Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

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> The larger the institution, the less accountable every individual within that institution tends to act.

I'm reading Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier, and this is one of the big points he makes in his discussion of how trust and security balance to allow society to function.

There is a huge difference between personal morality and organizational morality, for instance. Even if every person working for Citigroup had been basically moral (in the sense that they wouldn't have committed fraud alone) this still could have happened, and probably would have.

The argument that gets repeated ad nauseum, that things like this are the fault of "a few bad apples", is just plain false. The bad apples certainly exist (especially given that our society and economy reward anti-social behaviors), but the incentive structure is the real problem. It's systemic, there's no getting around that fact.

> "Even if every person working for Citigroup had been basically moral (in the sense that they wouldn't have committed fraud alone) this still could have happened, and probably would have."

When you consider the compensation and review structure at financial institutions, it was absolutely inevitable.

Those who didn't participate, even in the tiny slice that was their domain, would have been pushed aside or replaced in favor of someone who would.

Big Business simply doesn't allow for under-performance. Even on legal/moral grounds. Those are long-term concerns in a world that measures only short-term performance.

> The argument that gets repeated ad nauseum, that things like this are the fault of "a few bad apples", is just plain false.

Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the Stanford Prison Experiment and author, more recently, of The Lucifer Effect, argues that it's not "bad apples" that spoil the barrel, but a "bad barrel" that spoils the apples.

Here's Zimbardo's TED talk on what makes people do evil:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg

Complex systems have unpredictable and often undesirable emergent properties that are not immediately obvious at design time. Engineers have always known this. That's why after running all the simulations, they still use good old-fashioned wind tunnels, for example.

TLDR: The more a company grows, the more inefficient and dysfunctional it becomes.

Try this: The more a company grows, the more efficiently dysfunctional it becomes...

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