Chinese doctor who tried to raise alarm on coronavirus detained and died

This just goes to show that censorship is usually wrong, even if it has some small benefits here and there (like making people feel better), because in the long run, when the information is critical, you need information to flow freely. True, this information could cause a panic, or be a false alarm, but it seems like knowing this earlier and responding accordingly would have been a better use of resources. Not only that, but if information flows freely, those other scenarios can be mitigated with _more_ freedom of speech / information.

Free speech issues aside, I don't blame the officials that did this though, because they are in a prisoners dilemma, and I'm sure something like this could and does happen in the US too. There is likely no cost to ignoring it (likely false alarm and nothing will come of it 99% of the time), but if you make a big deal and are wrong, you get punished. Not sure how you fix this one -- its like that in most organizations too. The best strategy is usually to do nothing, maybe someone else will report, and at worst, the blame is distributed to the whole group and people can say "we had no idea this was an issue".

People hesitate to report issues because of all the costs socially and to their social/career prospects. If you're a "troublemaker" you don't get selected for promotion, social engagements, leadership, etc. And usually in the "best" case your reports result in some temporary words about how "we need to change the culture", meanwhile the momentum of culture / bureaucracy / process reverts things to their normal state pretty shortly (see Snowden or virtually any whistleblower story).

Edit: wording