Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the OP was complaining about short-term biases from management. The entire ethical discussion is pushed way over its actual relevance (really, how big an ethical flaw is not deleting a cookie? Google will identify you anyway, cookie or not).

That said, about this:

> and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable

It looks completely backwards. Environments that fix systemic problems are overwhelmingly on the side of not blaming individuals and looking only at the system. You are probably thinking about goal misalignment problems, and yet, just going after the individuals is still counterproductive if the system won't support the ones that do the right thing.

View on HN

> > and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable

> It looks completely backwards. Environments that fix systemic problems are overwhelmingly on the side of not blaming individuals and looking only at the system.

That's a fascinating exchange. I find myself siding more with you than with braythwayt, but still uncertain because the idea is new to me. Is there a good writeup of arguments for both sides?

I don't think these two ideas are as opposed as you're implying. They're describing two different perspectives on the same process. To wit:

1. Individuals have values and ethics that they'll make a reasonable effort to comply with. Society recognizes this and rewards and punishes individuals for the ethical bent of the projects they are clearly responsible for.

2. As the size and complexity of a project grows responsibility becomes diffuse until there's no single individual to hold responsible for any given decision. Once this happens the informal, personalized ethical safeguards begin to break down.

3. Once the informal individual scale safeguards have dissolved they usually can't be rebuilt. Instead they need to be replaced with formal safeguard mechanisms that operate at the project scale.

I don't know of any good writeup on the side of blaming the individual. On the side of fixing the system, I think the canon would be to look at systems theory (at the more human centered flank, like Meadows). You can get to the same conclusion on administration theory from Deming and his following, or any of the X-safety groups, like work-safety, aviation-safety, nuclear-safety, etc.

What really confuses the discussion is that a well working system that deals with ethical failures does necessarily hold people personally accountable. But you can't fix it by focusing on the "holding people accountable" part, it never works. You have to focus on the "system" part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com