Assassination is a leaky abstraction | Hacker News Reader

Assassination is a leaky abstraction

coldwaters.substack.com

90 pointsdrc500free73 comments

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None of those articles are addressing the event from the perspective of engineering ethics, as this blog does.

Why does this article remain flagged?

Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but I suppose it's because the article is an opinion piece and there have been several major threads about the story already.

TBH, it doesn't look like it's spurring much discussion about the engineering ethics angle.

It was nuked before many people could see it.

Tendency of the median HN poster to not RTFA notwithstanding.

I’m asking you, dang, since you felt the need to make gp post, why you haven’t done anything about it.

Surely you didn’t read the article and think it covered the same ground as all the other links you provided.

I'm sorry but I don't understand the question. Can you rephrase?

What part wasn’t clear?

Expecting individuals to hold a large organisation back from doing the things its incentivised to do solely through their personal morality is never going to work, and killing one dude doesn't change that. The entity interprets integrity as damage and routes around it. Railing against "greed" is an easy way to avoid doing anything that might actually change things.

Ever wonder why only one country has these healthcare companies making such huge profits, and it's a country whose health outcomes are so much worse than its peers? It's not because their people are greedier than others, or more alienated, or individually less moral. It's because their health system is set up to reward that behaviour.

(And if you want zip code to be less of a predictive feature, maybe legalise building housing. Or let your data analysts talk honestly about race, either would work.)

If such shootings became more common then they would provide an incentive for change. As a tool for punishment they are flawed, as a tool for change they are crude but potentially effective.

Somebody is going to be appointed new CEO, and I think it's hard to deny that "if you produce too many bad health outcomes that reduces your own life expectancy" isn't a powerful motivator, no matter what the rest of the system rewards.

Policy change would be a better tool towards that end. But even the tiniest steps in that direction like Obamacare/ACA get heavy opposition.

> Somebody is going to be appointed new CEO, and I think it's hard to deny that "if you produce too many bad health outcomes that reduces your own life expectancy" isn't a powerful motivator, no matter what the rest of the system rewards.

In the unlikely event that they appointed a CEO who felt sufficiently at-risk to issue orders to improve health outcomes at the expense of profit, how much effect would those orders have? Most likely the people below him would just ignore that CEO, find ways to rationalise that he didn't mean what he was saying. If necessary the board would go around the CEO and talk to the layer below him directly.

I don't think the shooter could get a fair trial in the US because I'm not sure they could find a jury to convict them. I don't think I've seen a shooting that's been so devoid of any sympathy for the victim. Looking inward, though, I find myself more intrigued at the reaction than horrified by the killing.

The loudest opinions surface. I wouldn’t take lack of public sympathy to mean that the average American condones this type of behavior.

I am no more sympathetic than I am towards the many people killed each day in the US, but I think the assassination and the subsequent justification of it because he was a small cog in the system is abhorrent. And I hope that the majority of the country feels the same way.

Whether or not the assassination is justified, I don't think it makes sense to call him a small cog. He's the leader of one of the largest health insurance companies in America.

Literally one of the biggest cogs in this machine.

What assassination would be "justified"?

This tragedy in the same city that could potentially throw the book at a Daniel Penny...

> What assassination would be "justified"?

I think it depends where ones sympathies lay.

Assassination assumes some premeditation.

I can at least grasp killing in some sort of immediate self-defense situation.

However, assassination seems a slippery slope to some anarchy that is unlikely to please anyone this side of Hell.

As much as I hate to point it out, it’s not so simple.

He had a legally enforceable mandate to maximize shareholder value. There’s some wiggle room in how that’s accomplished, but not as much as it seems from the outside.

That does make him, much as I hate to say it, a small cog.

It’s funny to me that so often on HN we have discussions about making ethical choices in who we work for and which projects we contribute to, yet the sentiment on this CEO is honestly the most sympathetic I have seen in any comment section

He chose to take the role. He profited from it massively and did more to perpetuate it than any other single individual at the company.

If we were talking about a developer who was writing software for drone bombs wiping out families, yeah maybe that’s a cog. But still there would be no shortage of judgement on that choice of profession

It’s plainly obvious that insurance companies are not good faith actors working to help people. They lobbied for this system, they are the beneficiaries of it, and they are reaping what they’ve sown

> He had a legally enforceable mandate to maximize shareholder value.

[citation needed]

There is no legal basis for this:

* https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/09/how-t...

* https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-i...

It is simply one view that just happened to become popular during the Reagan years and has continued on:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

And while we're at it, shareholders are not the owners of a corporation:

* https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/12/who-actually-own...

But from the assassins point of view, the system is abstract (therefore unshootable) while Brian Thompson was a man (therefore shootable).

Wow, it really is a shame he was forced into this job and had no agency.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If not this dude, would’ve been someone else.

There is no legal mandate to maximize shareholder value. That’s just an excuse used to justify sociopathic behavior.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shareholder-value.asp

[flagged]

Justice is subjective. What is a crime is subjective.

Hence we have laws - an eternal, never perfect project to find an agreed definition of justice.

Abandoning centuries of precedent of law happens in some places from time to time and they’re not places you’d live by choice.

> The loudest opinions surface. I wouldn’t take lack of public sympathy to mean that the average American condones this type of behavior.

I'm not sure I agree with you there. The indifference in some quarters, celebration in others, across either side of the political divide insofar as I've seen, leads me to believe that in some cases, the well of sympathy is running dry – or, worse, has run dry.

For the jury to convict you need all jurors to agree.

From what I've seen, 99% of feedback is of "scumbag deserved it" flavor.

If the shooter is ever caught he will probably die while "resisting arrest". A trial gives him a platform, and as you say a jury of his peers is unlikely to convict him.

Stakes will be too high for that. The risk of that backfiring will be immense.

Well, there’s always the chance of claiming the shooter got away, and be lying in a ditch somewhere

> not sure they could find a jury to convict them

A trial should be about setting forth the law and the facts and letting the jury handle any relevant "leaky abstractions".

It's fairly clear that the act was illegal. If the facts conclusively show that J. Random Somebody pulled the trigger, then conviction should be the non-leaky return from the jury() function.

But, then, IANAL, and our legal system has seemed less than water-tight of late, so we'll see.

Jury nullification exists

Humans aren't computers.

This sentiment reminds me of the movie Law Abiding Citizen. Gerald Butler's role Clyde Shelton could've single-handedly avenged his family from the get-go, yet he chose to also take his vengeance on the justice system as well. Yet somehow many viewers still think that Clyde was righteous and it was a pity that Jamie Foxx's role Nick Rice didn't get punished enough.

You can exploit people for decades before they rise up and murder you.

Leaders misinterpret decades of bloodlessness as peace, and as license to exploit even harder.

But when the exploiters rig the legal system and the political system to deny people justice, eventually there will be blood.

This is how it has always been. The ancient cycles of exploitation and payback are not about to stop now.

it’s not clear what the fallout will be

Some fallout: https://www.axios.com/2024/12/05/blue-cross-blue-shield-anes...

>So when UHC’s CEO was assassinated yesterday morning, on his way to brag to his shareholders about record profits

IMO a lot of the discourse on this topic is based more on vibes that reality.

UnitedHealthCare's profits are down YoY- both in absolute #s and in terms of their operating margin. (from 6.6% down to 5.6%). But if you frame the assassination as "CEO who has reduced the degree by which his company profits from sick people", you end up with a whole different batch of theories and motives.

(note that UnitedHealthcare is a subset of UnitedHealthcare Group, so you have to dig into their filings to see UHC's numbers broken out)

What really triggers me is that private healthcare operation costs are so high in the US. Ok, 5% operating margin. So for every 100 dollars paid to private insurance, you should expect what, 80 dollars to be paid for medical expenses ? It's less than 70.

Honestly I bought into the 'private sector is more efficient' quite a bit. In healthcare this simply isn't the case. In my country, depending on the year, for every 100€ the state give to our public insurance, between 88 and 93€ go to pay for medical expenses.

Healthcare is private in name and profits only. You are required to buy their product by law, they set the amount they pay for healthcare, whether or not they will pay that amount, and they decide on a whim whether or not you need a lawyer to get what you paid for. That is not a private company.

you forgot, they don't get to set their own prices. Those are set by the State department of insurance.

Citation requested.

As well as clarity: which prices? Service provision or premiums?

Hey folks. I know this one is a touchy subject. It is in no way intended to pile on those who are gleefully mocking a murder, and I should have probably included the subtitle ("Towards Ethical Data Science").

Rather, it's an encouragement for people who are paid to build software and data systems that shape people's lives to take a moment to reflect on that impact.

HN: “you know, in reality the French Revolution was actually a bad thing. Feudalism is where it’s at”

I've never heard of a premeditated murder in broad daylight be so universally celebrated by Americans regardless of their political leanings.

Other insurance companies have already started taking down personal information about their leadership teams. I guess they're afraid of copy-cats.

But will it change anything related to their scummy business model, or will the state assert itself to maintain the status quo?

I submit that human beings are the Leaky Abstraction, and the techo-fetishing involved in reducing society to a series of spreadsheets and AI models is the Orwellian bugaboo.

In my Glorious Future of Applied Handwaving, the system would trade some economies of scale for smaller organizations with more individual interactions. This involves some mechanism alongside the almighty dollar as an organizing mechanism. I don't know what that is.

When the Leaky Abstractions happen, the flooding would be less severe.

Maybe when Musk is done with the govmint he can fix healthcare.

Well, I thought it was well written.

"Here's what assassinations taught me about B2B sales."

Is he suggesting the suspect should have targeted the data scientist not the CEO.

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