it and forced everyone into becoming either a collaborator or victim themselves, facilitating even more atrocities as WW2 progressed
• franze 1y ago
  I'm now in a stage of my consulting career where I sometimes really get called into big organisation just to find out, that whatever they need to do is already panned out and they all want to do it! Still they call me cause ... it's a big decision and the "higher ups" (which quite often are not even part of the workshop/session then) want an external expert voice. cause the responsibility for this decision lies with them and they can not share it up or sideways, so they share the responsibility partly external. As the plan quote often (not always) is already very good I mostly end up making sure the goal is measurable in a quantitative and qualitative way, trends towards to and away from the goal are visually available and distributed , and its clear who is responsible to look and report them.
  • praptak 1y ago
    Ah yes, ass cover as a service. There's a classic article (2010) about it: https://thetech.com/2010/04/09/dubai-v130-n18 https://thetech.com/2010/04/09/dubai-v130-n18 (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257644) The difference is that while the decision has been made, it isn't necessarily very good.
    • lazide 1y ago
      Often, getting a decision (ANY decision) made is both absolutely critical, and with all the ass covering and office politics involved, nearly impossible. Even if (or sometimes especially) it’s patently obvious to everyone what the decision should be.
      • praptak 1y ago
        Yeah I guess there's a continuum between a) hiring someone impartial and not entangled politically to advise on an important decision and break the deadlock and b) paying someone to justify an obviously crappy decision while providing ass cover.
        • lazide 1y ago
• xg15 1y ago
  One example that's missing from the list is the TV series 24. A recurring plot point was that, yes, of course torture is bad and it's against the rules and we don't do it, etc etc, but it just so happens that here is such an exceptional, unprecedented, deeply urgent emergency situation where we need to have the information now or horrible things will happen, we need the hero who breaks the rules and goes on torturing anyway. [1] Fast-forward a few years and you find there were in fact many such "heroes" in reality - in Abu Ghraib and in the Black Sites - and the situation weren't exceptional at all. So accountability sinks can also be used as calculated ways to undermine your own ostensible ethical guardrails. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/24-jack-bauer-torture-donald-trump https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/24-jack...
  • euroderf 1y ago
    Wasn't 24 cited by Cheney when he was defending USA-as-torturer ?
    • dghlsakjg 1y ago
      Antonio Scalia name dropped Jack Bauer.
      • euroderf 1y ago
        That shows you the true depth of his legal thinking. Good riddance.
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" comes to mind here.
    • im3w1l 1y ago
      Another perspective is that it's a clever way of asking for consent. Like a trial balloon, except not even carried out for real. You get to see if the public approves of the character or not, and then you decide how to proceed with that information.
• paganel 1y ago
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  • npteljes 1y ago
    1. Not specific to the Dutch at all. Worldwide practice. 2. These are also human traits! Maybe not so much humane traits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
    • paganel 1y ago
      > Worldwide practice. For sure we don't do that sociopathic thing here in Romania. Ok, I get it, the regulations were set in stone, but after shredding (again, what the flying fuck?!?!) the first animal hasn't any of those Dutch employees just stopped and ask themselves: "What the hell are we doing here?". It certainly explains Anne Frank, after all she was violating the regulations that were in place back then in that desolate and sad country. > 2. These are also human traits! Maybe not so much humane traits. We're talking about mammals here. Not that what happens with chicks is the correct way to do it, and God knows we deserve everything that comes our way as a species for doing that, but there are degrees in all this madness.
      • npteljes 1y ago
        Dug around a little, found this map: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hbmivg/which_countries_have_banned_chick_culling_2023/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hbmivg/which_count... So at least in 2023, no bans were in place in Romania for this practice. I'm not entirely sure why it makes sense to distinguish between nations, with regards to questionable practices. A nation is large, with many different people in it. So, there will be many on each "degree of madness" as you call it. Over the course of a long history and a numerous population, you will every bad practice that you can think of, and then some. This has nothing to do with nation - people themselves are like this, everywhere. In fact, I think that it's very dangerous to put it like that, to distance oneself so much from the horrific acts. I believe that the capability to turn on the chick shredding machine exists between you and me just as much as they do in the people who currently operate these machines. Bad acts are way easier than they seem, and, depending on circumstances of course, it takes a lot of resolution and work to build a kind and wholesome life.
• TeMPOraL 1y ago
  My go-to example of a whole mesh of "accountability sinks" is... cybersecurity. In the real world, this field is really not about the tech and math and crypto - almost all of it is about distributing and dispersing liability through contractual means. That's why you install endpoint security tools. That's why you're forced to fulfill all kinds of requirements, some of them nonsensical or counterproductive, but necessary to check boxes on a compliance checklist. That's why you have external auditors come to check whether you really check those boxes. It's all that so, when something happens - because something will eventually happen - you can point back to all these measures, and say: "we've implemented all best practices, contracted out the hard parts to world-renowned experts, and had third party audits to verify that - there was nothing more we could do, therefore it's not our fault". With that in mind, look at the world from the perspective of some corporations, B2B companies selling to those corporations, other suppliers, etc.; notice how e.g. smaller companies are forced to adhere to certain standards of practice to even be considered by the larger ones, etc. It all creates a mesh, through which liability for anything is dispersed, so that ultimately no one is to blame, everyone provably did their best, and the only thing that happens is that some corporate insurance policies get liquidated, and affected customers get a complimentary free credit check or some other nonsense. I'm not even saying this is bad, per se - there are plenty of situations where discharging all liability through insurance is the best thing to do; see e.g. how maritime shipping handles accidents at sea. It's just that understanding this explains a lot of paradoxes of cybersecurity as a field. It all makes much more sense when you realize it's primarily about liability management, not about hat-wearing hackers fighting other hackers with differently colored hats.
  • chrisweekly 1y ago
    +1 Insightful Thank you for sharing this really illuminating take. I spend an unreasonable amount of time dealing with software security, and you've put things in a light where it makes a bit more sense.
  • diognesofsinope 1y ago
    > "we've implemented all best practices, contracted out the hard parts to world-renowned experts, and had third party audits to verify that - there was nothing more we could do, therefore it's not our fault" The amount of (useless) processes/systems at banks I've seen in my career that boil down to this is incredible, e.g. hundreds of millions spent on call center tech for authentication that might do nothing, but the vendor is "industry-leading" and "best in-class". > It's just that understanding this explains a lot of paradoxes of cybersecurity as a field. It all makes much more sense when you realize it's primarily about liability management, not about hat-wearing hackers fighting other hackers with differently colored hats. Bingo. The same situation for most risk departments at banks or healthcare fraud and insurance companies. I thought risk at a bank was going to be savvy quants, but it's literally lawyers/compliance/box-checking marketing themselves as more sophisticated than they are. Like the KYC review for products never actually follow up and check if the KYC process in the new products works. There's no analytics, tracking, etc. until audit/regulators come in an ask, "our best-in-class vendor handles this". All the systems are implemented incorrectly, but it doesn't matter because the system is built by a vendor and implemented by consultants, and they hold the liability (they don't, but it will take ~5 years in court to get to that point). Beginning to understand what "bureaucracy" mechanically is.
• deleted 1y ago
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• red_admiral 1y ago
  > Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage. > You ask to speak to someone who can do something about it, but you're told that's not company policy. People somewhere in between realise that the point of the gate attendant (or Level 1 tech support person) is to shield management from customers, so you have to outflank the shield. Being yelled at by a customer is bad for the Level 1 support person, although there's usually a policy in place for phone support that you can hang up if the customer is getting aggressive. What's much worse is saying to management "hey here's something you might want to look at" and being super yelled at by their boss for not doing their duty of keeping the customer away from the higher-ups. That kind of thing can get you fired. But you can hack the system in many ways. The point is to find someone higher up without going through the person who's not allowed to help you, and without blaming them for doing their job. Some possibilities: find the higher-ups on linkedin, speak to a company rep or executive personally at an event if your professional circles overlap, send a printed physical letter to someone in control, and so on. Something I've seen work many times: if you're a student, find out about the university's management structure and ask for a personal meeting with the Dean of X of whoever sits above the department admin person who's assignment is "we've taken this decision, now make the students happy with it". A dozen students asking to personally speak with the Dean or President lets them know something's up and the shield was ineffective. Since there's usally some kind of statement of values about how the "student experience" is central to everything they do (read: "students are paying customers"), they can't just turn you away.
• Thorrez 1y ago
  > And it turns out that the German soldiers faced surprisingly mild consequences for disobeying unlawful orders. Huh. Franz Jägerstätter was executed for refusing to fight in the war.
  • hamandcheese 1y ago
    Franz Jägerstätter was not a soldier.
    • Thorrez 1y ago
      >Drafted for the first time on 17 June 1940, Jägerstätter, aged 33, was again conscripted into the German Wehrmacht in October and completed his training at the Enns garrison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_J%C3%A4gerst%C3%A4tter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_J%C3%A4gerst%C3%A4tter That kind of sounds like he was a soldier to me. Or trained to be one.
  • the_af 1y ago
    There are many documented and studied cases where orders to carry out massacres which were disobeyed carried no harm to the German who refused. Mostly demotion or transfer to a different area, but no execution or jail time. Sometimes not even that. I'm talking about not taking part in massacres (e.g. shooting unarmed women and children, locking people in a barn and setting it on fire, etc), not about refusing to fight, cowardice, aiding the enemy or actual treason.
• spoonsort 1y ago
  Ah, I love when I'm a software engineer sitting for coffee in the morning, and I open up my tech newspaper to read some extremely overly verbose way of explaining to me like I was just born that yelling at floor staff doesn't change anything (this is actually not a product of modern society, you could yell at a soldier fighting against you and that also won't change anything). Had to stop after that second massive quote. Seriously, what? I thought this was going to be about managing the 1000 compliance settings in Azure and how that sucks.
• mykowebhn 1y ago
  Does Kafka, the writer[1], come to mind for anyone? [1] I dislike that I have to specify. I wish there were still only one common reference for this name.
  • mtndew4brkfst 1y ago
    So why not elaborate as "Franz Kafka" when you mean the author? It can only clarify and it just takes 6 more characters. People who know both won't be bothered, and people who know neither will have a better time looking up the context.
    • layer8 1y ago
      GP would just have put the footnote on "Franz" rather than on "the writer" then (and may have had to look up Kafka's first name). I don’t think 6 vs. 12 characters makes that much of a difference.
• canterburry 1y ago
  The reasons we suffer these accountability challenges are often rooted in that anyone holding someone else accountable, may experience negative consequences to self...and those are often estimated as too high to do "the right thing". If the governing part at the time of the Nazi trials actually held each and every person involved accountable, would they win the next election? If a company holds their employees to the actual standards laid out by their policies or guidelines, what would attrition look like? Would they immediately be short staffed critial roles? Would they loose a key employee at a very inconventient time? These are the real reasons preventing us from holding people accountable.
• markus_zhang 1y ago
  The TV series Yes Minster and Yes Prime Minister have a lot to say about accountability in the governments.
• melvinmelih 1y ago
  According to Dutch law, you lose your Dutch citizenship if you accept another nationality. The Dutch embassies (who are responsible for renewing Dutch passports abroad) are well aware of this law and have processes in place to refuse a passport renewal if you can’t provide proof of temporary residence in the country you reside in. The local institutions however, don’t have these processes in place and are generally not aware of this law because it only happens to a tiny little percentage of the population. And nobody updates the national registry with your new nationality because that’s the responsibility of local municipalities, not the Department of Foreign Affairs. So if you decide to simply renew your passport in the Netherlands instead of abroad, they’ll just give you a new passport because you’re still registered as a Dutch citizen at the local level and they don’t have a process in place to check your foreign nationality. Don’t ask me how I know :) It is one of the few accountability sinks that doesn’t affect me negatively.
  • apexalpha 1y ago
    There is also a fun - legal - bypass to this. The Dutch law doesn't say you 'can't have a second passport'. It only says: 'you can't have a second passport at the time you get your Dutch one'. So countries like the UK allow their citizens to 'renounce' their UK citizenship, get a Dutch one, then get their UK one 'back'.
• begueradj 1y ago
  >The SREs were accountable to the higher ups for the service being up. But other than that they are not expected to follow any prescribed process while dealing with the outages. That's because hard work and being serious about your tasks do not get you promoted.
• vishnugupta 1y ago
  David Graeber has written a really good book about this exact topic and one that I highly recommend. He explores why and how bureaucracy crept up on us. “ The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules
• Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
  The KLM squirrel problem is arguably the opposite problem as all the other examples. It would have been a simple matter to call up KLM's corporate counsel and have them figure out how to both comply with the government's order and the country's animal welfare laws. So really a case of not enough bureaucracy rather than too much.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I have a feeling that AI will be used to replace the folks that might get squeamish. If I understand it correctly, that's what United Healthcare was doing, that got people so mad at the guy that was shot. He brought in "AI Denial Bots," so the company could knowingly cause the death of their customers, without having any "soft" humans in the process.
• srameshc 1y ago
  The moment I saw 250bpm, my mind took me to ZeroMQ and indeed it was Martin. Then ofcourse Pieter Hintjens came to my thoughts next. I just loved ZeroMQ but I don't use it anymore. Good to find Martin's blog and a great writeup.
• belter 1y ago
  Some of the seminal works on accountability as applied to systems and particularly the business world, are the works from Gerald M. Weinberg. "Are Your Lights On?" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1044831.Are_Your_Lights_On_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1044831.Are_Your_Lights_... "The Secrets of Consulting" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/566213.The_Secrets_of_Consulting https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/566213.The_Secrets_of_Co... "More Secrets of Consulting" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714345.More_Secrets_of_Consulting https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714345.More_Secrets_of_C...
• hliyan 1y ago
  A few things came to mind as I read this. 1) About 8 years ago I was gifted a copy of Ray Dalio's Principles. Being a process aficionado who thought the way to prevent bureaucracy was to ground process in principles, I was very excited. But halfway through I gave up. All the experience, the observations, the case studies that had led Dalio to each insight, had been lost in the distillation process. The reader was only getting a Plato's Cave version. I used to love writing spec-like process docs with lots of "shoulds" and "mays" for my teams, but now I largely write examples. 2) I live in a Commonwealth country, and as I understand (IANAL), common law, or judge made law, plays a larger role in the justice system here than in the US, where the letter of the law seem to matter more. I used to think the US system superior (less arbitrary), but now I'm not sure. Case law seems to provide a great deal of context that no statute could ever hope to codify in writing. It also carries the weight of history, and therefore is harder to abruptly change (for better or for worse). 3) Are human beings actually accountability sinks? This is only possible if they are causal originators, or in Aristotlean terms, "prime movers", or have pure agency, or are causa sui. But the question is, once we subtract environment (e.g. good parenting / bad parenting) and genetics (e.g. empathy, propensity toward anger), how much agency is actually left? Is it correct for our legal and ethical systems to terminate the chain of causality at the nearest human being?
  • FabHK 1y ago
    2) The US is considered a common law jurisdiction.
• jccodez 1y ago
  i came to search for a word: advocate. void.
• draw_down 1y ago
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• t_luke 1y ago
  The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible. The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.
  • steveBK123 1y ago
    Yes unfortunately I've observed this in some support systems. The best way is to thread the needle between being extremely personally polite to the other human on the line, but going through the required machinations on their runbook to trigger an escalation. That is - you don't really have to behave unpleasant (raise voice, swear, be impolite, threaten) but you should just refuse to get off the line, demand escalation, and importantly emphasize with their predicament in needing to escalate you. Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue". I had a cellphone provider send me a $3000 bill because someone apparently was able to open 5 lines & new devices in my name/address. I went through the first few steps of their runbook including going to police department, getting report filed, and providing them the report number. They then tried to demand further work from me and I escalated. At that point I turned it around - what evidence do you have that I opened this line. Show me the store security footage of me buying the phones, show me the scan of my drivers license, show me my social security number? Tim, are you saying I can just go to the store with your name & address and open 5 lines in your name? Being able to point out the asymmetry of evidence, unreasonableness of their demands, and putting the support staff in my shoes.. they relented and cleared the case.
    • selfselfgo 1y ago
      I ask for something, when they say they can’t do that. I say the magic words “Maybe your manager can do it?” You just don’t accept the possibility of your request not being fulfilled, say they are contractually obliged to do, even if you’re not sure, if all else fails reverse the charges on your card. Threatening small claims court works well. I now do that on the on the second email, do I look like a fool? Yes. Do I have a lot of time to investigate your platform's org structure and capabilities when I have dozens of companies like this I deal with daily? No.
• t_luke 1y ago
  The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible. The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave *as unpleasantly as possible* — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.
• 1dom 1y ago
  I read most of this agreeing with everything the author was saying, sometimes in a "I already thought that" but often in a "huh, that's a really cool insight." I quite like the style too. As a Brit though, I was completely blindsided by the inclusion of Dom Cummings. I'd forgotten he existed. Seeing his and Boris' attitude to PPE provision discussed in a positive light without any mention of the associated scandal[1] made me a bit uncomfortable. Without getting too political, they claimed to have solved a problem, but whether or not it was a justifiable, sensible or legitimate solution is probably going to be debated for decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_regarding_COVID-19_contracts_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_regarding_COVID-...
  • biimugan 1y ago
    In an American context, this part also struck me: >> We did that. But only the Prime Minister could actually cut through all the bureaucracy and say, Ignore these EU rules on Blah. Ignore treasury guidance on Blah. Ignore this. Ignore that. “I am personally saying do this and I will accept full legal responsibility for everything.” > By taking over responsibility, Johnson loosened the accountability of the civil servants and allowed them to actually solve the problem instead of being stuck following the rigid formal process. Of course this also can have pretty severe negative consequences. In the U.S., thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling, the president has immunity from criminal prosecution under certain (yet to be fully determined) circumstances. If the president then "takes over the responsibility" for obviously illegal actions, and is immune from prosecution for those actions, you now have a civil service unburdened by any responsibility to follow the law. And there are some 3 million odd workers in the U.S. federal government. That the conservatives on the Supreme Court did not consider this danger, especially in light of who occupies the office, is still astounding to me.
    • BlueTemplar 1y ago
      The problem in your case is the immunity bit, not the ability to cut through red tape if the situation is dire enough - which is like half of the job of the president (or similar post) !
• tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
  When dealing with companies, small claims court can be an amazing tool to fix the "nobody is responsible so you hit a wall" issue. The court sends a letter to the company, and either the company figures out who is responsible for dealing with it, or whatever process for collecting unpaid judgements eventually deals with the company (e.g. the famous "sheriff comes to repo the bank's furniture" example). For companies, this is also fine, because in most cases the built-in processes work well enough, and in others people just give up, that handling the escalations through their legal department is manageable. Unfortunately, this approach only helps for the subset of cases where the issue is monetary and/or can wait (and only if it happened in a country with a working small claims system).
• hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
  I find some startup leaders really struggle with this if they come from a Big Corp environment. If you're a CTO or VP or Director of Engineering for like 20 people, you're actually going to have to decide things. Yes at your previous roles you could follow a flow chart or whatever but here you have to actually take accountability. Watch them tap dance trying to avoid committing to anything.
• EZ-E 1y ago
  > The card design only allowed for 24 characters, but some applicants had names longer than that. They raised the issue with the business team. > The answer they've got was that since only a tiny percentage of people have names that long, rather than redesigning the card, those applications would simply be rejected. Long names are a pain. This happened to me when I tried to open a bank account in Vietnam. Similarly bank tellers in China were always puzzled and needed to call supervisors when having to enter the information. Also airport auto gates frequently fail for me, and systems that want me to enter your full name in a form will reject my input more often than not. When I'm asked to sign my full name with my signature, it hardly fits and I need to write in tiny letters. If I ever have children I'll name then with something short, with no special characters. Something like Tim, Kim, Leo... Otherwise they will always end up the edge case.
• ayus09 1y ago
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• titzer 1y ago
  > Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself. Welcome to scale. Every business that wants to grow faces this, and those that grow exponentially face this way before they could ever have established a company culture of treating people like humans, which only comes with years of face-to-face interactions, sometimes that don't go so well. Customers sometimes disappointed and you have to make it up to them; when they do, they feel valued. But in today's economy means you can endlessly screw customers, and as long as your business/your userbase/the sector keeps appearing to grow before your exit, giving a shit is an active impediment to that sweet sweet millionaire payoff in the end.
• GenshoTikamura 1y ago
  The pyramid on the dollar bill is built of human bricks which believe that they are free from repercussions of their actions under orders from above. But real karma is much more of a bitch than even HN moderation
• yusina 1y ago
  The squirrel example sounds terrible, but people don't realize the danger that moving pathogen-carrying specimen across ecosystems poses. Introducing a disease into your local environment can have devastating consquences for wildlife or farming or both. Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. There are many such examples and similar examples exist for wild ecosystems. So, while it may seem cruel to kill a few hundred squirrels, the precaution is justified. The "guilt", if there is any, is with whoever didn't ensure all the paperwork is in order.
  • ethbr1 1y ago
    The acute guilt levied wasn't about following orders and exterminating the ground squirrels... ... but using an industrial shredder to do it. (on 440 of them) For reference, this is an industrial shredder: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I15kCJyl6po https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I15kCJyl6po Anyone who did that to a live animal deserves to be in prison, orders or no. There are innumerable compassionate, humane ways to kill animals, if it's necessary.
    • yusina 1y ago
      I suppose you are vegetarian? Cause the amount of suffering that the majority of animals have endure which are killed for meat is on a similar level. (Transport to slaughterhouse and subsequent death by suffocation or boiling, depending on species.) Or rather, vegan? Since average dairy cow or hen endures quite some suffering over their whole life too. In addition to then experiencing a similar death to what animals mainly used for meat production endure. This is meant to point out that the shredder is a terrible machine, buy not categorically worse than how the typical production animal is treated at some point of their conscious life. (To clarify, I'm personally neither vegan nor vegetarian so am not trying to elevate myself morally above you.)
      • ethbr1 1y ago
        Spare me the whatabout- and no-true-scotsman- isms. People in this position had a choice: they chose a terrible option. There weren't economies of scale. There weren't labor cost concerns. There weren't quotas. At minimum, someone could have researched how slaughterhouses stun prior the euthanasia.
• OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  Also... there was this discussion several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301 Both that item and this item add the unique perspectives of the authors, but both are about issues raised by Dan Davies' Unaccountability Machine. So if you like this thread, you might like that thread.
  • aaviator42 1y ago
    The link you shared is to this thread
• zbentley 1y ago
  Another terrific write up on this subject is Jen Pahlka (cited in the article)’s essay on the “cascade of rigidity”.
• cckolon 1y ago
  Reminds me of a Rickover quote: "If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
• sillysaurusx 1y ago
  I don’t see anyone mentioning it, so: I was disappointed that an otherwise interesting post was turned political. > This is why even the well-off feel anxious and restless. We may have democracy by name, but if the systems we interact with, be it the state or private companies, surrender accountability to the desiccated, inhuman processes and give us no recourse, then the democracy is just a hollow concept with no inner meaning. > You can't steer your own life anymore. The pursuit of happiness is dead. Even your past achievements can be taken away from you by some faceless process. And when that happens, there’s no recourse. The future, in this light, begins to feel less hopeful and more ominous. > It’s eerie how much of today’s political unrest begins to make sense through this lens. No, your past achievements aren’t taken away from you. When you’re wronged, you almost always have recourse, up to and including making a big stink on social media. Private companies aren’t meant to be political democracies. They’re in fact almost explicitly designed to be authoritarian, because it works well. You don’t suddenly live in a not-democracy just because the companies have a CEO and middle managers that set up processes. I wish the rest of the post wasn’t called into question by this hyperbole, but it is. It makes some interesting points, but ultimately it feeds into a natural desire to be pessimistic. Which means it’s entertainment rather than an analysis.
  • cbsmith 1y ago
    There's also the nice sidestepping of the whole issue of human judgement comes with the baggage of ignorance and prejudice. Yes, the article acknowledges that processes can be largely beneficial, but it focuses on the horrors of the processes, while glossing over the horrors of NOT having the processes.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    In the ideal world, each private company is authoritarian, but there are many competing for your money, and so you get to choose - which effectively approximates something like a democracy. In the world we actually live in, you often have at most 2-3 companies to choose from, with exact same policies. And if this is something that you actually need, then you're effectively forced into their bullshit.
• CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
  In my experience, the credit card example is _usually_ solved in a practical way which is still somewhat bad, but allows the person to at least get a card: They abbreviate one or both names in some way for the card. As crappy as the system with its max length for people's names, it's common to allow first initial + surname. It also works very badly for non ASCII names - to my understanding, I _think_ people in East Asia just have to use romanisations if they want to have a Mastercard. This all sucks, but it's a bit more than "the card design" - it's quite fundamentally baked in to how the whole system works. There aren't a lot of systems out there which are based on more aged and legacy technology than card networks.
• dkbrk 1y ago
  The discussion near the end about how leadership taking responsibility can beneficially relieve accountability reminded me of the story of the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) [0]. [1]: > When NTDS was eventually acclaimed not only a success, but also one of the most successful projects in the Navy; it amazed people. Especially because it had stayed within budget and schedule. A number of studies were commissioned to analyze the NTDS project to find why it had been so successful in spite of the odds against it. Sometimes it seems there was as much money spent on studying NTDS than was spent on NTDS development. [2]: > ...the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations authorized development of the Naval tactical Data System in April 1956, and assigned the Bureau of Ships as lead developing agency. The Bureau, in turn, assigned Commander Irvin McNally as NTDS project “coordinator” with Cdr. Edward Svendsen as his assistant. Over a period of two years the coordinating office would evolve to one of the Navy’s first true project offices having complete technical, management, and funds control over all life cycle aspects of the Naval Tactical Data System including research and development, production procurement, shipboard installation, lifetime maintenance and system improvement. [1]: The Freedom to Fail: McNally and Svendsen had an agreement with their seniors in the Bureau of Ships and in OPNAV that, if they wanted them to do in five years what normally took 14, they would have to forego the time consuming rounds of formal project reviews and just let them keep on working. This was reasonable because the two commanders were the ones who had defined the the new system and they knew better than any senior reviewing official whether they were on the right track or not. It was agreed, when the project officers needed help, they would ask for it, otherwise the seniors would stand clear and settle for informal progress briefings. The key take-away is that the NTDS was set up as a siloed project office with Commanders McNally and Svendsen having responsibility for the ultimate success of the project, but other than that being completely unaccountable. There were many other things the NTDS project did well, but I believe that fundamental aspect of its organization was the critical necessary condition for its success. Lack of accountability can be bad, in other circumstances it can be useful, but diffusion of responsibility is always the enemy. How many trillions of dollars are wasted on projects that go overbudget, get delayed and/or ultimately fail, and to what extent could that pernicious trend be remedied if such projects were led from inception to completion by one or two people with responsibility for its ultimate success who shield the project from accountability? [0]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_Tell_Me_What_to_DO_-_The_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System,_NTDS https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_T... [1]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Legacy_of_NTDS_-_Chapter_9_of_the_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System#Against_All_Odds https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Legacy_of_NTDS_-_Chapter_9_of_th... [2]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Building_the_U.S._Navy%27s_First_Seagoing_Digital_System_-_Chapter_4_of_the_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Building_the_U.S._Navy%27s_First...
• bgnn 1y ago
  This reminded me of my favorite David Greaber book: The utopia of rules (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules). Greaber, if I remember right, argues that modern bureaucracy started with efficient means of communication. He squares the Deutsche Post as the milestone, as they made the whole population available to be controlled. Now the state could send them letters, count them, enlist them in the military etc.. It's a brilliant observation: communication technology is the main tool of the bureaucracy. The tangent he takes fron there is even more brilliant: we have been heavily focusing and improving the communication tech (telephone, fax, tv, radio, internet, social media) but not necessarily the tech to reduce thr burden of work for the masses (robots!). If you would ask someone 100 years ago how the future would look like, people would almost invariably say they would need to work less in the future, abd at some point they invariably expected to have robots do all the work. Yet, all we got is smartphones that watch every movement of us, makes us available to the employer anywhere and anytime, hence more means to control us by state or, exceedingly, private bureaucracies. There's a reason why AI boom is happening, as this is the next tech on the bureaucracy tree. This being said, none of these tech are bad by themselves. It is the shape they took and the way they are used in contemporary society. To tie with the OP: we have communication tools available to us that is billions of times more efficient and effective yet the customer service, or any interaction with any big corporation (as a customer or employee) or state got so much worse and impersonal. Impersonal as in, individual cases do not exist anymore, only policies. One could have expected to escalate a claim back in late 19th century by just writing letters and eventually get to someone, or even just show up at the offices of a company and get their problem resolved (this is still the case in developing countries). Can we expect this now?
  • gavmor 1y ago
    More reachable, more accountable, and more surveilled by whom? And can we flip the relationship, creating dashboards or whatever from which agentic systems reach, hold to account, and surveille right back? I'm thinking pro-active agents that escalate for you, sinking their teeth into interactions with large organizations like a dog with a bone.
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• thomastjeffery 1y ago
  This is the same reason that computers suck. Every program you ever run will precisely follow the same set of rules, because it is those rules. There's a missing piece that no one has really managed to implement on computers: backstory. The reason why a program's rules are written is much more important than the rules themselves, yet we haven't found any way to write the reason why. The most important feature of backstory is that it's dynamic. The meaning of a story can be completely changed by simply replacing its backstory. Whether it's a computer program or a societal organization, a decided system must be ignorant to its backstory. There is no place in a decided system to implement context. It turns out that this is a core feature of computable systems: they are context-free. --- I've been working on a way to change this, but it's such an abstract idea, it's been hard to actually find (and choose) where to get started.
• ungreased0675 1y ago
  Generalizing here, but it’s a sign of a bad process when it’s thrown out in an emergency. Crisis is when well-thought out, tested procedures should be used, at least as a starting point.
• jll29 1y ago
  You can't get a credit card because your name is too long? You can't pass immigrations because you don't have a last name? The future is not made for you, because progammers and designers didn't get requirements that match the diversity of this beautiful world. It remindes me how someone I know often makes complicated food orders in restaurants (modfying or replacing items on the menu), and then they get disappointed or complain because their wishes are forgotten or screwed up. I never make changes to a menu item, because I assume they are unable to accommodate me (either due to stress, lack of intelligence/memory, bad process e.g. not writing down customers' orders etc.). As a result, I get disappointed less often on average - make your oder "compatible" with the realities of this world to avoid disappointment and stress. There is actually an official procedure for U.S. Immigrations dealing with people who have names that cannot be split meaningfully into first/last names, e.g. some people from India. Assume your name is "Maussam", then you are permitted and expected to fill in that string in BOTH fields, first name and last/family name, when booking a flight or applying for visa. (A similar hack could be devised for names that are "too long".) Overall, these examples are reminiscent of the movie Brazil (1985), which is about a dystopian future in which a plumber that helps people fix their toilets gets hunted as a terrorist because he didn't fill in the right form. My theory is the world has been gradually converging towards the absurd state parodied in that movie. Airlines are not the only ones that get less and less accountable. We should stop spending our money with companies that communicate with us using email spam services the address of which begins with noreply@fubar.com. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985)
• mschuster91 1y ago
  > The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself. Welcome to modern day customer support. Phone or email agents have zero agency and their jobs are more often than not outsourced to some ultra low wage country... the only ones with actual authority tend to be C-level executive assistants and social media teams because a bad experience gone viral can actually threaten a massive financial impact.
• alganet 1y ago
  That is some Tetsuo level bullshit. Did you already engulfed precious North American spirit in the process, thus, killing it by suffocating it in nonsensical debate? Let us know when that happens so we can wake up Akira.
• zamalek 1y ago
  > If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the "wrong" thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment. Not only this. I had a particularly toxic manager many years ago and during some major disaster he was fuming around the office demanding to know who was responsible. We had to spend time determining that instead of how to fix the issue. Someone might have been responsible for initiating the disaster, but he was responsible for extending it (substantially).
• southernplaces7 1y ago
  >faced with the paperwork issue, airport staff threw all 440 squirrels into an industrial shredder. Has nobody commented on the sheer macabre bloodbath that must have ensued, or that some random airport staffer were willing to carry it out right to the end, for 440 chunky, cute, furry marmots? That's some psychotically serious.. uh, dedication to job duties.