I happen to agree that labeling them as villains wouldn’t have been helpful to this story, but they didn’t do that.
> It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.
There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.
This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.
Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.
Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed. The root is then bad hiring decision and bad management of problematic people. You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.
In theory maybe, but in my experience the blameless postmortem culture gets taken to such an extreme that even when one person is consistently, undeniably to blame for causing problems we have to spend years pretending it’s a system failure instead. I think engineers like the idea that you can engineer enough rules, policies, and guardrails that it’s impossible to do anything but the right thing.
This can create a feedback loop where the bad players realize they can get away with a lot because if they get caught they just blame the system for letting them do the bad thing. It can also foster an environment where it’s expected that anything that is allowed to happen is implicitly okay to do, because the blameless postmortem culture assigns blame on the faceless system rather than the individuals doing the actions.
I think there are too many people that actually like "blaming someone else" and that causes issues besides software development.
If one party decides that they don’t want to address a material error, then they’re not acting in good faith. At that point we don’t use blameless procedures anymore, we use accountability procedures, and we usually exclude the recalcitrant people from the remediation process, because they’ve shown bad faith.
This is just a proxy for "the person is bad" then. There's no need to invoke a system. Who can possibly trace back all the things that could or couldn't have been spotted at interview stage or in probation? Who cares, when the end result is "fire the person" or, probably, "promote the person".
Your customers would prefer to have the enterprise doing stuff rather than hiring and firing.
Not necessarily, although certainly people sometimes fall into that trap. When dealing with a system you need to fix the system. Ejecting a single problematic person doesn't fix the underlying problem - how did that person get in the door in the first place? If they weren't problematic when they arrived, does that mean there were corrosive elements in the environment that led to the change?
When a person who is a cog within a larger machine fails that is more or less by definition also an instance of the system failing.
Of course individual intent is also important. If Joe dropped the production database intentionally then in addition to asking "how the hell did someone like him end up in this role in the first place" you will also want to eject him from the organization (or at least from that role). But focusing on individual intent is going to cloud the process and the systemic fix is much more important than any individual one.
There's also a (meta) systemic angle to the above. Not everyone involved in carrying out the process will be equally mature, objective, and deliberate (by which I mean that unfortunately any organization is likely to contain at least a few fairly toxic people). If people jump to conclusions or go on a witch hunt that can constitute a serious systemic dysfunction in and of itself. Rigidly adhering to a blameless procedure is a way to guard against that while still working towards the necessary systemic changes.
One strategy for correcting the institution is to start holding individuals accountable. The military does this often. They'll "make an example" of someone violating the norms and step up enforcement to steer the institutional norms back.
Sure it can feel unfair, and "everyone else is doing it" is a common refrain, but holding individuals accountable is one way to fix the institution.
1) the immediate action _is more important immediately_ than the systemic change. We should focus on maximizing our "fixing" and letting a toxic element continue to poison you while you waste time wondering how you got there is counterproductive. It is important to focus on the systemic change, but once you have removed the person that will destroy the organization/kill us all.
2) I forgot. Sorry
If Joe dropped the production database and you're uncertain about his intentions then perhaps it would be a good idea to do the bare minimum by reducing his access privileges for the time being. No more than that though.
Whereas if you're reasonably certain that there was no intentional foul play involved then focusing on the individual from the outset isn't likely to improve the eventual outcome (rather it seems to me quite likely to be detrimental).
is answered by:
> any organization is likely to contain at least a few fairly toxic people
It’s a good thing to take a look at where the process went wrong, but that’s literally just a postmortem. Going fully into blameless postmortems adds the precondition that you can’t blame people, you are obligated to transform the obvious into a problem with some process or policy.
Anyone who has hired at scale will eventually encounter an employee who seems lovely in interviews but turns out to be toxic and problematic in the job. The most toxic person I ever worked with, who culminated in dozens of peers quitting the company before he was caught red handed sabotaging company work, was actually one of the nicest and most compassionate people during interviews and when you initially met him. He, of course, was a big proponent of blameless postmortems and his toxicity thrived under blameless culture for longer than it should have.
It could also well be that Joe did the same thing at his last employer, someone in hiring happened to catch wind of it, a disorganized or understaffed process resulted in the ball somehow getting dropped, and here you are.
This is exactly the toxicity I’ve experienced with blameless postmortem culture:
Hiring is never perfect. It’s impossible to identify every problematic person at the interview stage.
Some times, it really is the person’s own fault. Doing mental gymnastics to assume the system caused the person to become toxic is just a coping mechanism to avoid acknowledging that some people really are problematic and it’s nobody’s fault but their own.
I'm not saying you shouldn't eventually arrive at the conclusion you're suggesting. I'm saying that it's extremely important not to start there and not to use the possibility of arriving there as an excuse to shirk asking difficult questions about the inner workings and performance of the broader organization.
> Doing mental gymnastics to assume the system caused the person to become toxic
No, don't assume. Ask if it did. "No that does not appear to be the case" can sometimes be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to arrive at but it should never be an excuse to avoid confronting uncomfortable realities.
It's both obviously. To address the human cause, you have to call out the issues and put at risk the person's career by damaging their reputation. That's what this article is doing. You can't fix a person, but you can address their bad behavior in this way by creating consequences for the bad things.
Part of the root cause definitely is the friction aspect. The system is designed to make the bad thing easier, and when designing a system you need the good outcomes to be lower friction.
> This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.
The real conversations like that take place in places where there's no recordings, or anything left in writing. Don't assume they aren't taking place, or that they go how you think they go.
Post-mortems are a terrible place for handling HR issues. I'd much rather they be kept focused on processes and technical details, and human problem be kept private.
Dogpiling in public is an absolutely awful thing to encourage, especially as it turns from removing a problematic individual to looking for whoever the scapegoat is this time.
One problem is that if you behave as if a person isn't the cause, you end up with all sorts of silly rules and processes, which are just in place to counter "problematic individual".
You end up using "process" as the scapegoat.
It's way too easy to pretend the system is the problem while sticking your head in the sand because you don't want to solve the actual human problem.
Sure, use the post mortem to brainstorm how to prevent/detect/excise the systematic problem ("How do we make sure no one else can make the same mistake again"), but eventually you just need to deal with the repeat offender.
In a blame focused postmortem you say “Johnny fucked up” and close it.
When you are about accountability, the responsible parties are known or discovered if unknown and are responsible for prevention/response/repair/etc. The corrective action can incorporate and number of things, including getting rid of Johnny.
1) Basic morality (good vs evil) with total agency ascribed to the individual
2) Basic systems (good vs bad), with total agency ascribed to the system and people treated as perfectly rational machines (where most of the comments here seem to sit)
3) Blended system and morality, or "Systemic Morality": agency can be system-based or individual-based, and morality can be good or bad. This is the single largest rung, because there's a lot to digest here, and it's where a lot of folks get stuck on one ("you can't blame people for making rational decisions in a bad system") or the other ("you can't fault systems designed by fallible humans"). It's why there's a lot of "that's just the way things are" useless attitudes at present, because folks don't want to climb higher than this rung lest they risk becoming accountable for their decisions to themselves and others.
4) "Comprehensive Morality": an action is net good or bad because of the system and the human. A good human in a bad system is more likely to make bad choices via adherence to systemic rules, just as a bad human in a good system is likely to find and exploit weaknesses in said system for personal gain. You cannot ascribe blame to one or the other, but rather acknowledge both separately and together. Think "Good Place" logic, with all of its caveats (good people in bad systems overwhelmingly make things worse by acting in good faith towards bad outcomes) and strengths (predictability of the masses at scale).
5) "Historical Morality": a system or person is net good or bad because of repeated patterns of behaviors within the limitations (incentives/disincentives) of the environment. A person who routinely exploits the good faith of others and the existing incentive structure of a system purely for personal enrichment is a bad person; a system that repeatedly and deliberately incentivizes the exploitation of its members to drive negative outcomes is a bad system. Individual acts or outcomes are less important than patterns of behavior and results. Humans struggle with this one because we live moment-to-moment, and we ultimately dread being held to account for past actions we can no longer change or undo. Yet it's because of that degree of accountability - that you can and will be held to account for past harms, even in problematic systems - that we have the rule of law, and civilization as a result.
Like a lot of the commenters here, I sat squarely in the third rung for years before realizing that I wasn't actually smart, but instead incredibly ignorant and entitled by refusing to truly evaluate root causes of systemic or personal issues and address them accordingly. It's not enough to merely identify a given cause and call it a day, you have to do something to change or address it to reduce the future likelihood of negative behaviors and outcomes; it's how I can rationalize not necessarily faulting a homeless person in a system that fails to address underlying causes of homelessness and people incentivized not to show empathy or compassion towards them, but also rationalize vilifying the wealthy classes who, despite having infinite access to wealth and knowledge, willfully and repeatedly choose to harm others instead of improving things.
Villainy and Heroism can be useful labels that don't necessarily simplify or ignorantly abstract the greater picture, and I'd like to think any critically-thinking human can understand when someone is using those terms from the first rung of the ladder versus the top rung.
On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other.
The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world).
So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.
It's a paradox. We know for an absolute fact that changing the underlying system matters massively but we must continue to acknowledge the individual choice because the system of consequences and as importantly the system of shame keeps those who wouldn't act morally in check. So we punish the person who was probably lead poisoned the same as any other despite knowing that we are partially at fault for the system that lead to their misbehavior.
1. Who is responsible for adding guardrails to ensure all papers coming in are thoroughly checked & reviewed?
2. Who review these papers? Shouldn’t they own responsibility for accuracy?
3. How are we going to ensure this is not repeated by others?
I've read multiple times that a large percentage of the crime comes from a small group of people. Jail them, and the overall crime rate drops by that percentage.
Yes. One's past behavior is a strong predictor of future behavior.
> so they should be preemptively jailed even if they didn't do a crime this time?
No, it means that each successive conviction should result in a longer prison sentence.
I am unfamiliar with the reasons to which the varying murder rate is ascribed. If I had to guess, I would guess economics is #1.
Both views are maximalistic.
Negative consequences and money always work!
People are on average both bad and stupid and function without a framework of consequences and expectations where they expect to suffer and feel shame. They didn't make a mistake they stood in front of all their professional colleagues and published effectively what they knew were lies. The fact that they can publish lies and others are happy to build on lies ind indicates the whole community is a cancer. The fact that the community rejects calls for correction indicates its metastasized and at least as far as that particular community the patient is dead and there is nothing left to save.
They ought to be properly ridiculed and anyone who has published obvious trash should have any public funds yanked and become ineligible for life. People should watch their public ruin and consider their own future action.
If you consider the sheer amount of science that has turned out to be outright fraud in the last decade this is a crisis.
God gave us free will to choose good or evil in various circumstances. We need to recognize that in our assessments. We must reward good choices and address bad ones (eg the study authors'). We should also change environments to promote good and oppose evil so the pressures are pushing in the right direction.
However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.
Personally, I do believe that there are benefits to labelling others as villains if a certain threshold is met. It cognitively reduces strain by allowing us to blanket-label all of their acts as evil [0] (although with the drawback of occasionally accidentally labelling acts of good as evil), allowing us to prioritise more important things in life than the actions of what we call villains.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#The_reverse_halo_e...
If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.
The act itself is bad.
The human performing the act was misguided.
I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.
Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.
Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.
So the act and the person are separate.
Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.
But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.
I don't buy that for a moment. It presumes people do not have choices.
The difference between a man and an animal is a man has honor. Each of us gets to choose if we are a man or an animal.
No, there are choices. It states that given the exact same starting parameters and sequence of events, you would make the same choice.
And sure what you said is irrefutable in the sense that it's impossible to collect evidence about it. That's generally a bad sign for theories.
> If everyone would make the same choice, then free will doesn't exist. It's only one step away from what you said.
I didn't say anything about free will. "One step away" is where you went, not me.
If you believe free will and determinism are logically incompatible, that's your own theory to prove.
I'm simply saying that everyone would make the same choice given the exact same circumstances and starting conditions.
To believe anything otherwise is magical thinking, and basically implies a moral superiority to someone else.
If someone else in the "exact same circumstances and starting conditions" implies they're identical down to every single molecule, how is that someone else?
If they're not identical at that level, they wouldn't make the same decisions. Put two almost-perfect clones into two exact copies of the world and a week later they'll be on diverging paths.
So if the argument is not to judge anyone as a person because everyone would act the same if they had the exact same life circumstances and environment, and everything that affects their decisions fits into life circumstances and environment, what else is left that it would be unfair to judge?
> implies a moral superiority to someone else
Some moral systems are superior to other moral systems.
If free will does exist then yes you can judge people for their choices.
Everyone is capable of redemption but saying they need redemption is judging them.
1. You can't judge the person, you can judge the behavior
2. To judge the person requires the ability to quantify the unquantifiable (circumstance, sequence of events leading to the outcome, going back to the literal beginning of time).
3. To judge the person implies a superiority to that person
Sure, one can take/justify simplistic shortcuts for practical reasons. But some forget that's what they are - shortcuts that bypass the nuances/reality of the situation.
What does this mean? If someone rapes someone else, they were inherently perfect but misguided, in your view?
Both can be pursued without immediately jumping to defending a crime
These failures aren’t on that list because they require active intent.
Blameless post-mortems are critical for fixing errors that allowed incident to happen.
It's not processes that can be fixed, it's just humans being stupid.
Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again.
It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person.
That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.
If we equate being bad to being ignorant, then those people are ignorant/bad (with the implication that if people knew better, they wouldn't do bad things)
I'm sure I'm over simplifying something, looking forward to reading responses.
Unfortunately academia as a pursuit has never had a larger headcount and the incentives to engage in misconduct have likely never been higher (and appear to be steadily increasing).
Surely the public discourse over the past decades has been steadily moving from substantive towards labeling each other villains, not the other way around.
When the opposition is called evil it's not because logic dictates it must be evil, it's called evil for the same reason it's called ugly, unintelligent, weak, cowardly and every other sort of derogatory adjective under the sun.
These accusations have little to do with how often people consider others things such as "ugly" or "weak", it's just signaling.
This is effectively denying the existence of bad actors.
We can introspect into the exact motives behind bad behaviour once the paper is retracted. Until then, there is ongoing harm to public science.
For example, you assume that guy trying to cut the line is a horrible person and a megalomaniac because you've seen this like a thousand times. He really may be that, or maybe he's having an extraordinarily stressful day, or maybe he's just not integrated with the values of your society ("cutting the line is bad, no matter what") or anything else BUT none of all that really helps you think clearly. You just get angry and maybe raise your voice when you're warning him, because "you know" he won't understand otherwise. So you left your values now too because you are busy fighting a stereotype.
IMHO, correct course of action is assuming good faith even with bad actions, and even with persistent bad actions, and thinking about the productive things you can do to change the outcome, or decide that you cannot do anything.
You can perhaps warn the guy, and then if he ignores you, you can even go to security or pick another hill to die on.
I'm not saying that I can do this myself. I fail a lot, especially when driving. It doesn't mean I'm not working on it.
Turns out that calling someone on their bullshit can be a perfectly productive thing to do, it not only deals with that specific incident, but also promotes a culture in which it's fine to keep each other accountable.
It's also important to recognize that there are a lot of situations where calling someone out isn't going to have any (useful) effect. In such cases any impulsive behavior that disrupts the environment becomes a net negative.
It's also important to base your actions on what's at hand, not teaching a lesson to "those people".
It's fine and even good to assume good faith, extend your understanding, and listen to the reasons someone has done harm - in a context where the problem was already redressed and the wrongdoer is labelled.
This is not that. This is someone publishing a false paper, deceiving multiple rounds of reviewers, manipulating evidence, knowingly and for personal gain. And they still haven't faced any consequences for it.
I don't really know how to bridge the moral gap with this sort of viewpoint, honestly. It's like you're telling me to sympathise with the arsonist whilst he's still running around with gasoline
That wasn't how I read it. Neither sympathize nor sit around doing nothing. Figure out what you can do that's productive. Yelling at the arsonist while he continues to burn more things down isn't going to be useful.
Assuming good faith tends to be an important thing to start with if the goal is an objective assessment. Of course you should be open to an eventual determination of bad faith. But if you start from an assumption of bad faith your judgment will almost certainly be clouded and thus there is a very real possibility that you will miss useful courses of action.
The above is on an individual level. From an organizational perspective if participants know that a process could result in a bad faith determination against them they are much more likely to actively resist the process. So it can be useful to provide a guarantee that won't happen (at least to some extent) in order to ensure that you can reliably get to the bottom of things. This is what we see in the aviation world and it seems to work extremely well.
I mean, do not put the others into any stereotype. Assume nothing? Maybe that sounds better. Just look at the hand you are dealt and objectively think what to do.
If there is an arsonist, you deal with that a-hole yourself, call the police, or first try to take your loved ones to safety first?
Getting mad at the arsonist doesn't help.
Academics that refuse to reply to people trying to replicate their work need to be instantly and publicly fired, tenure or no. This isn't going to happen, so the right thing to do is for the vast majority of practitioners to just ignore academia whilst politically campaigning for the zeroing of government research grants. The system is unsaveable.
It's still up! Maybe the answer to building a resilient system lies in why it is still up.
The act itself, of saying something other than the truth, is always more complex than saying the truth. ← It took more words to describe the act in that very sentence. Because there are two ideas, the truth and not the truth. If the two things match, you have a single idea. Simple.
Speaking personally, if someone's very first contact with me is a lie, they are to be avoided and disregarded. I don't even care what "kind of person" they are. In my world, they're instantly declared worthless. It works pretty well. I could of course be wrong, but I don't think I'm missing out on any rich life experiences by avoiding obvious liars. And getting to the root cause of their stuff or rehabilitating them is not a priority for me; that's their own job. They might amaze me tomorrow, who knows. But it's called judgment for a reason. Such is life in the high-pressure world of impressing rdiddly.