I remember back in the day, the days of chisel and hammer. I could feel the stone, and the impact of the hammer vibrating into my hand. It was pleasant, and I could feel that every hit really meant something to shape the future of the stone, and thereby the building. Customers and contractors alike told me how great it was to see me work that stone. So I kept swinging that hammer.
Then I was told about some electrical chisel that was supposed to make my life better. Sure, I made more money, but the work was gone. It just shakes; it doesn't vibrate. I get numb, not proud. I have to take breaks, because my hands can't handle it. It's awful. What's the point, I asked?
But then I started talking to my colleagues during those breaks. I even discovered I had a relative in common with one. While chipping away at stone, no one ever wanted to stand close to me, and I had spent all this time proudly creating stone chips all day long! I still chip away at stone sometimes, but only when there's no one else around to talk to at breaktime.
---
You are not going to be able to stop change. The world never stood still, it's just that changes happen step-wise, and it's unlikely any one step affects _you_ profoundly. This time, the step affects you (and me.) You are standing in front of a steamroller and shouting "stop!"
We'll find a new way to be humans. It won't look like the Instagram times. It won't look like the Myspace times. It won't look like the Rolodex times. It'll be new. What can you do with it that makes you happy?
This guy [1] (in Swedish) was digitizing a municipal archive. 25 years later, the IT department (allegedly) accidentally deleted his entire work. With no backup.
Translated:
> For at least 25 years, work was underway to create a digital, searchable list of what was in the central archive in Åstorp municipality. Then everything was deleted by the IT department.
> “It felt empty and meaningless,” says Rasko Jovanovic.
> He saw his nearly 18 years of work in the archive destroyed. HD was the first to report on it.
> “I was close, so close to taking sick leave. I couldn't cope,” he says.
The digital catalog showed what was in the archive, which dates back to the 19th century, and where it could be found.
> "If you ask me something today, I can't find it easily, I have to go down and go through everything.
> “Extremely unfortunate”
> Last fall, the IT department found a system that had no owner or administrator. They shut down the system. After seven months, no one had reported the system missing, so they deleted everything. It was only in September that Åstorp discovered that the archive system was gone.
> “It's obviously very unfortunate,” says Thomas Nilsson, IT manager.
Did you make a mistake when you deleted the system?
> “No. In hindsight, it's clear that we should have had different procedures in place, but the technician who did this followed our internal procedures.”
In typical Swedish fashion, there cannot have been a mistake made, because procedures were followed! Or to put it in words that accurately reflect having 25 years of work removed: "Own it, you heartless bastard."
Given that Sweden manufactures submarines since long ago, I'm surprised second-strike capability was even a question.
Agreed that finding a target that doesn't blow back in our own face would be an issue. Though you don't really have to answer that question to have a deterrent, almost by definition.
You also need to build the infrastructure to take on 1,000 tons of gold. I doubt that's done in a month. IIRC, London has the biggest storage after NYC, so that's probably where it'll end up in the interrim. Eventually, I'd guess Switzerland will rise to do more gold storage.
We're essentially creating the same scenario as WTI vs Brent oil, where gold is partitioned into multiple different products depending on location.
> This doesn’t mean that the authors of that paper are bad people!
> We should distinguish the person from the deed. We all know good people who do bad things
> They were just in situations where it was easier to do the bad thing than the good thing
I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"
In this case, it seems not owning up to the issues is the bad part. That's a choice they made. Actually, multiple choices at different times, it seems. If you keep choosing the easy path instead of the path that is right for those that depend on you, it's easier for me to just label you a bad person.
Labeling people as villains (as opposed to condemning acts), in particular those you don’t know personally, is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality. It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.
In this case they hadn’t labeled anyone as villains, though. They could have omitted that section entirely.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
agreed, the concept of a 'blameless' post mortem came from airplane crash investigation - but if one pilot crashes 6 commercial jets, we wouldnt say "must be a problem with the design of the controls"
So what do they say actually in aviation? There was a pilot suicide with the whole plane Germanwings Flight 9525, I find it more important the aviation industry did regulatory changes than the fact that (probably) "they blamed the pilot".
I think there are too many people that actually like "blaming someone else" and that causes issues besides software development.
Blameless postmortems are for processes where everyone is acting in good faith and a mistake was made and everyone wants to fix it.
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.
> Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed.
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".
> 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.
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.
Often institutions develop fundamental problems because individuals gradually adjust their behaviors away from the official norms. If it goes uncorrected, the new behavior becomes the unofficial norm.
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.
I agree with most of what you said but i'd like to raise 2 points
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.
I suppose that depends on context. I think it's important to be pragmatic regarding urgency. Of course the most urgent thing is to stop the bleeding; removing the bullet can probably wait until things have calmed down a bit.
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).
Exactly. The above comment is an example of the kind of toxic blameless culture I was talking about: Deflecting every problem with a person into a problem with the organization.
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.
Of course. I actually think that "we did everything we reasonably could have" or "doing more would be financially disadvantageous for us" are acceptable conclusions for an RCA. But it's important that such a conclusion is arrived at only after rigorously following the process and making a genuine high effort attempt to identify ways in which the system could be improved. You wouldn't be performing an RCA if the incident didn't have fairly serious consequences, right?
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.
> 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?
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.
On the contrary. It's all too easy to dismiss as being the fault of a fatally flawed individual. In fact that's likely to be the bias of those involved - our system is good, our management is competent. Behead the sacrificial lamb and be done with it. Phrases such as "hirinng is never perfect" can themselves at times be an extremely tempting coping mechanism to avoid acknowledging inconvenient truths.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problem
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.
The prior is stating an extreme case, eg "comical extreme".
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".
I agree, but in this hypothetical situation the HR part needs to happen, despite the fact that most people don't want to be the squeaky wheel that explicitly starts pointing fingers..
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.
People don’t really understand what this stuff means and create fucked up processes.
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.
This hits the nail on the head. I liken it to a scale or ladder, each rung representing a new level of understanding:
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.
I'm not sure the problems we have at the moment are a lack of accountability. I mean, I think let's go a little overboard on holding people to account first, then wind it back when that happens. The crisis at the moment is mangeralism across all of our institutions which serves to displace accountability .
It’s possible to take two opposing and flawed views here, of course.
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.
What specific pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world? People almost universally behave better in a functional system with enough housing food education and so forth. Morality is and will always remain important but systems matter a LOT. For instance we've experienced less murder since we stopped mass lead poisoning our entire population.
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.
reviewers are unpaid. its also quite common to farm out the actual review work to grad students, postdocs and the like. if you're suggesting adding liability, then you're just undermining the small amount of review that already takes place.
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.
So when someone is arrested, that makes them more likely to do crime in the future, so they should be preemptively jailed even if they didn't do a crime this time?
It's also pretty clearly a deterrence against people admitting and fixing their own mistakes, both individually and as institutions. Which is exactly what we're seeing here...
Sure, but are you implying that is because of our stricter enforcement of the laws? Or other systemic / environmental causes (eg systemic poor mental health)?
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.
On the flop side, maybe there wouldn't be as many garbage papers printed if there were any actual negative consequences. It's not so simple as you make it out to be.
A national "War on Data", a Data enforcement agency (DEA), and a Data Abuse Resistence Education (DARE) program and we should have this problem wrapped up in no time.
Just to add on, armchair quarterbacking is a thing, it’s easy in hindsight to label decisions as the result of bad intentions. This is completely different than whatever might have been at play in the moment and retrospective judgement is often unrealistic.
One thing that stands in the way of other people choosing the wrong path is the perception of consequences. Minimal consequences by milquetoast critics who just want to understand is a bug not a feature.
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.
That comment sounds like the environment causes bad behavior. That's a liberal theory refuted consistently by all the people in bad environments who choose to not join in on the bad behavior, even at a personal loss.
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.
It is possible that the root cause is an individual person being bad. This hasn't been as common recently because people were told not to be villains and to dislike villains, so root causes of the remaining problems were often found buried in the machinery of complex social systems.
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.
As with anything, it's just highly subjective. What some call an heinous act is another person's heroic act. Likewise, where I draw the line between an unlucky person and a villain is going to be different from someone else.
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.
It’s not really subjective if you don’t believe it’s your place to judge the human to begin with.
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.
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?
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.
I'm guessing you believe that a person is always completely responsible for their actions. If you are doing root cause analysis you will get nowhere with that attitude.
In the case of software RCA, but if a crime is committed then many times there is a victim. There could be some root cause, but ignoring the crime creates a new problem for the victim (justice)
Both can be pursued without immediately jumping to defending a crime
Bad acts are in the past, and may be situational or isolated.
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.
I would argue that villainy and "bad people" is an overcomplication of ignorance.
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.
What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).
Actually the risks for academic misconduct have never been higher. For quite a while now there's been borderline activism to go out and search the literature for it - various custom software solutions have been written specifically to that end. We're also rapidly approaching a reality in which automated cross checking of the literature for contradictions will be possible.
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.
Most people seem to think that holding the "wrong" political stance is a failure of moral character so I'm having difficulty making sense of your point.
They truly don't. That's just part of the alienation.
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.
I disagree. There's an awful lot of "my position is obviously based on the data, so if you disagree it must be because you want to be evil". (In my opinion, the left does this more than the right, for whatever that's worth.)
If we expand "based on the data" to also include "based on my obviously correct ethical framework dictated by my obviously correct religion" then I figure the score is probably pretty close to even. The weird thing to me is how the far left has adopted behaviors that appear to be fundamentally religious in nature (imo) while fervently denying any such parallel.
IMHO, you should deal with actual events, when not ideas, instead of people. No two people share the exact same values.
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.
I used to think like this, and it does seem morally sound at first glance, but it has the big underlying problem of creating an excellent context in which to be a selfish asshole.
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.
I think they're both good points. An unwillingness to call out bullshit itself leads to a systemic dysfunction but on the flip side a culture where everyone just rages at everything simply isn't productive. Pragmatically, it's important to optimize for the desired end result. I think that's generally going to be fixing the system first and foremost.
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.
I honestly think this would qualify as "ruinous empathy"
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
> 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 thought assuming good faith does not mean you have to sympathize. English is not my native language and probably that's not the right concept.
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?
I think they're actually just saying bad actors are inevitable, inconsistent, and hard to identify ahead of time, so it's useless to be a scold when instead you can think of how to build systems that are more resilient to bad acts
You have to do both. Offense and defense are closely related. You can make it hard to engage in bad acts, but if there are no penalties for doing so or trying to do so, then that means there are no penalties for someone just trying over and over until they find a way around the systems.
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.
Perhaps start by defunding any projects by institutions that insist on protecting fraudsters especially in the soft sciences. There is a lot of valuable hard science that IS real and has better standards.
You presumably read the piece. There was no remedy. In fact the lavishly generous appreciation of all those complexities arguably is part of the reason there was no remedy. (Or vice versa, i.e. each person's foregone conclusion that there will be no remedy for whatever reason, might've later been justified/rationalized via an appeal to those complexities.)
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.
People are afraid to sound too critical. It's very noticeable how every article that points out a mistake anywhere in a subject that's even slightly politically charged, has to emphasize "of course I believe X, I absolutely agree that Y is a bad thing", before they make their point. Criticising an unreplicable paper is the same thing. Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.
> Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.
This is true though, and one of those awkward times where good ideals like science and critical feedback brush up against potentially ugly human things like pride and ego.
I read a quote recently, and I don't like it, but it's stuck with me because it feels like it's dancing around the same awkward truth:
"tact is the art of make a point without making an enemy"
I guess part of being human is accepting that we're all human and will occasionally fail to be a perfect human.
Sometimes we'll make mistakes in conducting research. Sometimes we'll make mistakes in handling mistakes we or others made. Sometimes these mistakes will chain together to create situations like the post describes.
Making mistakes is easy - it's such a part of being human we often don't even notice we do it. Learning you've made a mistake is the hard part, and correcting that mistake is often even harder. Providing critical feedback, as necessary as it might be, typically involves putting someone else through hardship. I think we should all be at least slightly afraid and apprehensive of doing that, even if it's for a greater good.
The fountain is charity. This is no mere matter of sentiment. Charity is willing the objective good of the other. This is what should inform our actions. But charity does not erase the need for justice.
American culture has this weird thing to avoid blame and direct feedback. It's never appropriate to say "yo, you did shit job, can you not fuck it up next time?". For example, I have a guy in my team who takes 10 minutes every standup - if everyone did this, standup would turn into an hour-long meeting - but telling him "bro what the fuck, get your shit together" is highly inappropriate so we all just sit and suffer. Soon I'll have my yearly review and I have no clue what to expect because my manager only gives me feedback when strictly and explicitly required so the entire cycle "I do something wrong" -> "I get reprimanded" -> "I get better" can take literal years. Unless I accidentally offend someone, then I get 1:1 within an hour. One time I was upset about the office not having enough monitors and posted this on slack and my manager told me not to do that because calling out someone's shit job makes them lose face and that's a very bad thing to do.
Whatever happens, avoid direct confrontation at all costs.
On one hand, I totally agree - soliciting and giving feedback is a weakness.
On the other hand, it sounds like this workplace has weak leadership - have you considered leaving for some place better? If the manager can’t do their job enough to give you decent feedback and stop a guy giving 10 min stand ups, LEAVE.
Reasons for not leaving? Ok, then don’t be a victim. Tell yourself you’re staying despite the management and focus on the positive.
I agree. If the company culture is not even helping or encouraging people to give pragmatic feedback, the war is already lost. Even the CEO and the board are in for a few years of stress.
The biggest reason for not leaving is that I understand that perfect things don't exist and everything is about tradeoffs. My current work is complete dogshit - borderline retarded coworkers, hilariously incompetent management. But on the other hand they pay me okay salary while having very little expectations, which means that if I spend entire day watching porn instead of working, nobody cares. That's a huge perk, because it makes the de facto salary per hour insanely huge. Moreover, I found a few people from other teams I enjoy talking to, which means it's a rare opportunity for me to build a social life. Once they start requiring me to actually put in the effort, I'll bounce.
I'll be direct with you, this sounds like an issue specific to your workplace. Get a better job with a manager who can find the middle ground between cursing in frustration and staying silent.
While I agree there’s a childish softness in our culture in many respects, you don’t need to go to extremes and adopt thuggish or boorish behavior (which is also a problem, one that is actually concomitant with softness, because soft people are unable to bear discomfort or things not going their way). Proportionality and charity should inform your actions. Loutish behavior makes a person look like an ill-mannered toddler.
“For the sake of time, is it okay if we move on to the next update? We can go into further details offline.”
Also if that doesn’t work, “Hey Bro I notice you like to give a lot of detail in standup. That’s great, but we want to keep it a short meeting so we try to focus on just the highlights and surfacing any key blockers. I don’t want to interrupt you, so if you like I can help you distill what you’ve worked on before the meeting starts.”
That's a legitimate fear though - it's exactly what happened in this case. "The reviewers did not address the substance of my comment; they objected to my tone".
In general Western society has effectively outlawed "shame" as an effective social tool for shaping behavior. We used to shame people for bad behavior, which was quite effective in incentivizing people to be good people (this is overly reductive but you get the point). Nowadays no one is ever at fault for doing anything because "don't hate the player hate the game".
A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior
Certainly, you are aware we literally had more crime back then, right? Additionally, we heaped shame on people who did not deserve it, like women and black people and gay people.
So what the fuck good does that do?
You know what actually changed? White collar crime stopped being a thing.
It's interesting to talk about 'banality of evil' in the comment section about flawed papers. Her portrayal of Eichmann was very wrong, Arendt had an idea in her head of how he should be and didn't care too much about the facts and the process. Not that I totally disagree with the idea.
I think this is not only about Eichmann, but a picture of humanity in general.
The obedience to authority that we must be able to challenge to stand a chance.
Milgram's or Zimbardo's tests we're somewhat flawed yes, but still WW2 and Germany kinda proved this tendency IMO. And that's why I brought it up. Perhaps not the best comparison, I admit, but a comparison that seems more and more relevant ni many cases.
I guess he means that the authors can still be decent people in their private and even professional lives and not general scoundrels who wouldn't stop at actively harming other people to gain something.
At which point do you cross the line? Somebody who murders to take someone else's money is ultimately just too lazy to provide value in return for money, so they're not evil?
If someone wants to be bad or shitty in a way that harms nobody but themselves, then more power to them. That's freedom.
If someone wants to be bad or shitty in a way that makes their lives own better while making the lives of everyone around them worse, that's evil and parasitic, and I'm not going to wring my hands about labeling it as such.
There are extremely competent coworkers I wouldn't like them as neighbours. Some of my great neighborhoods would make very sloppy and annoying coworkers.
These people are terrible at their job, perhaps a bit malicious too. They may be great people as friends and colleagues.
Not sure if this in jest referring to the inherently sanctimonious nature of the framing, but this is actually exactly what I was gesturing towards. If it didn't feel good, then it would be either an unintentional action (random or coerced), or an irrational one (go against their perceived self-interest).
The whole "bad vs good person" framing is probably not a very robust framework, never thought about it much, so if that's your position you might well be right. But it's not a consideration that escaped me, I reasoned under the same lens the person above did on intention.
I think the writer might enjoy Vonnegut's Mother Night.
> Vonnegut is not, I believe, talking about mere inauthenticity. He is talking about engaging in activities which do not agree with what we ourselves feel are our own core morals while telling ourselves, “This is not who I really am. I am just going along with this on the outside to get by.” Vonnegut’s message is that the separation I just described between how we act externally and who we really are is imaginary.
Some people want to avoid labeling individual people without admitting that they don't want to avoid labeling people. They don't seem to be aware that they are doing it either; I've had people tell me to my face that all of these are true:
1. There are bad people
2. We know bad people are bad because they do bad things
3. There does not exist any set of bad actions that one could do to qualify one for the label of "bad person."
I've just come to the conclusion that a "bad person" is just a term for someone who does bad things, and for whom their extenuating circumstances don't count because they are the member of the wrong tribe.
Connecting people's characters to their deed is a double edged sword. It's not that it's necessarily mistaken, but you have to choose your victories. Maybe today you get some satisfaction from condemning the culprits, but you also pay for it by making it even more difficult to get cooperation from the system in the future. We all have friends, family and colleagues that we believe to be good. They're all still capable of questionable actions. If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused. That's part of how closing ranks works. I think King recognizes this too, which is why he recommends that Penalties should reflect the severity of the violation, not be all-or-nothing.
It is like in organisational error management (aka. error culture), there are three levels here:
1) errors happen, basically accidents.
2) errors are made, wrong or unexpected result for different intention.
3) errors are caused, the error case is the intended outcome. This is where "bad people" dwell.
Knowing and keeping silent about 1) and 2) makes any error 3). I think, we are on 2) in TFA. This needs to be addressed, most obviously through system change, esp. if actors seem to act rationally in the system (as the authors do) with broken outcomes.
I guess there isn't much utility in categorizing people as "good" and "bad," arguably. Better to think about the incentives/punishments in the system and adjust them until people behave well.
> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"
For starters, the bar should be way higher than accusations from a random person.
For me,there's a red flag in the story: posting reviews and criticism of other papers is very mundane in academia. Some Nobel laureates even authored papers rejecting established theories. The very nature of peer review involves challenging claims.
So where is the author's paper featuring commentaries and letters, subjecting the author's own criticism to peer review?
Never qualify the person, only the deed. Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them. But we all have the same capacity.
And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about, mon semblable, mon frère.
> Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them
> And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about...
No one is disputing any of this. The person who is capable, and who has chosen to do, the bad deed is morally blameworthy (subject to mitigating circumstances).
They are very related concepts. Lack of remorse? Malicious act? Particularly heinous act? Both morally blameworthy and bad person! Isolated incident? Not a pattern? Morally blameworthy but not bad person.
This is pretty standard virtue ethics we all learned in school. Your statements that morally blameworthiness and badness are "[n]ot the same thing...[a]t all" and that we should "[n]ever qualify the person, only the deed" make me think your moral framework is likely not linked to millennia of thought in this area from Socrates on down, so it's unlikely we will get anywhere and should "agree to disagree."
I think calling someone a "bad person" (which is itself a horribly vague term) for one situation where you don't have all the context is something most people should be loath to do. People are complicated and in general normal people do a lot of bad things for petty reasons.
Other than just the label being difficult to apply, these factors also make the argument over who is a "bad person" not really productive and I will put those sorts of caveats into my writings because I just don't want to waste my time arguing the point. Like what does "bad person" even mean and is it even consistent across people? I think it makes a lot more sense to label them clearer labels which we have a lot more evidence for, like "untrustworthy scientist" (which you might think is a bad person inherently or not).
But he shoveled the neighbor sidewalks when it snowed.
I have a relative who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. A few years ago some guy got out of prison, went to a fellow's home to buy a car, shot the car owner dead, stole the car and drove it around until he got killed by the police.
One of the neighbors said, I kid you not, "he's a good kid"
Focusing on criticising people's actions and being lenient and not judging the person's character is literally centuries old, I don't think you can say it's because of woke.
The woke movement in many ways has taken core Christian principles, cut out the supernatural elements, and formed a new quasi religious movement. It has its dogmas and priests, it focuses on the poor & disadvantaged, etc. That's not a criticism of woke, I see it more as a response of the failures of Christianity in practice to live or embrace those values.
There's a reason Nietzsche labeled it slave morality. It undermines people's confidence to act and judge other appropriately, revalues weakness to be a virtue and strength as evil, and demands that people stop trying to change the world for the better and focus instead on their own supposed guilt. It's morality developed for people who are structurally unable to act (because they are commoner serfs with no power) to make them feel justified and satisfied with inaction.
It's 2026, and social media brigading and harassment is a well-known phenomenon. In light of that, trying to preemptively de-escalate seems like a Good Thing.
But there is a concern which goes out of the "they" here. Actually, "they" could just as well not exist, and all narrative in the article be some LLM hallucination, we are still training ourself how we respond to this or that behavior we can observe and influence how we will act in the future.
If we go with the easy path labeling people as root cause, that's the habit we are forging for ourself. We are missing the opportunity to hone our sense of nuance and critical thought about the wider context which might be a better starting point to tackle the underlying issue.
Of course, name and shame is still there in the rhetorical toolbox, and everyone and their dog is able to use it even when rage and despair is all that stay in control of one mouth. Using it with relevant parcimony however is not going to happen from mere reactive habits.
As a technologist, I like lane-keep assist because it feels fundamentally more right that my car by default follows the road than keeps going with the turn radius I had previously input.
Cruise control with minimum distance helps me keep a sound distance even as other cars keep packing up and reducing distances on a busy highway. My previous car (Mercedes) was great at detecting if a new car coming in front of me was accelerating, if so it didn't adjust the distance as aggressively. Much better behavior than my current Kia.
Auto-break features are sweet as they react really fast. If that can avoid deploying an airbag in my face, I'm all for it.
I agree it's a lot like managing, with six buttons just to do the above, but from a bottom-up approach, each feature has value in its own right.
> For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Where do you draw the line? Would you prefer not having a steering and brake servo? Would you prefer sticking out your arms instead of having flashing lights? Would you prefer feeling every bump in the road to having suspension?
To me these systems just feel like natural evolution of the car concept, something that's been going on for 120 years. What Tesla failed at was putting their heads in the clouds and hoping something awesome would eventually pop out the other end. While the established car makers did incremental improvements.
GP said s/he didn't understand why anyone would want these in-betweens. I gave an explanation as to why.
Based on what you're saying, it seems the divide arises from some drivers classifying these features as physical comfort, and some as mentally disengaging.
I agree. For example, in this video they say "1% peroxide" to clean the circular ¿mould? marks. I don't remember any specific detail like that in the videos by Baumgartner, just "a mix of solvents", "some cleaners", ...
We are in a large futures expiration week. There's always extra volatility around there.
https://www.investing.com/futures-expiration-calendar/
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