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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

>What a bunch of assholes.

While it might be true, the sentiment is entirely unhelpful and mirrors a fundamental problem with the reaction to these types of problems: there is nothing special about these people that makes them assholes.

In fact, I'm proposing that any group of people put into these roles would behave exactly the same. When you put people into jobs, the – let's say architecture – of the organization they are put into has a drastic influence on their behavior (see the Stanford prison experiment)

The question that should be asked is what's wrong with the architecture of these organizations that brings out the natural bad qualities of human behavior in average people?

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Not entirely at odds with the experimentation you quoted, I think it's perfectly within rights to call these people assholes. If they really had any conscience about the matter they would speak up or leave the job, seeing as they don't it's well within rights to refer to these actions as their own and hold them at least partially responsible.

Within rights, perhaps... helpful? no. Even prosecution and lawsuits, while necessary doesn't actually solve the problem and that's the point I'm trying to make.

Being upset at individuals, suing and prosecuting, and all things of this sort miss the core of the issue and if you spend all your time concentrating on the superficial causes you'll never fix the actual problem.

Your thinking about the guard/prisoner scenarios and it's effect on people? Likely very true. But, I wonder if there are some types of people who actively seek those kinds of roles and others who actively avoid them. In some people, with all the information the might not participate.

Idk - just thinking out loud, I am not aware of any research the back up my hunch.

Employment at will. They can find other jobs. They're assholes for continuing employment in such corruption.

I may even go so far to call you an asshole for defending them.

He's not defending them - just pointing out that behavior is engendered by the situation, and thus it is wise to architect the system to minimize the incentives to behave badly.

> there is nothing special about these people that makes them assholes.

Yes there is: They've committed a crime. One of the worst offenses you can commit. Witness tampering. The Judge here has every right to root out who is responsible and have them thrown in prison.

There is absolutely no justification here for what the TSA did, and they deserve to be punished accordingly.

So whether or not you view calling them assholes is appropriate, the fact of the matter is that they are, in fact, assholes guilty of one of the worst criminal offenses in US law.

Exactly. The system should be resilient to the assholery of the individuals, as far as possible. It's not a surprise that TSA, which is new, high-profile, and huge has fucked up incentives.

So you get a pass on doing assholy things and don't deserve to be called an asshole if you do assholy things because it's natural human behavior?

> entirely unhelpful (calling people assholes)

That doesn't follow. Turning normal people into assholes by giving them small powers and prestige doesn't mean that prestige cannot be undermined by denigrating them. It's a perfectly good hypothesis that calling a petty tyrant a knave, poltroon or asshole could deflate them. So raise a middle finger for freedom.

> Turning normal people into assholes by giving them small powers and prestige doesn't mean that prestige cannot be undermined by denigrating them.

I think it's funny that you think your Internet comment on a nearly 100% anti-TSA forum counts as undermining by denigration. If anything, you're reinforcing their view that people like you are dangerous and should be controlled.

> It's a perfectly good hypothesis that calling a petty tyrant a knave, poltroon or asshole could deflate them.

So test your hypothesis. We have a very long history of petty tyrants who keep court fools. How many of them turned into states of happy freedom?

Is there a "pro-TSA" forum that would have a different response?

Probably. It's the Internet. We still have white supremacists sites hitting the top of Google for unrelated searches.

For one thing, there isn't enough accountability after the fact. This kind of obstruction of justice should be a slam dunk go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200 for the people involved. How much do you want to bet that none of them ever set foot inside a federal penitentiary? I certainly wouldn't take that bet.

There are certain laws that appear to simply not apply to certain agencies. Fix that, and the rest will largely fall into place. Nobody is going to put a witness on the no-fly list to prevent them from testifying if they know that they're going to spend years in jail for it. And similarly, few people will avoid doing that if they know that there will be no consequences.

Somewhere along the way, we got the judicial branch working for the executive rather than keeping them in check. That strikes me as the root of this.

> (see the Stanford prison experiment)

The principal investigator for this ended up writing a book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/The-Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Peopl... He goes into his own culpability as the person who designed the system and then talks about his expert witness testimony at Abu Ghraib.

There are several sibling comments who seem to feel that removing a couple of individuals, or even massively overhauling the payroll in a conscience-clearing fire sale, will have a significant effect on the behavior of the TSA as a whole. This is exactly the mistake that colechristensen is pointing out. You're busy sniping at symptoms rather than addressing the root cause: it's the equivalent of visiting every customer for your web app and opening up their Javascript console in order to temporarily fix a bug rather than actually debugging your app.

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