I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought.
It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers.
Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat
I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but computers can only interact in the way the UI was designed, and no programmer accounted or cared for my scenario
The ground attendant couldn't have done anything of course because it wasn't part of the scope of her job, and this was the part of germany where nice was not one of their stereotypes.
Eventually I got a survey a week later about a different leg of the flight, so could I really complain there? that one was fine? I had a paranoid wonder if that was intentional
I arrived at the train station in the night after 6 hours train journey. German Railways app shows there will be my final leg train in 45 minutes. I wait in the cold at night, sitting in the station building because it's warmer there. 5 minutes before departure I go on the platform. The local display shows no train, even though the all still shows it. I waited for nothing.
Syncing the app with the train station? Somebody else's problem.
In half an hour there should be a replacement bus for another cancelled train. There are no signs in the app or the station that indicate where that bus is to be found. You just need to know.
Putting sings for replacement buses due to degraded service that's long planned and already happening for 2 months? Somebody else's problem.
An old man asks if the bus will allow to catch the train connection at its destination. The bus driver bitches at him for asking that question -- not his job. Somebody else's problem.
Training the bus driver that, being an official replacement of a train, he needs to know that, clearly also somebody else's problem than that of the German Railways.
It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.
The bus is ice cold for an hour. When am old lady gets off and tells the bus driver that it was freezing all journey, he asks "well what can you do". Bewildered she answers "turn on the heating"?
He didn't expect that. He seemed to think that everything except driving was somebody else's problem.
This is just one night's bus journey story. I also got my SIM card deleted and a parcel was lost in the subsequent week. Documenting here the amounts of "somebody else's problem" I encountered in their customer support hotlines is somebody else's problem for me for now.
There is some degree of accountability for DB: Other organizations like Swiss and Austrian railways stopped taking schedules of DB seriously and stopped waiting or booking through.
The German mail rail and track operator (Deutsche Bahn) isn't private but 100% state owned (and control sits with the federal government). They wanted to privatize it a couple of decades ago but abandoned it. There is still some hybridization between supposedly it being a business and also a public service left in the law, though.
The Deutsche Bahn AG is in fact a private Aktiengesellschaft(which is to say a stock company) with the german gov't owning 100% of the shares. I'd very much argue that it is run mostly like a private enterprise and only occasionally compelled by the government to act like a public service.
Yes, but doesn't change that it is 100% state owned and controlled with a mixed mandate (business/public service - see art 87e GG). No reason to absolve the owner and the associated politics from their responsibilities.
The legal form doesn't determine whether something is state owned or private.
I would say Deutsche Bahn has managed to combine the disadvantages of public services with the disadvantages of private companies into one coherently terrible package.
Well it's pretty much the same with the SNCF in France. However, surprisingly it is still more reliable than the DB (less accident, more on time); which is quite shocking considering German's reputation...
I believe they make a good point: making a vertically integrated entity could matter more than just buying most of the shares.
If we are discussing tendencies of "privatized vs public", it's hard to ignore that factor. Public entities that historically worked well weren't just masses of 600 subcontractors.
But again, that is up to the owners - and the owner is the state. Also, the state didn't buy most of the shares: it had full ownership before and kept it while the legal form changed.
I presume running a national rail system is somewhat different from a railway for a single city. How good are the national rail systems in these countries?
Being a bus driver used to be a decent job for semi-retired construction workers, and such.
But then privatization hit, and over the last 20 years, there is no niceness left. They're even trained to disregard customers, and penalized otherwise.
It's insanely inhumane.
And the causal effect is very clear, there can be no doubt about it.
It's not the bus driver's fault.
No, it's not. It's bureacracy, and it exists in every big organisation, private or public. I'd actually suggest that public sector bodies are often worse for this.
There is still a meaningful difference. Businesses usually need to have some profit even if minimum so they will run leaner for the same output because of efficiency.
I agree that there are many big businesses bureaucracies but they tend to be in areas closely linked to the state/government because of heavy regulation: banks and insurance for example.
They tend to survive despite their terrible efficiency because it is way too costly to enter their business for a small actor. Any of their real competitors is already big enough that the bureaucracy is already well established...
The more focused a company is (the more reliant it is on its core service) the more accountable it can be. I'd argue many companies are if anything more accountable than the government. It doesn't have to be true, but I'd argue it often is.
I had a similar experience in Germany about a year ago. Train stations are mostly self-service now. The ticket kiosk ate my €50 and promptly rebooted. It didn’t print a receipt or anything. The only human I could find was a security guard. He told me to call the number on a sticker on the machine. The person who answered couldn’t speak English. My €50 is out there somewhere but it would cost me more than that to track it down.
That’s a sad experience and I would definitely try to chase them robots. Sadly even though German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality, though when it comes to human service you can find yourself in peculiar position. And particularly if you are not German and happen to be in one of those international cities there where Germans are fed up with visitor. You waive goodbye to your 50€ and keep a story to tell, that’s all.
Sadly I don’t expect this all to get any better with robots and LLms and thing. We will be crying to meet a human sooner than later, and my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era when you actually have people in the loop, just for humanity’s sake.
>German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality
Ease of use maybe, although my parents and grandparents would like to argue differently. They are not as quick to work their smartphone, and the ticket machines are being removed everywhere to be replaced by apps that are much cheaper to run. This works fine for the younger generations, but older and less tech-savvy people are getting left behind.
Quality though, no way. Every single time I tried to give ÖPNV a chance in the last 3-4 years I was either different degrees of late or didn't arrive at all without switching to some alternative method of transport on the way. Doesn't even matter if I tried local routes (Frankfurt and Darmstadt) or longer inter-city connections to Munich or Leipzig, it's all completely broken. People in my company routinely book connections several hours earlier than they need to be places to have a chance of arriving in time, and often are still late. Trains are overbooked, connections are late or often cancelled altogether, seat reservarions don't work more often than they do, WiFi on the trains never works... Many, many things have to change for me to reconsider my default of taking the car everywhere, and I don't think they will in any sort of a relevant timeline.
It's not that they don't want to have people, it's that there are no people. Germany, as most of other countries in Europe, has an aging population and the workforce is hard to find. So all these "easy" things that can get automated, do get automated, oftentimes indeed at the price of quality of service in exceptional situations.
Well, they say that, but in my experience at least, that is just conjured up as a more palatable explanation after the fact. While I do think that a certain, even significant, amount of automation is good, there is also a large mass of unemployed that can undoubtedly be trained to fill these "human interaction" kind of roles (support). This workforce is still not hard to find at all. We just don't want to do that - there is not a single western country left that has low unemployment as its key prerogative.
Yes, it's only a profit thing. If you cut out the humans you can make more money. If not for your boss then for the company that gets the contract to make the automation.
It's definitely easy to use. You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train. No security checks like an airport. No multi step check in. Just be there and get on. In many cases your ticket won't even be checked, and when it is it's while you're seated while the train is moving. Getting a ticket is no problem: the ticket machines are multilingual, and you type in the stops you want to go from/to and the date. You can also book one online and get a QR-like code you can print or display on your phone.
Quality is mediocre. The trains are often delayed, which is a problem with the size of the network and cascading failures. Once they do get to A, they get from A to B just fine, the seats are okay, the luggage space is okay, etc. The DB Navigator app is useful for finding alternative routes but it won't tell you whether your ticket is valid for them. It will tell you if the delay is so long that you're allowed to use any route.
> You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train.
The train is late. The lounges suck or are tied to a complex system of ticket tiers that seemingly don't correlate to price. You bought a specific seat but the train was changed so now no assigned seat and lol on a refund. And fuck you if you're crossing borders.
Germans travel a good amount by car for good reason [1]. When I'm in Germany, I tend to drive between cities because the alternative is burning several hours in buffers and delays.
It sounds like this was the main point of failure. I’m not sure it can be considered an error in the system. I’d consider the risk inherent in traveling in a country without knowing its language.
Yes sir. A friend of mine, the girlfriend passed out, being pregnant. In the moment of total stress, we called 112, and said “passed away“ instead of „passed out“. The guy on the other side “well, if she is dead, why are you calling?!” Very rude. He went on to explain, it was an error, an instead of just dispatch an ambulance, had to hear a 10 minute lesson in english (from a german) after which the ambulance was dispatched. When the ambulance finally arrived, she was “ok” so they had to pay couple of thousand Euros for a “negligent dispatch”…
The level of arrogance and lack of empathy and service is beyond limits.
> When the ambulance finally arrived, she was “ok” so they had to pay couple of thousand Euros for a “negligent dispatch”
That part seems really hard to believe for me. The only time you should get charged at all is for prank calling. In fact, if you call and tell them and decide you don't need EMS after all they will in fact come anyways because they need to check on every call. And you will not get charged for that.
Yes, but it’s still fine to have a customer service only answering in the official language. The chance are high that a random German speaks english so you’ll probably be good but if that’s not the case, blaming the company seems unfair to me.
> The chance are high that a random German speaks English
Not sure how random my selection process was, but that certainly wasn't my experience when I lived in Germany a few years ago. Maybe in big cities, yes. But even in the burbs, chances are you have to look for the metaphorical needle in the haystack to find someone speaking English. Your best bet might just be teenagers and young adults.
Absolutely. There is a big myth that “germans (all?) speak good English“ and nothing can be further from the truth. There are good ones, sure, maybe even more percent than other places, but go out of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich… and good luck!!!
Please look my comment to the parent comment. If you do find a german that speaks understandable english (that you can differentiate “think” and “sink” or “g” and “she” or “zoo” and “sue” then may be the arrogant crap that got my friend. For that they receive years of “Ausbildung”…
What THE FUCK is it with the expectation that everybody has to understand and speak in-glitch? Employ a local guide. Too expensive? Bad luck. Entitled little .....
>The chance are high that a random German speaks english so you’ll probably be good
What does high mean in this context? I experienced what I would call the inverse Danish maneuver, the German obviously understand English because they often answered our English questions correctly - In German.
In Denmark if a Dane understands what you said in Danish but you have a definite accent they will often answer your question in English.
Maybe Germanic cultures are geared towards the rude.
This sounds like a language education issue. It's easier to understand a language than to express yourself in it, so possibly Germans on average have good enough knowledge of English to understand you but not enough to adequately reply in English. Conversely, Denmark has some of the highest English literacy in Europe.
I mean sure, that sounds plausible, until I point out in Germany that I don't speak German and they continue trying to explain to me in German the answer to my question.
If I'm talking to an Italian and trying to explain to them in English and they don't understand then I try with a combination of my broken Italian and hand signals, not obdurate sticking to English because that's being a jerk.
At the same time, yes Danes have a high English literacy, but switching to English when someone is talking to you in Danish is rude no matter how you slice it.
They might have been rude, but that's besides the point. Even if they could speak English you shouldn't expect them to be comfortable doing so. That actually seems pretty rude in itself to me.
right, if I'm trying to get information from a guy at a train ticket agent and I don't speak German but he obviously understands what I am saying in English it is me being rude for expecting him to make some sort of attempt to explain to me where I need to get off at in a language we both evidently understand instead of me just learning his language in a couple minutes.
If I had been buying a ticket at a window from a human, there's no way I'd have handed over 50 EUR without someone understanding me. If fluency in the local language to the level that you can have a phone conversation (which is many times more difficult than face-to-face) is a prerequisite for visiting a country, you are either an impressive polyglot, or don't travel enough.
I had something similar happen to be on the tube in london. My ticket got demagnetised (combined intercity rail with travel card are/were still magnetic stripe tickets) and there were not staff at the station so I could not get the barrier open to leave.
At this point everyone needs to get in the habit of using small claims court. You can often do it online in a few minutes these days.
Make a good faith effort to get your problem addressed, and record the fact that you've done so to use in your hearing if it gets that far. Then just file the claim. Generally they fold immediately, and this way you incentivize actual customer service in the only language they understand.
I do agree but also feel if people did this en masse, that system would get a rate limiter. After 2 claims per year you would be barred for being "vexatious"
Being realistic, if you have these sorts of issues more than twice a year there's probably something wrong and you should fix that. Everyone has a few of those stories, but the only people who consistently have them are likely looking for trouble and picking fights.
Many businesses build walls around themselves like this.
Hiding the customer service number. Making an FAQ that is missing the common but time-consuming questions. Chatbots instead of people.
I remember when amazon sent me a package once, said it was delivered, but it was nowhere to be found. There was no way to get help. They did have an FAQ at the time that said to check in the bushes.
What was annoying was the search auto-complete had many variations of "package not found says delivered"
I've got an actual email address to a real business, but the humans* are struggling with the concept of "$company created the account with the wrong billing address, ignoring my agent who could have received it when my agent did contact $company, it's provably $company's fault that the bills were not received, so $company must tell me who this debt collector is and refund me for the late payment penalties and admit their own fault to the CRA".
I just switched ISPs, and the new one has one of the most obnoxious phone processes I've ever interacted with.
I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want to try rebooting." (Pause)... "thank you for your call click"
First off, rebooting doesn't solve my problem. But I guess I have to try anyway?
So I call back, this time I do pick to reboot, and get "your modem will reboot in the next few minutes, and could take up to 10 minutes to come online. If things still aren't working, try our online support chat"
So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
I had problems solved several times by rebooting modem. One time it was "reboot modem and access point in proper order", me naively rebooting them both at the same time didn't help, only phone support solved this problem.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer.
Hmm, I might be desensitivised from too much programming in erlang. It's implied that your program will encounter bugs or strange data and parts WILL be restarted, better account for that and plan on what to do on restart of each small part at the start of writing your program.
> So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
Because it's cheaper. Those who don't have support can offer lower prices. When people search for trinkets, they only have information about what is supported, there is no good information about quality of device and support, high price also not always means better support. SO they just go for lower price and hope not to suffer too much.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
Why is rebooting offensive to you? State is hard; resetting your system to know state can fix many issues.
If your microwave had an error, you would be put off if you had to power cycle the whole house. Installed a new receptacle, sure, but operating an appliance? No way. Now you would have to reset your clocks everywhere at a minimum.
I have a linux computer running a public server that has not be restarted in three and a half years. This is what I expect.
Every time I have to reboot my work laptop due to work pushing some updates or that I have to reboot my windows machine because it is running unreasonably slow, I am reminded that inconsiderate assholes have become more lazy and are ok with polluting the whole system, mismanaging state and resiliency, and when the equivalent of the microwave has an error, the only solution is rebooting my house. We can do better.
> I have a linux computer running a public server that has not be restarted in three and a half years. This is what I expect.
I restart my Linux desktop every few weeks, when the kernel updates.
For a reliable server, you want to exercise the restart ritual somewhat regularly, because when anything goes wrong (eg with the hardware), you might have to restart anyway, so you want to be sure that this works.
Windows is awful at this. Completely weird problems with many apps (especially VPN) which get resolved with a reboot. Seriously? It is the whole culture around this OS which finds this acceptable.
Often this will be resolved by the network being quiet long enough for a reboot - with connection tables in intermediate firewalls timing out etc - rather than the actual reboot.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot.
This surprises me - as a programmer you should realise that reboots can often help. Cache invalidation is one of the notoriously hard CS problems and an awful lot of systems will start fresh on reboot.
> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
My current ISP is better, but my previous ISP cycled IP addresses at 2am (and lost connectivity for about 30 seconds at the same time) on a Friday night. I would semi-frequently be up playing games at that hour, and it was about 50/50 as to whether devices on my network would survive the blip. Rebooting the router had a 100% success rate.
I currently (unfortunately) have a google wifi mesh system. It works great, except about once a month it reports that absolutely everything is fine, all tests pass from my mobile device, but my laptop has no internet connectivity. Rebooting fixes it just fine.
> How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out?
Firmware is still software, like it or lump it. Modem firmware has been shitty for a long time. A major ISP [0] in the UK had an issue with their firmware that caused massive latency spikes under load. Alsom Power loss happens sometimes. The modem/router has to be able to turn on in the first place, so a "reboot" is just going through that process again. It's attempting to return to a "last known good".
>If things still aren't working, try our online support chat
>So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
I wish everything had support chat. IMO it's much less hassle than having to call. It's usually trivial to get through the first layer of automated support and get a human on the line.
Support chat is universally shitty. My mobile provider's website only works if you keep the browser window open, and times out if you go away for 2 minutes. The replies often take more than 2 minutes. I can only access "certain" information about my account if I'm on mobile data, except my carrier's website doesn't work if I am out of data. (granted, I am on a super budget mobile network, but still). In the last 18 months, the chat experience has been taken over by LLM's which are just acting as full text search for the doc pages that don't solve my problem.
I still choose web chat over any other method of interaction though.
I can provide another POV to that story. We checked in as a family of four, and we're assigned seats in four different rows, with a two and a four year old. Only when entering the plane we had the possibility address this to a human and we were assigned new seats.
So this might be the reason you had to change seats.
they claimed they had to change planes though
i had selected that seat when booking the flight, and there were no humans available to address such issues
Of all the various useless laws that keep getting enacted, one that guarantees that every company needs to have a phone number, manned by actual human(s) with organic intelligence, advertised prominently on their products/advertisements, never gets passed.
I've long thought that that is one of the main functions of corporations. There's a reason they're called limited liability. The fact that you can conjure up new companies at a whim makes it easy to shuffle responsibility into an obscure corner.
This is a strong reason that corporations should not be considered people. People are long-lived entities with accountability and you can't just create or destroy them at will.
At a more basic level money eliminates the need for social obligation. There is no expectation of reciprocity or mutual respect. You pay for a product, it is delivered and that is the end of it. Corporations do this within their own internal economy or with partner companies. A cost centre pays an amount of money and delegates responsibility.
Enjoying the benefits of living in a society (a degree of trust, no deadly combat, services like police) without suffering its liabilities (mandatory politeness and respect).
I agree with the feeling, but State orgs are effectively eternal (think the various level of government) and still great at diffusing accountability to various scapegoats
State orgs (and federal ones) often have length processes before they can do stuff though.
As well as after they do something there is typically a recourse path provided by that org for you to protest their decisions and if that doesn't resolve favorable you can also sue them.
Which differs from the article because the corporation doesn't provide any protest path nor did it have to publish any memo/etc describing how they're going to downsize cleaning for cost-savings. But you can still sue them (but good luck showing damages over an unclean room)!
> I've long thought that that is one of the main functions of corporations.
Ambrose Bierce already hit the nail on the head in 1911:
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
It has long since baffled me this isn't being talked about more – I guess everyone is just so used to it. As far as I'm concerned the entire concept of "fining a company" should be abolished and replaced with the criminal persecution of those who did the illegal thing.
Oh sweet summer child. Companies are frequently structured and created in multiple jurisdictions to obscure beneficial ownership, responsibility, profits and taxes.
Limited liability corporations are a relatively new concept and there is certainly scope to change how/when/where they could be created and run, for example.
I recently had to submit a copy of my drivers license to the feds, for my LLC. I have heard that they are working on the accountability shield for LLCs.
Yeah, this dysfunction is not a bug, it's the feature. In some ways, it's useful, because it allows positive risk-taking that could not be taken if anyone was actually held (or even just felt) accountable. But at this point, as a society, we've shifted too far towards enabling accountability-free behavior from corporations.
I think a good example of the dichotomy here is Starlink. On one hand, it's an incredibly useful service that often has a positive impact. On the other hand, a private corporation is just polluting our low earth orbit with thousands of satellites.
It's not clear to me where exactly the right balance for something like this should be, but I do think that as of today, we're too far on the lessez-faire side.
> I think a good example of the dichotomy here is Starlink. On one hand, it's an incredibly useful service that often has a positive impact. On the other hand, a private corporation is just polluting our low earth orbit with thousands of satellites.
Seems like a terrible example to me. I'm no fan of Musk, but I don't see how that is "polluting".
They provide an excellent service. They're a minor hindrance for astronomy, true, but I think it would be hard to make a good case for that a few people having a good view of the sky is more important than millions having good communications.
Then there's that there's nothing really special about Starlink. It's merely one of the first users of cheap rocket launches. It could be somebody else, or 1000 different entities launching smaller numbers, in the end the effect on astronomy would be the same.
"Then there's that there's nothing really special about Starlink"
I didn't say there was, and this isn't about Musk. I'm just using Starlink as an example, my point is not about Starlink.
"I don't see how that is polluting"
Starlink satellites create light pollution and disrupt radio frequencies. Astronomers are already running into issues with research due to the light from Starlink satellites. There's also the issue of reentry. We now have a Starlink reentry almost every single day, which is at least damaging to the ozone layer, and very likely causing other issues.
But like I said, this is not about Starlink. It's just an example to illustrate accountability sinks having both positive and negative effects.
There's no accountability sink to speak of here. "Accountability sink" in the article's meaning means that accountability got obscured, something bad happened (eg, lies on TV, terrible customer service), yet nobody can be clearly blamed for giving the order.
Here, it's Musk's invention, and he's clearly to blame for it. In fact Musk has a propensity to take more credit than he deserves, so it's almost the opposite from a sink really.
Musk is not accountable for Starlink. Starlink is an LLC, a limited liability company. There is no single person who is accountable for Starlink's satellites.
The chief difference here is that you can plausibly point at every investor in Starlink and say if they have the slightest idea of Starlink's business plan, they know that causes light pollution. There is exactly one degree of separation from putting satellites in the sky to causing light pollution. There's no plausible deniability there.
This article is more about the phenomenon where decisions are removed by multiple degrees. The locus of decision making is either obscured or non-existent, creating plausible deniability. This is often done by rewarding activities that don't obviously create harm but nevertheless require causing harm to carry out.
But that is how it works, isn't it? They're saying, "we want to make the Internet available to as many people as possible." They don't want the light pollution, and they don't create the light pollution.
It's analogous to the Fox example in the article, where somebody at the top says, "we want high viewership." They don't want their employees to lie to their audience, and they don't force them to lie to their audience.
Does the Fox leadership at some point become aware that "lying to the audience" is a result of their performance goals, just like the decision makers at Starlink become aware that light pollution is a result of their goals? They very likely do. Does that make them feel accountable for the negative side effects? Probably not, because they didn't tell anyone to lie and pollute the skies, somebody else did that.
Sorry but I find your example totally wrong. Things like radio frequencies and space launches are hard regulated by govs, no corporation can launch satellites at will without permission from the government(s).
Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin Random House) is a good companion to this concept, covering the "accountability sink" from the other side of those constructing or overseeing systems.
Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in.
A computer is not alive. A computer system is a tool that can do harm. It can be disconnected or unplugged like any tool in a machine shop that begins to do harm or damage. But a tool is not responsible. Only people are responsible. Accountability is anchored in reality by personal cost.
= Notes
Management calculates the cost of not unplugging the computer that is doing harm. Management often calculates that it is possible to pay the monetary cost for the harm done.
People in management will abdicate personal responsibility. People try to avoid paying personal cost.
We often hold people accountable by forcing them to give back (e.g. community service, monetary fines, return of property), by sacrificing their reputation in one or more domains, by putting them in jail (they pay with their time), or in some societies, by putting them to death ("pay" with their lives).
Accountability is anchored in reality by personal cost.
Admittedly the context matters “we are trying to sell to Management, therefore let’s butter them up and tell them they make great decisions and they won’t get automated away” while the next page of the presentation says “we will
Automate away 50% of the people
Working for you saving globs of money for your next bonus”
IBM in 1979 was not doing anything different to 2024. They were just more relevant
I want to note here that this is illegal in the EU. Any company that makes decisions algorithmically (EDIT: actually, by an AI, so maybe not entirely applicable here) must give people the ability to escalate to a human, and be able to give the user information for why that decision was made the way it was made.
It's much easier to hold an algorithm accountable than an organization of humans. You can reprogram an algorithm. But good look influencing an organization to change
Yes. Not literally of course, but it can be deleted/decommissioned, which is even more effective than temporary imprisonment (it's equivalent to death penalty but without the moral component obviously).
Why should it be obvious that the moral component is absent? Removing an algorithm is like reducing the set of choices available to society… roughly equivalent to a law or regulation, or worse, a destructive act of coercion. There are moral implications of laws even though laws are not human
If algorithm can do some thing wrong, but nobody should be responsible for it, everyone will just hide their crimes under algorithm and replace it when someone find problem.
If a mechanical device does something wrong, are we in the same conundrum?
I don't see what the problem is. There's malice, there's negligence, and there's accident. We can figure out which it was, and act accordingly. Must we collapse these to a single situation with a single solution?
>If a mechanical device does something wrong, are we in the same conundrum?
Sure! But oop mentioned a phenomenon that some companies can hide after algorithms and reject taking responsibility for it. If machines cause damage, people can easily find who's fault, but sometimes the same way does not work on software.
That's reasonable. Let's just call it root cause analysis in this case.
The original point seemed to me to be "we can't use computers because they're not accountable". I say, we can, because we can do fault analysis and fix what is wrong. I won't say "we can hold them accountable", to avoid the category error.
I think folks may have different interpretations of accountability.
If your algorithm kills someone, is the accountability an improvement to the algorithm? A fine and no change to the algorithm? Imprisonment for related humans? Dissolution of some legal entity?
The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences for who are responsible for them. Those consequences can be good or bad, though it is often used to refer to bad.
An algorithm has no concept of consequences (unless programmed to be aware of such), and the more plausibly whoever wrote it can deny knowledge of the resulting consequences, also the more whoever wrote it can avoid consequences/accountability themselves. After all, we can tell Soldiers or Clerks that ‘just following orders’ is no excuse. But computers don’t do anything but follow orders.
Most people/organizations/etc have strong incentives to be able to avoid negative consequences, regardless of their actions or the results of their actions.
Everyone around them has strong incentives to ensure negative consequences for actions with foreseeable negative outcomes are applied to them.
Sometimes, organizations and people will find a way for the consequences of their actions to be borne by other people that have no actual control or ability to change actions being performed (scapegoat). Accountability ideally should not refer to that situation, but sometimes is abused to mean that.
That tends to result in particularly nasty outcomes.
> The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences
What I read is yes, the point is revenge. If I can offer you a different way of preventing harmful activity, apparently you're not interested. There has to be some unpleasant consequences inflicted, you insist on it.
Suppose I’m a bad actor that creates an unfair algorithm that overcharges the clients of my company. Eventually it’s discovered. The algorithm could be fixed, the servers decommissioned, whatever, but I’ve already won. If the people who requested the algorithm be made in that way, if the people who implemented it or ran it see no consequences, there’s absolutely nothing preventing me from doing the same thing another time, elsewhere.
Punishment for fraud seems sane, regardless of whether it’s enabled by code or me cooking some books by hand.
One could even argue (from a raw individual utility perspective - aka selfish) that if the person/people who did that suffered no negative consequences, they’d be fools to not do it again elsewhere.
The evolutionary function certainly encourages it, correct?
Ignoring that means that not applying consequences makes one actually culpable in the bad behavior occurring.
Especially if nothing changed re: rules or enforcement, etc.
Every rule/boundary/structure needs both a carrot, and a stick, to continue to exist long term.
Ideally, the stick never gets used. We aren’t dealing with ideals, however, we have to deal with reality.
On any sufficiently large scale, an inability/lack of will to use the stick, results in wide scale malfeasance. Because other constrains elsewhere result in wide scale push to break those rules/boundaries/structures for competitive reasons.
No carrot, magnifies the need to use the stick, eh? And turns it into nothing but beatings. Which is not sustainable either.
It has nothing to do with revenge. But if it makes you feel more comfortable, go ahead and call it that.
It’s ensuring cause and effect get coupled usefully. And is necessary for proper conditioning, and learning. One cannot learn properly if there is no ‘failure’ consequence correct?
All you need to do to verify this is, literally, look around at the structures you see everywhere, and what happens when they are or are not enforced. (Aka accountability vs a lack of it).
You now have to not only find someone responsible for the algorithm but also competent and with permission to do it. Isn't it clear that this is very hard?
"Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in."
Algorithms are used by people. An algorithm only allows "harmful and unaccountable systems" if people, as the agents imposing accountability, choose to not hold the people acting by way of the algorithm accountable on the basis of the use of the algorithm, but...that really has nothing to do with the algorithm. If you swapped in a specially-designated ritual sceptre for the algorithm in that sentence (or, perhaps more familiarly, allowed "status as a police officer" to confer both formal immunity from most civil liability and practical immunity from criminal prosecution for most harms done in that role), it functions exactly the same way: what enables harmful and unaccountable systems is when humans choose not to hold other humans accountable for harms, on whatever basis.
Yeah, I think you're conflating the arguments of "Weapons of Math Destruction" and "The Unaccountability Machine" here.
"The Unaccountability Machine," based on Mandy's summary in the OP, argues that organizations can become "accountability sinks" which make it impossible for anyone to be held accountable for problems those organizations cause. Put another way (from the perspective of their customers), they eliminate any recourse for problems arising from the organization which ought to in theory be able to address, but can't because of the form and function of the organization.
"Weapons of Math Destruction" argues that the scale of algorithmic systems often means that when harms arise, those harms happen to a lot of people. Cathy argues this scale itself necessitates treating these algorithmic systems differently because of their disproportionate possibility for harm.
Together, you can get big harmful algorithmic systems, able to operate at scale which would be impossible without technology, which exist in organizations that act as accountability sinks. So you get mass harm with no recourse to address it.
This is what I meant by the two pieces being complementary to each other.
This is a terrible example because it's simply not true:
> Davies gives the example of the case of Dominion Systems vs Fox News, in which Fox News repeatedly spread false stories about the election. No one at Fox seems to have explicitly made a decision to lie about voting machines; rather, there was an implicit understanding that they had to do whatever it took to keep their audience numbers up.
Rupert Murdoch conceded under oath that "Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election."[1] He knew the claims were false and decided not to direct the network to speak about it otherwise.
Communications from within Fox, by hosts, show they knew what they were saying was false.[2]
These two examples clearly fit the definition of lying [3].
The "External Links" section of Wikipedia gives references to the actual court documents that go into detail of who said what and knew what when [4]. There are many more instances which demonstrate that, indeed, people made explicit decisions to lie.
Voting machines are hacked every year at DEFCONs voting village. They're wildly insecure and no one should trust them. Frankly, any claims of manipulation of voting machines are at worst plausible.
No, you are confusing terms here. We are talking about Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network, which alleged that Fox had broadcast false statements that Dominion's voting machines had been rigged specifically to steal the 2020 election.
That is a wildly different than reporting on what is demonstrated at DEFCON's voting village. What are you trying to pull.
Winning or loosing a lawsuit doesn't say much about the truth of any matter. Especially when it's a civil suit between corporations, or a criminal suit in a jurisdiction that has plea deals.
Accounts are hacked every second. They are wildly insecure and noone should trust them. Frankly saying you are just a hacked account is at worst plausible.
You logic is flawed at the core.
With that train of thought you can infer everything.
My suspicion I'd that one of the major appeals of automation and especially "app-ification" for management and C-Suite types is specifically its ability to break accountability links.
A lot of corporations now seem to have a structure where the org chart contains the following pattern:
- a "management layer" (or several of them) which consists of product managers, software developers, ops people, etc. The main task of this group is to maintain and implement new features for the "software layer", i.e. the company's in-house IT infrastructure.
Working here feels very much like working in a tech company.
- a "software layer": This part is fully automated and consists of a massive software and hardware infrastructure that runs the day-to-day business of the company. The software layer has "interfaces" in the shape of specialized apps or devices that monitor and control the people in the "worker's layer".
- a "worker's layer": This group is fully human again. It consists of low-paid, frequently changing staff who perform most of the actual physical work that the business requires (and that can't be automated away yet) - think Uber drivers, delivery drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, etc.
They have no contact at all with the management layer and little contact, if any, with human higher-ups. They get almost all their instructions through the apps and other interfaces of the software layer. Companies frequently dispute that those people technically belong to the company at all.
Whether or not those people are classified as employees, the important point (from the management's POV) is that the software layer serves as a sort of "accountability firewall" between the other two layers.
Management only gives the high-level goal of how the software should perform, but the actual day-to-day interaction with the workers is exclusively done by the software itself.
The result is that any complaints from the worker's layer cannot go up past the software - and any exploitative behavior towards the workers can be chalked up as an unfortunate software error.
In my opinion it's even more complicated, as the "management layer" is also using these tactics against itself. "You must use an iPhone", "You cannot expense this trip with company card", "Your permission request to do XYZ in our cloud was automatically declined", "This tool only works in Google Chrome". Why? "The rules say so" / "The system says so". Who set "the rules"? Who set up "the system"? Nobody seems to know, and digging into it yourself is a herculean effort and usually a waste of time.
If you think back to less automated times, management was the programming —- you built instructions and procedures that allowed organisation to scale and improve your end product.
The only thing that changed is that now instructions and procedures are oftentimes executed by software and hardware, not by actual human beings. Hence the use of software engineering wing, in addition to your usual, sorry for the lack of better word, “meat programmers” aka organisational execs.
Interestingly, the end result customers get has not changed, despite many people coloring it that way. People still get same cup of coffee or a taxi ride, just quicker/cheaper/marginally better. But such incremental improvements were achievable in the business world before IT era using same exact means, through internal product management and imrovement of org procedures, applied to people and processes instead of pieces of software.
Yes, in principle nothing has changed since at least Fordian times - back then we had factory workers on one side and owners, managers and engineers on the other side, with the intermediate role perhaps being the foreman or something similar.
I still think there is some difference in kind, not just degree: A human operational exec at least has to engage with the workers personally, witness the conditions they are working in, is exposed to complaints, etc. Even the most uncaring foreman is therefore forced into a position where he is subjected to accountability. He also has personal contact with the upper layer and can pass on that accountability to his higher-ups.
In contrast, a software layer is physically unable to hear complaints and to pass them back up the chain. Because it's not a human, it cannot take accountability itself - however, it can still give higher-ups plausible deniability about "not having known" about problems.
(A knock-on effect is also that it will prevent workers from even attempting to communicate the problem, because no one wants to talk to a wall)
Therefore it creates an accountability sink where there was none in the old structure.
(None in theory at least, of course there were enough other ways to be shielded from accountability even before computers)
My experience: only the good operational execs engage personally, and only for specific reasons of gathering feedback and improving the overall system.
You’d be surprised how often decisions are made without ever seeing people at work, or communicating with them in a meaningful way. There are managers who do engage first hand, but they are not real decision makers, and just relay the report on situation and context upstream / execute on decisions of others. Relay of accurate first hand information from workers to execs almost never happens.
As one of the neighbor threads accurately highlighted: this is by design, both on customer side and on worker’s side. Customers get vouchers, workers get retainers, among both there is a calculated percentage of people facing what they see as “accountability sink”, what is in reality a machine intentionally designed that way.
Nothing has changed for rich people who didn’t see their employees as people anyway. When you are the one stuck with a computer as your boss then tell me nothing has changed. Good luck getting a reference for a better job!
That's a really thought provoking article.
And my thinking is this highlights the importance of government consumer protection agency/laws as the protection against that. I.e. when you fly through Europe or use European airlines, there is this EU law that gives you compensation of ~ 600 EUR if your flight is delayed by more than 3 hours or cancelled or whatever. This is a good insurance that no matter what BS is thrown at you at the airport by the company, you will get your compensation. And the process of getting the money is reasonably straightforward. What that gives is a way of avoiding any kind of airline systems, and just leads to the compensation. Also I hope that serves as an actual motivation for the airline to perform reasonably well, because otherwise they'll pay too much in fines. I think we really need this kind of protection laws in order to avoid the situation of chatbot-wall shielding companies from customers.
At least in my experience, I asked for compensation 3 times and got the money in every case (with different companies: American Airlines, United and Lufthansa). But I agree the system could be improved further.
I've asked for compensation twice (Swiss and Air Canada) and gotten it once (Air Canada). Even the successful case wasn't resolved without many many emails.
I experience this pretty often with the newfangled, automated government e-filing systems.
As a screen-reader-using person who cannot use pen and paper without assistance, I was once quite enamored by them, but I've changed my stance a bit.
The thing about pen and paper is that it accepts anything you put in, and it's up to a human to validate whether what you put in makes any sense. Computers aren't like that, if they tell you that the numbers in your application have to match up, you need to lie to the government to make them match up, even if you're a weird edge case where the numbers should, in fact, be slightly off and "inconsistent" with each other.
I called the local govt office responsible for this specific program, and they essentially told me to lie to the government in not so many words. Their system is centrally managed, they have no power of introducing updates to it, they wish they could fix it, but even they aren't empowered to do so.
When I was a grad student in STS I was considering doing a project on how software can function as an "agency adjuster" where individuals come to bear the risks of something (generally an economic transaction) and the majority of the profits go to the owner of the software. In many ways Uber & related services are about allowing individuals to take on very low-probability high-acuity downside risk for a small fee.
I think this sort of analysis is valid and fruitful in a very general sense. Software as a recently adopted vehicle in a long tradition of liability displacement / diffusion of responsibility / agency modification
Yah - it lies outside of the narrowly technical (though technical systems come up a lot) and part of what I would talk about would have been: how much is this a trick and how much of this is real? Like, is software doing slight of hand and really Uber (or whoever) should be taxed on an externality / risk? Or does this electronic machine of software genuinely create a new arrangement of responsibility? My unhelpful understanding is "it depends" and even in the Uber case it's a bit mixed, though on balance I think Uber is more of a scam than a truly new thing (even though there's some new there).
My intuition is similar; software can distribute responsibility in ways no previous vehicle could, by virtue of speed, scale, and mode of interaction (in a McLuhan-ish "medium as message" sense). But it's still an evolution of long pre-existing social dynamics, not (or relatively rarely) an absolute novelty. Scamming is an ancient art which we did not invent, I suspect, but rather discovered ourselves doing already. Only painstakingly (and still only partially) have we dragged the concept into the light of consciousness.
I feel the same way about artificial intelligence: it's not new, it's all around us, digital computation merely crystallizes the concept. But shiny objects should not distract us from the much more general phenomenon.
Hmm, the analysis with respect to FOSS could also interesting. might make less sense to consider profit/compensation. Might be more useful to think of responsibility flows.. (or sources as well as sinks)
Yah - I think there's value there too. I am a huge fan of FOSS ofc - and also it's good to look at how FOSS allows companies to avoid hiring developers because they can use FOSS products. The first benefit I think of is trying to come up with FOSS approaches that would convince or coerce companies to contribute back to the projects they use at least a little.
I was thinking about something similar today. Sometimes accountability can be a blocker, for example for hiring.
If you have 1 candidate, it's an easy call, if you have 3 candidates, you evaluate in less than a week. If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.
You can't evaluate all the information and make an informed decision, the optimal strategy is to flip a 100 sided die, but no one is going to be on the hook for that.
> If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.
That's not how accountability works, in the traditional sense.
What you described is Person A (accountable for hiring) hiring person B (responsible for screening and evaluating candidates). Person A is still accountable for the results of Person B. If Person B hired a sh*t candidate, it still lands on Person A for not setting up an adequate hiring system.
Being accountable for something doesn't forbid you from delegating to other people. It is very common for 1 person to be accountable for multiple people's work.
heh never works that way. an experienced bureucrat like you describe always has a shit-deflecting canopy. so whatever decisions he personally took are never attributable to him personally.
what you’re describing is not someone who is accountable for something.
In the hiring example, perhaps the person A stops being accountable for hiring someone successful in the role, and rather they are accountable for successfully hiring persons B who is capable of hiring someone to fill the role.
Essentially creating an accountability chain. If you want to describe a logical chain of accountability instead as a “accountability sink”, then I’d go along with that.
It’s true that accountability chains can be difficult to keep track of and the longer they get, the blurrier they get.
The comments here are grossly oversimplifying this concept.
Sure you are a little bit responsible if your hiring manager hires a dud, but not as much. Similarly your hiring manager is not as responsible as the dud, accountability loses power in each chain.
You can fire your hiring manager and pick another one if he fails too often for example
I learned early on when I moved from development to management that a big part of my job was being accountable for everything my team did (short of outright sabotage). You don't hold junior devs accountable for anything, you do your best to monitor their work anytime they're working on something mission critical and to mentor them through the mistakes they make. Senior devs take on some or a lot of that monitoring and mentoring role, especially as the team size grows, but as their manager I am still accountable for any errors they make too (especially including letting errors from junior devs slip through).
Sometimes I think the most important part of my job is standing up before senior management and saying something like "My team made this series of decisions which resulted in the bad outcome we are here to discuss. I apologise and accept full responsibility. The team has learned from this, and we can assure you we will never repeat this mistake." And then deflecting and outright refusing to throw any of my team under the bus by naming them - to the point of being accused of insubordination occasionally.
(To be honest, I didn't internalise that quite early enough. There are probably a few apologies I should have made from back then...)
You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do. At the end of the day it's a trolley problem (the real one, not deciding between two bad things, but looking at how people typically define reponsibility)
One way or another you gotta own the decisions you make and deal with it. Even if the decision is to let someone else make the decision.
The issue is that, yes, absolving yourself of accountability sure does free you to scale in ways previously thought unimaginable, it doesn't mean you absolve yourself of responsibility. The cure is keeping accountability in favor of scaling which means a much smaller scale to everything we have been doing.
Another way to think about it. If you said you would give me 1 million dollars but I had to fully own up to what 1000 random people do in the next 24 hours I'd say thats a pretty raw deal. Basically no chance that a million will cover the chaos that a few of those 1000 people could cause. What some people do is take the million and then figure out how to rid themselves of the reponsibility.
> You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do.
Sure. And the article allows for that. You need to have "an account" that acknowledges that at the time you didn't and couldn't have enough information to completely de risk the decision, but that you'd discussed and agreed that the 1/100 (or 1/5 or 1/10,000) risk of the bad outcome was a known and acceptable risk.
"where an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event?"
Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee B doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee C doing their job correctly according to the process, and the end result is shit, then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself. As more and more employees are involved, and the processes get more and more hierarchical (rather than "employee A", you have "middle-manager M"), then the person with accountability is higher and higher up the hierarchy, who also has more and more power and responsibility to fix it.
The idea of "unaccountable" failures only makes sense if both (a) the problem is so systemic that actually an executive is accountable, (b) the executive is so far removed in the hierarchy from the line employees doing the work that nobody knows each other or sometimes even sits on the same campus, (c) the levers available to the executive to fix the problem are insufficient for fixing the problem, e.g. the underlying root cause is a culture problem, but culture is determined by who you hire, fire, and promote, while hiring and firing are handled by "outside" HR who are unaccountable to the executive who is supposedly accountable. But really this is another way of saying that accountability is simply another level higher, i.e. it is the CEO who is accountable since both the executive and HR are accountable to the CEO.
No, you have to have an astoundingly large organization (like government) to really have unaccountability sinks, where Congress pass laws with explicit intent for some desired outcome, but after passing through 14 committees and working groups the real-language policy has been distorted to produce the exact opposite effect, like a great big game of telephone, one defined by everyone trying to de-risk, because the only genuine shared culture across large organizations is de-risking, and it is simply not possible to actually put in place both policy and real-life changes to hiring, firing, and promotion practices in the public sector to start to take more risks, because at the end of the day, even the politicians in Congress are trying to de-risk, and civil servants burning taxpayer money on riskier schemes is not politically popular, though maybe it should be, considering the costs of de-risked culture.
> Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process... then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself.
The book's point is that while this _should_ be the case, all too often it's not. AFAIK, nobody has been charged with forging documents in the case of Wells Fargo cross selling. Not the counter clerks who directly responded to incentives and management pressure nor the executives who built that system.
This is exactly why being an executive of a large organization is so incredibly difficult to pull off well. Sure, you can let your assistant fill your calendar with a bunch of meetings you don't want to be in to spend 95% of the meeting listening, 4% being the arbiter who tells people what they already knew they needed to do but refused to do it until asked by someone in authority, and 1% saying you'll take it further up the ladder. You will also fail hard because you will be constantly blindsided by people either fucking up (at best) or gaming (at worst) the processes for which you are responsible. Small example litmus test: in organizations that use Jira, whether the executives are comfortable with JQL and building their own dashboards to tell them what they need to know, or whether they expect their direct reports to present their work. If it's the latter, how can an executive be surprised that their reports are always coming in with sunny faces and graphs going up and to the right?
That too many companies are not willing to hold executives accountable for processes that they are, in theory, supposed to be accountable for is an entirely different problem. The law proscribes, the officer arrests, and the judge presides, but all rests upon the jury to convict. If a company's "jury" is not willing to "convict", because the crime is one of negligence and not treason, then the company has larger problems and I'd like to short their stock, please.
Also, usually these situations involve intentionally (or not, depending on how charitable one is being) passing back and forth between different divisions/groups.
So the only one with consistent power over all groups is an executive so high up the food chain (in some cases not even the CEO!) that they can plausibly claim ignorance.
I think "accountability" here was the wrong word to begin with. I believe they are more talking about "ability for feedback" or even better "just in time corrections". Feedback exists, but from my experience nobody reads those form submissions - maybe an AI these days that will create a summary... The latter is purposefully removed from all processes :(
Douglas Adams was here in 1982 with the invention of the SEP field
‘An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.
The narration then explains:
The Somebody Else's Problem field... relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.’
This article seems to redefine the word "accountability". In the first sentence:
> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.
Why not just call it "no-consequence sinks"?
It's somewhat of an oxymoron to say "accountability" isn't working because there's no consequence. Without any consequence there is no accountability. So why call it accountability in the first place?
This article is describing something along the lines of "shared accountability" which, in project management, is a well known phenomenon: if multiple people are accountable for something, then no one is accountable.
If someone is accountable for something that they can't do fully themselves, they are still accountable for setting up systems (maybe even people to help) to scale their ability to remain accountable for the thing.
I think it’s that the accountability falls into the sink and doesn’t reach the decision maker. I still find accountability poorly defined, even after the effort. Clicking through to the definition helps.
It’s all kinda mushy. Being accountable is hearing and knowing a story. I don’t see why that has to correlate with decision power.
The point of the article could be made much more clearly by talking about systems that leave decision makers not aware of the consequences of their decisions. All the anecdotes in the article fit that pattern.
I think people don’t use the language of decision-consequences because it doesn’t capture an emotional aspect they’d rather not say out loud. They want the decision maker to feel their pain, they want the decision maker to hurt.
Decision makers can be aware of how many unready rooms are caused by less cleaning staff, how many flights they’re cancelling. I’d actually bet they are. But that’s not enough, the harmed person wants to tell their story.
In the article, there are human agents involved at all times; sometimes people create accountability sinks even without humans.
You're a neolithic farmer, and plant your barley, but that year there's a drought; you suffer the consequences, but who (or what) do you hold accountable?
I get this, but I think we can recognize the author might not be from the same background. Which I think you can talk about the point while noting what language is used in your community.
After all, is it the words or the ideas behind the words that matter more? We should always be trying to improve our language, but I'm worried if we prioritize words over meanings. I feel it's an important thing considering how language is constantly evolving.
I disagree with the authors definition of accountability:
> The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.
No.
You can absolutely be accountable for something that you can’t change a decision about. Simple example: You’re a branding agency and you decide to rename X to Y. (No pun intended). The rebrand to Y fails. You’re accountable for the failure, but likely don’t have the ability to change anything by the time you know the results of your decision.
Edit: ok, fair I agree. Bad example. A simpler example would be the person in the article continuing to point the the boss above them until there’s no one left. The chain would break somewhere along the way, but the broken chain is communication rather than one of accountability.
The information may not reach the person able to make a change. But that doesn’t make them not accountable. If that person is unable to make a change because they’re in vacation for a month without anyone filling in, that person is accountable for both the results AND future results that are caused by not having someone monitor/reroute their acckuntability.
It's not clear from the article (which I largely agree with), but that "ability to change the decision" can just as easily refer to change the decision before it is made, instead of any ability to change it afterwards.
Amazon's concept of "two way and one way doors" is useful here. A two way door decision lets you go back if the decision turns out to be bad and can be made with significantly less scrutiny that a one way door decision which you cannot back out of after you've acted on it.
It's much like the distinction between responsibility and blame. At least in English, it seems like a lot of different meanings often get blurred together.
At its root, responsibility is about who responds, rather than who causes.
In that example, accountability is not with the branding firm at any point. Someone at the client that hired the branding firm is accountable for approving the rebrand and someone at the client is accountable for leaving it in place.
The branding firm certainly does not seem to have performed well, from the scenario you described. But accountability is not the same as performance or even culpability.
we can argue semantics all day but when I see 'accountability' to me it means 'this person's ass is on the line'
shared accountability is spreading that risk around to a group (but I don't think it necessarily eliminates that accountability – you can fire an entire department if you need to)
author's point, which I think is interesting, is that there's bermuda triangles where accountability cannot occur and that these can manifest naturally, outside of any traditional RACI
I feel like the article, or perhaps just the example, is missing the point.
>> a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room.
This reads from the perspective of a person checking in. But it should read from the perspective of the person who made the decision.
The decision was made like this;
On most days we have too many cleaners. If we reduce the cleaners we reduce expenses by x.
On some days some customers will need to wait to check-in. Let's move checkin time from 1pm to 2pm (now in some cases to 4pm) to compensate. n% of customers arrive after 4pm anyway. We start cleaning early, so chances are we can accommodate early checkin where necessary.
Where there's no room available before 4pm, some % will complain. Most of those will be placated with a voucher [1] which cost us nothing.
Some small fraction will declare "they'll never use us again". Some will (for reasons) but we'll lose a few.
But the savings outweigh the lost business. Put some of the savings into marketing and sales will go up. Costs remain lower. More profit.
There is perfect accountability of this plan - the board watches to see if profits go up. They don't care about an individual guest with individual problems. The goal of the business is not to "make everyone happy". It's to "make enough people happy" to keep profits.
[1] the existance of the voucher proves this possibility was accounted for.
So accountability in this case is working - except for the customer who didn't get what they want. The customer feels frustrated, so from their perspective there's a failure. But there are other perspectives in play. And they are working as designed.
And even in the case where the company's decision is arguably just "bad," it still might not be a problem from the company's point of view.
Companies (including start-ups) create buggy products all the time and don't care, and aren't very responsive to requests for support, as long as money is coming in. I don't think they are using special accountability-flushing techniques. It takes real work, intention, experience, and power in a company to create feedback channels, and use them, and ensure that the customer has an experience of quality. It doesn't happen by magic or by default.
I rather think accountability improved a lot. Esp. with the decline of buerocratic walls.
Accountibility always was down. Back in aristocracy you were never allowed to ask for support. Only in modern civilisation this improved. Middle management, the clueless in the Gervais principle, need their walls.
Don't be fooled by the decline of customer support in big orgs, like Google, Apple, or Amazon. They believe that support cannot scale, or if it's really needed, it needs to be outsourced to India or East Asia.
> you should make yourself unavailable for contact, when you suspect someone is trying to blackmail you.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how often does blackmail happen that it rises to the level of needing strategic advice like "make yourself unavailable" ?
Politicians setting policies for use of nuclear weapons during the cold war, IIRC. Among others, at least.
I read parts of that book many years ago, I recall the major theme is that voluntarily sacrificing control over the situation can be a powerful way to force the other party to do what you want. Like if you and me are playing "chicken", speeding towards each other and wanting the other to turn away first, you ripping out your steering wheel and throwing it out for me to see is a guaranteed way to force me to turn first and lose. This kind of stuff.
I guess it ties into the larger topic here in that you can avoid being held accountable if you remove the ability to make any choices yourself.
This is how we get a Dr. Strangelove situation. If both people take that advice then they both crash into each other, even if they realize at the last minute it was a terrible idea.
What the article describes seems like a parallel concept (and an important one.) I wouldn't call them Accountability Sinks, though, as they seem more like Accountability Avoiders. Here are things we might think of as sinks in the real world:
- "Sin Eaters"
- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company
- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)
Ideally, a consultant is hired for their specialist skills, rare experience, sage advice on niche topics, etc...
In practice, about half the work I do is to act as a lightning rod so that the guy with the power to sign the cheque for my time doesn't get fired if things go sideways. Instead, they can just blame me, shrug their shoulders, and hire another consultant.
I've had a customer where I got "fired" for an "error". My coworker replaced me. Then he was fired, and I replaced him. We alternated like this for years. Upper management just saw the "bad" consultants get fired for their incompetence, they never noticed that we were the same two guys over and over.
I don’t know how much it works with consulting because someone has to approve paying them. If they do a bad job you can blame whoever brought them in. It does make it easier to do something you were going to do anyways though.
There was a leaked memo essentially instructing to form a committee when you make an illegal decision so that one person cannot be sent to jail. Does anyone remember this? I've had a hard time finding it
Taleb's Skin in the Game seem to be related to this, but from a different optic. Goodhart's Law is also mentioned, but is not the core argument. In the end, is about agency, who have it, and system dynamics to get rid of responsibility.
The modern company is a very very limited liability company:
- Cut corners so your jets crash and kill people (Boeing)?
- Cheat on emissions testing so your product kill people (VW)?
- Hush up drug trial results so you kills people (Pfizer)?
- Sloppy security leads to hundreds of millions of people's personal data being leaked (too many to mention)?
What happens to those in charge? Nothing. Perhaps they leave with a big golden handshake. If it's really bad, they get a don't do it again agreement with the Feds.
No accountability means no feedback/skin in the game. So nothing gets better.
Liability and retroactive clawbacks need to be introduced, particularly for very large organizations that like the government, don’t face real competition.
Accountability sinks sounds a lot like the Toyota factory story, where on the contrary, every employee in the factory could pull the 'stop' lever if they thought there was a quality problem. Which of course drastically increased quality and feedback because the process is interrupted and stops.
But I don't think it is quite so black and white in the world. Because the legal system is also a way to give feedback to companies. And it can stop them in their tracks.
This is a small part of business reality. It's not clear how calling out a specific aspect really helps; indeed, it may hurt when business leaders learn how to do this more effectively. It's not at all clear that calling people irresponsible or unaccountable is actually effective at changing the transaction features; it likely makes things worse.
Transaction cost economics since the 1960's has been enumerating aspects like these, and showing they in fact determine the shape of business organizations and markets. Exported costs (implied in accountability sink) are mostly the rule rather than the exception.
What to do with them? A primary TCE finding is that if there were no transaction costs to adjudicating liability, it wouldn't matter from the social cost perspective where the liability lay (with the perpetrator or the victim) because they would adjudicate it down to their mitigation costs. As a result, the main policy goal for assigning liability (if you want to minimize the total cost to society) is actually to minimize and correct for adjudication transaction costs. (hence, no-fault divorce and car insurance)
The same dynamics are at play in the market and within organizations.
As a participant if your goal is your own profit, you can gain by making it harder to adjudicate and reducing the benefits thereof (hence binding arbitration, waivers, and lack of effective feedback). Doing so is becoming much simpler as virtual transaction interfaces and remote (even foreign) support afforded by software replace face-to-face interactions bound by social convention.
And who wouldn't want to? If you're head of customer support or developer relations, would you document your bugs or face the wrath of customers for things which can't change fast enough? You'd want to protect yourself and your staff from all the negativity. Indeed, with fixed salaries, your only way of improving your lot is to make your job easier.
To me the solution is to identify when incorporating the feedback actually benefits the participants. There, too, the scalability of virtualized software interfaces can help, e.g., the phone tree that automates simple stuff most people need and vectors complex questions to real people who aren't so harried, or the departing-customer survey querying whether it was price, quality, or service that drove one away.
I liked this article a lot - it made me think about the ways large companies operate from a different viewpoint.
At the same time, though, I think it's a mistake to leave out the fact that, in many ways, modern society is just so fundamentally complex that we (as a society at large) deliberately forego demanding accountability because we believe the system is so complex that it's impossible to assign blame to a single person.
For example, given this is HN and many of us are software developers, how many times have we collectively supported "blameless cultures" when it comes to identifying and fixing software defects. We do this because we believe that software is so complex, and "to err is human", that it would be a disservice to assign blame to an individual - we say instead that the process should assume mistakes are inevitable, and then improve the process to find those mistakes earlier in the software lifecycle.
But while I believe a "blameless culture" is valuable, I think a lot of times you can identify who was at fault. I mean, somebody at CrowdStrike decided to push a data update, without verifying it first, that bluescreened a good portion of the world's Windows machines and caused billions in damages.
I just think that if you believe "accountability sinks" are always a bad thing, don't forget the flip side: would things always be better if we could always assign "root cause blame" to a specific individual?
I think you are conflating accountability and blame when I don't think those terms can be used interchangeably here. Accountability can be used as a way of assigning blame, but that isn't all that it is good for.
Accountability, at least as presented here, is about feeeback between those affected by a decision and those making it. In a "blameless culture", people are still held to account for their decisions and actions but are not blamed for their results.
I would argue that a blameless culture actually makes accountability sinks less likely to develop. In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture.
Thanks, I found your response really helpful, and it helped identify some of the mistakes in my thinking. "In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture." - that really made a lot of sense to me.
A blameless postmortem culture says that when a human error is identified in the causal chain leading to an incident, there will be no consequences for the individual. In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.
> In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.
The two concepts we are talking about are each talked about under each label so there is enough ambiguity in both words that this is true. However choosing to use 'blame' in the opposite sense from the one being used in that context adds nothing to the conversation.
Systems Theory would describe this as "intrinsic responsibility".
From Donella Meadows:
“Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision-makers.
Super interesting concept, because these complaints tend to end up at the bottom of top management backlog due to amount of time and attention required to analyse these. In real life it just does not work unless your org is in the low hundreds of customers.
This could change if technology could solve aggregation and analysis problem, making ready-made decision propositions to management. High risk of this mechanism just becoming another accountability sink, though.
Another solution is to build large organisations out of federated micro-orgs, where such intristic responsibility is feasible.
>> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.
Government and Civil Servant are the biggest example. I guess its time to re-watch "Yes Minister".
I guess you haven’t worked in many large companies. I’m currently working for a large American company, and the waste and inefficiencies there beat most Swedish government agencies I’ve ever have had to deal with.
I wouldn't be surprised with Waste and inefficiencies, but this is about Accountability. And I did work in both Fortune 500 companies and within Government.
The future iterations of this are purely terrifying. This is so elegantly demonstrated by the Oscar Nominated short film “Please Hold” from 2022. Picked up by mistake by a roving police drone, a young man is incarcerated autonomously and has no way of release outside of money or time.
In the 400 blows, Truffaut plays a schoolteacher whose disciplinary methods in the classroom only accentuate the rebelliousness of a boy. At home, this trickles down and he decides to run and drink milk. At the end, we find him on a beach and the film ends.
Enforcing copyright law through an honest projection of 35mm film footage is a philanthropic endeavour. Making sure that every member of the production team, even the gaffers and stage hands take part in the exclusivity of re-capitalisation efforts, like the Fox complaint, is purely, legalistic sleight of hand.
you can't have accountability in a world where you can be a good family member and work for a company that manufactures bombs that kill families. This doesnt compute in humans. They cant deal with that. If you cant handle accountability for that ... who cares about you getting into your hotel room a little later or missing a flight or not getting health insurance ... no biggie.
what you can have is a discussion about this or a blog post that is read by people and maybe some new subscribers, so no worries - all is not lost. :)
That suddenly reminded me of a Redditor talking about how some acquaintance of theirs works for a US military technology company, but is only involved in non-weapons research that has civilian applications.
When pressed, the Redditor said that the their friend was working on the mathematical theory for computers to control planes that have no power, such as under emergency landing conditions. I.e.: If the engine dies, the auto pilot can help steer the plane onto a runway.
"No, your friend is working on precision glide bombs. The emergency landing thing is just marketing to make it palatable. She might not even know, but that's definitely what she'd doing."
That stuck with me: someone could be working on bomb technology and not even know it.
When stock you've held for years rockets to the moon, and your major banking institution with 100 billion dollar annual revenue experiences "technical difficulties" at the login page. You can't sell your meagre crumbs until the spaceship has completed its orbit and you're left with no doubt about who the system doesn't work for.
My theory is all developed societies converge on having no accountability in the governing positions. Of course, I may and most like am wrong but if you look at say politics you must at least think about this being a real possibility
There has been a lot of talk of silos in the company I work for and the need to break them down. This looks like it could be a big part of why they have been so hard to tackle.
Judge, Jury and Executioner
Firing Squad
Limited Liability Organisation
Humans like to sleep at night. An emergent property of our rule of law is that it exists in a way to reduce the moral culpability of any individual. A police man, a jury member, a judge, a inspector, an executioner, a jailer, they all exist in very neat boxes. These boxes allow them to sleep at night. Surely the Judge has few qualms going by the recommended mandatory minimum, after the jury, who is assured the judge will provide a fair sentence, and the executioner doubly so, with double the potential moral hazard, is certain at least two other parties have done their due diligence.
these systems prevent a single actor from acting. More like they allow a series of hand offs, so by the time the jailer is slamming the doors shut, they are bereft of any investment in the morality of the outcome
The firing squad, with seven guns, all line up, with just one loaded. The rest are blanks. Each man can sleep at night, regardless if the murdered man was surely deserving of death
large institutions, organizations and objects are scale are fully inhumane
I would rather have my jailer be my judge and my executioner be each man or woman on the jury. Isolating each of these things allows the individuals to have almost a powerless notion of 'completing our task'. As if all tasks completed would add up to a moral outcome
Should juries be formed to perform the whipping of an individual, the institutionalization in their own homes, the judge forced to starve a prisoner in his cell, i find the outcomes would be different
The right to a trial by jury was specifically meant to prevent personal bias from the judge affecting the outcome of the trial.
Letting juries perform executions and judges be responsible for the imprisonment of the guilty just creates a massive perverse incentive for sadistic individuals.
You wrongly assume that either judge or jury would be more empathetic if they were burdened with the weight of these things. Instead, you'll get the people you least want in charge of these things doing them.
Aside from the method of using blanks at executions, everything else about the system protects the convicted, not the people in the system itself.
not just the moral piece, but the passive nature. Once I do this, then it goes to the next person. I don't need wait for the taxpayer to come by and demand ransom for my work to send money off to the capital so they can fund wars in far away lands, it just comes right out of my paycheque
I agree with the description. But make no judgment of its morality or pretend to have a better system, no shred of humility in that.
Of course you can run a political party suggesting that this division of powers thing was a step in the wrong direction, or better yet, take a trip to any of the dozens of countries with superdictators.
“The blood of the First Men still flows in the veins of the Starks, and we hold to the belief that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”
I get a lot of shit for saying this, but I agree completely!
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with eating animals. But I have a particularly carnivorous friend who thinks hunting is for sociopaths, because he “loves animals”.
If I wouldn’t harvest it, I won’t eat it. And I definitely would be too timid to slaughter a freaking cow lol
I think it's a matter of hygiene and speed. Sure I could butcher a chicken, maybe have a shot at a bigger animal like a goat or cow. I've seen it multiple times since I live in a country that regularly do animal sacrifice. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to do it as clean or as fast as the usual butcher.
It does feel different from market-bought meat though, at least for me.
> Each man can sleep at night, regardless if the murdered man was surely deserving of death
Surely this line of reasoning requires the presence of omniscient judgement (ie the abrahamic god) to make sense. Otherwise all gunmen would (and should) assume practical responsibility
It's a reasonable thing to do. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. If you could demand responsibility from any grievance you have from anyone they could dement responsibility from you for the distress you caused them with your grievance.
ahem at least in the Western world corporations were invented by the Church, an entity well known to me not accountable....look at the 94 apologies and the Pope's words before and after each apology....
By the way this is what bitcoin was set up to solve...notice it not being solved.
I find that the word "accountability" almost always obscures what's being talked about. If we remove it, we can instead talk about understanding and feedback:
As organizations become more complex, it's difficult to understand the consequences of many high-level decisions. Unless great effort is made to gather feedback, it won't happen.
Not only that: the lack of immediate, human communication results in one-way feedback mechanisms, like suggestion boxes and surveys. Many companies clearly want to make this work, because we're constantly prompted and sometimes paid to fill out surveys. But the result is survey fatigue.
The person giving feedback needs to be reassured (by people, not machines) that their feedback matters, or they won't be bothered to do it. Often, it's socially awkward to give negative feedback, so people don't. And often, the employees directly on the scene have incentive to encourage customers to avoid negativity when they fill out surveys.
One way to show that feedback matters is to respond to complaints with some sort of assistance. In the example in the article, that's a voucher. Perhaps somewhere in the organization, that voucher counts as a cost, but it's pretty unsatisfying.
In some organizations, managers are encouraged to work at the support desk occasionally as a more immediate way to understand what's going on. (I remember reading about how Craig Newmark would do this for his website.)
You're really good at bullshitting and saying nothing at the same time. Feedback and communication is pointless without accountability. I'm sure this sounded smart when you were typing it out but man, this is dumb. Like, this is literally what lack of accountability sounds like.
I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought.
It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers.
Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat
I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but computers can only interact in the way the UI was designed, and no programmer accounted or cared for my scenario
The ground attendant couldn't have done anything of course because it wasn't part of the scope of her job, and this was the part of germany where nice was not one of their stereotypes.
Eventually I got a survey a week later about a different leg of the flight, so could I really complain there? that one was fine? I had a paranoid wonder if that was intentional
Germany is somewhat rubbish.
I arrived at the train station in the night after 6 hours train journey. German Railways app shows there will be my final leg train in 45 minutes. I wait in the cold at night, sitting in the station building because it's warmer there. 5 minutes before departure I go on the platform. The local display shows no train, even though the all still shows it. I waited for nothing.
Syncing the app with the train station? Somebody else's problem.
In half an hour there should be a replacement bus for another cancelled train. There are no signs in the app or the station that indicate where that bus is to be found. You just need to know.
Putting sings for replacement buses due to degraded service that's long planned and already happening for 2 months? Somebody else's problem.
An old man asks if the bus will allow to catch the train connection at its destination. The bus driver bitches at him for asking that question -- not his job. Somebody else's problem.
Training the bus driver that, being an official replacement of a train, he needs to know that, clearly also somebody else's problem than that of the German Railways.
It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.
The bus is ice cold for an hour. When am old lady gets off and tells the bus driver that it was freezing all journey, he asks "well what can you do". Bewildered she answers "turn on the heating"? He didn't expect that. He seemed to think that everything except driving was somebody else's problem.
This is just one night's bus journey story. I also got my SIM card deleted and a parcel was lost in the subsequent week. Documenting here the amounts of "somebody else's problem" I encountered in their customer support hotlines is somebody else's problem for me for now.
There is some degree of accountability for DB: Other organizations like Swiss and Austrian railways stopped taking schedules of DB seriously and stopped waiting or booking through.
And the root of all that? Privatization.
The German mail rail and track operator (Deutsche Bahn) isn't private but 100% state owned (and control sits with the federal government). They wanted to privatize it a couple of decades ago but abandoned it. There is still some hybridization between supposedly it being a business and also a public service left in the law, though.
The Deutsche Bahn AG is in fact a private Aktiengesellschaft(which is to say a stock company) with the german gov't owning 100% of the shares. I'd very much argue that it is run mostly like a private enterprise and only occasionally compelled by the government to act like a public service.
Yes, but doesn't change that it is 100% state owned and controlled with a mixed mandate (business/public service - see art 87e GG). No reason to absolve the owner and the associated politics from their responsibilities.
The legal form doesn't determine whether something is state owned or private.
I would say Deutsche Bahn has managed to combine the disadvantages of public services with the disadvantages of private companies into one coherently terrible package.
Well it's pretty much the same with the SNCF in France. However, surprisingly it is still more reliable than the DB (less accident, more on time); which is quite shocking considering German's reputation...
It's still the government running the company if they own all the shares. So what's your point?
You sure the ~600 companies that the Deutsche Bahn is made up of can be compared to one state-owned entity?
All rolls up into one 100% owner and having a lot of subsidiaries isn't unusual.
I believe they make a good point: making a vertically integrated entity could matter more than just buying most of the shares.
If we are discussing tendencies of "privatized vs public", it's hard to ignore that factor. Public entities that historically worked well weren't just masses of 600 subcontractors.
But again, that is up to the owners - and the owner is the state. Also, the state didn't buy most of the shares: it had full ownership before and kept it while the legal form changed.
The actual root is even widely acknowledged: DB has been underfunded for a long time.
It’s an AG, why should it be funded?
Most of the world agrees that public transport has external benefits and therefore is deserving of public funding.
Why would it not given the legal framework put in place?
Given how good the rail systems are in several Asian cities despite/thanks to being private, you might want to reconsider that opinion.
I presume running a national rail system is somewhat different from a railway for a single city. How good are the national rail systems in these countries?
Japan’s is the greatest in the world, for one.
Exactly.
Being a bus driver used to be a decent job for semi-retired construction workers, and such.
But then privatization hit, and over the last 20 years, there is no niceness left. They're even trained to disregard customers, and penalized otherwise. It's insanely inhumane.
And the causal effect is very clear, there can be no doubt about it. It's not the bus driver's fault.
No, it's not. It's bureacracy, and it exists in every big organisation, private or public. I'd actually suggest that public sector bodies are often worse for this.
They are only worse because they are bigger. If the private replacement organization gets as big, they get the same problems.
There is still a meaningful difference. Businesses usually need to have some profit even if minimum so they will run leaner for the same output because of efficiency.
I agree that there are many big businesses bureaucracies but they tend to be in areas closely linked to the state/government because of heavy regulation: banks and insurance for example. They tend to survive despite their terrible efficiency because it is way too costly to enter their business for a small actor. Any of their real competitors is already big enough that the bureaucracy is already well established...
> the root of all that? Privatization
Honesty, it's German politics doing precisely this that's part of the problem: flippant diagnoses too broadly applied from afar.
Really?
The more focused a company is (the more reliant it is on its core service) the more accountable it can be. I'd argue many companies are if anything more accountable than the government. It doesn't have to be true, but I'd argue it often is.
I had a similar experience in Germany about a year ago. Train stations are mostly self-service now. The ticket kiosk ate my €50 and promptly rebooted. It didn’t print a receipt or anything. The only human I could find was a security guard. He told me to call the number on a sticker on the machine. The person who answered couldn’t speak English. My €50 is out there somewhere but it would cost me more than that to track it down.
That’s a sad experience and I would definitely try to chase them robots. Sadly even though German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality, though when it comes to human service you can find yourself in peculiar position. And particularly if you are not German and happen to be in one of those international cities there where Germans are fed up with visitor. You waive goodbye to your 50€ and keep a story to tell, that’s all.
Sadly I don’t expect this all to get any better with robots and LLms and thing. We will be crying to meet a human sooner than later, and my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era when you actually have people in the loop, just for humanity’s sake.
>German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality
Ease of use maybe, although my parents and grandparents would like to argue differently. They are not as quick to work their smartphone, and the ticket machines are being removed everywhere to be replaced by apps that are much cheaper to run. This works fine for the younger generations, but older and less tech-savvy people are getting left behind.
Quality though, no way. Every single time I tried to give ÖPNV a chance in the last 3-4 years I was either different degrees of late or didn't arrive at all without switching to some alternative method of transport on the way. Doesn't even matter if I tried local routes (Frankfurt and Darmstadt) or longer inter-city connections to Munich or Leipzig, it's all completely broken. People in my company routinely book connections several hours earlier than they need to be places to have a chance of arriving in time, and often are still late. Trains are overbooked, connections are late or often cancelled altogether, seat reservarions don't work more often than they do, WiFi on the trains never works... Many, many things have to change for me to reconsider my default of taking the car everywhere, and I don't think they will in any sort of a relevant timeline.
I was in Berlin earlier this year and everything too contactless payment, no app required.
It's not that they don't want to have people, it's that there are no people. Germany, as most of other countries in Europe, has an aging population and the workforce is hard to find. So all these "easy" things that can get automated, do get automated, oftentimes indeed at the price of quality of service in exceptional situations.
Well, they say that, but in my experience at least, that is just conjured up as a more palatable explanation after the fact. While I do think that a certain, even significant, amount of automation is good, there is also a large mass of unemployed that can undoubtedly be trained to fill these "human interaction" kind of roles (support). This workforce is still not hard to find at all. We just don't want to do that - there is not a single western country left that has low unemployment as its key prerogative.
Yes, it's only a profit thing. If you cut out the humans you can make more money. If not for your boss then for the company that gets the contract to make the automation.
The automations predate any demographic issues - mostly a (sticky) cost thing.
>my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era
after the Butlerian Jihad.
> german public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality
You have something mixed up there.
It's definitely easy to use. You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train. No security checks like an airport. No multi step check in. Just be there and get on. In many cases your ticket won't even be checked, and when it is it's while you're seated while the train is moving. Getting a ticket is no problem: the ticket machines are multilingual, and you type in the stops you want to go from/to and the date. You can also book one online and get a QR-like code you can print or display on your phone.
Quality is mediocre. The trains are often delayed, which is a problem with the size of the network and cascading failures. Once they do get to A, they get from A to B just fine, the seats are okay, the luggage space is okay, etc. The DB Navigator app is useful for finding alternative routes but it won't tell you whether your ticket is valid for them. It will tell you if the delay is so long that you're allowed to use any route.
> You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train.
The train is late. The lounges suck or are tied to a complex system of ticket tiers that seemingly don't correlate to price. You bought a specific seat but the train was changed so now no assigned seat and lol on a refund. And fuck you if you're crossing borders.
Germans travel a good amount by car for good reason [1]. When I'm in Germany, I tend to drive between cities because the alternative is burning several hours in buffers and delays.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> The person who answered couldn’t speak English.
It sounds like this was the main point of failure. I’m not sure it can be considered an error in the system. I’d consider the risk inherent in traveling in a country without knowing its language.
Germany is the only country in which I’ve had 112 (emergency services) hang up on me because they couldn’t speak English.
It’s worse than France in this regard.
Yes sir. A friend of mine, the girlfriend passed out, being pregnant. In the moment of total stress, we called 112, and said “passed away“ instead of „passed out“. The guy on the other side “well, if she is dead, why are you calling?!” Very rude. He went on to explain, it was an error, an instead of just dispatch an ambulance, had to hear a 10 minute lesson in english (from a german) after which the ambulance was dispatched. When the ambulance finally arrived, she was “ok” so they had to pay couple of thousand Euros for a “negligent dispatch”…
The level of arrogance and lack of empathy and service is beyond limits.
> When the ambulance finally arrived, she was “ok” so they had to pay couple of thousand Euros for a “negligent dispatch”
That part seems really hard to believe for me. The only time you should get charged at all is for prank calling. In fact, if you call and tell them and decide you don't need EMS after all they will in fact come anyways because they need to check on every call. And you will not get charged for that.
Yes, but it’s still fine to have a customer service only answering in the official language. The chance are high that a random German speaks english so you’ll probably be good but if that’s not the case, blaming the company seems unfair to me.
> The chance are high that a random German speaks English
Not sure how random my selection process was, but that certainly wasn't my experience when I lived in Germany a few years ago. Maybe in big cities, yes. But even in the burbs, chances are you have to look for the metaphorical needle in the haystack to find someone speaking English. Your best bet might just be teenagers and young adults.
Absolutely. There is a big myth that “germans (all?) speak good English“ and nothing can be further from the truth. There are good ones, sure, maybe even more percent than other places, but go out of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich… and good luck!!!
Please look my comment to the parent comment. If you do find a german that speaks understandable english (that you can differentiate “think” and “sink” or “g” and “she” or “zoo” and “sue” then may be the arrogant crap that got my friend. For that they receive years of “Ausbildung”…
Jaa. Vell. Trai zamm Turkish or Arabic zen?
What THE FUCK is it with the expectation that everybody has to understand and speak in-glitch? Employ a local guide. Too expensive? Bad luck. Entitled little .....
>The chance are high that a random German speaks english so you’ll probably be good
What does high mean in this context? I experienced what I would call the inverse Danish maneuver, the German obviously understand English because they often answered our English questions correctly - In German.
In Denmark if a Dane understands what you said in Danish but you have a definite accent they will often answer your question in English.
Maybe Germanic cultures are geared towards the rude.
This sounds like a language education issue. It's easier to understand a language than to express yourself in it, so possibly Germans on average have good enough knowledge of English to understand you but not enough to adequately reply in English. Conversely, Denmark has some of the highest English literacy in Europe.
I mean sure, that sounds plausible, until I point out in Germany that I don't speak German and they continue trying to explain to me in German the answer to my question.
If I'm talking to an Italian and trying to explain to them in English and they don't understand then I try with a combination of my broken Italian and hand signals, not obdurate sticking to English because that's being a jerk.
At the same time, yes Danes have a high English literacy, but switching to English when someone is talking to you in Danish is rude no matter how you slice it.
They might have been rude, but that's besides the point. Even if they could speak English you shouldn't expect them to be comfortable doing so. That actually seems pretty rude in itself to me.
right, if I'm trying to get information from a guy at a train ticket agent and I don't speak German but he obviously understands what I am saying in English it is me being rude for expecting him to make some sort of attempt to explain to me where I need to get off at in a language we both evidently understand instead of me just learning his language in a couple minutes.
Sure, that’s bad, and a service dealing with train ticket machine failures not available in English isn’t as bad.
Ticket machines are still something foreigners can be expected to interact and need help with.
People visiting a foreign country can still expect to have to interact with local not speaking their language.
Go to any museum… just brutal.
I tried speaking German to a random security guard in Arizona and he just walked off.
If I had been buying a ticket at a window from a human, there's no way I'd have handed over 50 EUR without someone understanding me. If fluency in the local language to the level that you can have a phone conversation (which is many times more difficult than face-to-face) is a prerequisite for visiting a country, you are either an impressive polyglot, or don't travel enough.
I had something similar happen to be on the tube in london. My ticket got demagnetised (combined intercity rail with travel card are/were still magnetic stripe tickets) and there were not staff at the station so I could not get the barrier open to leave.
There are supposed to be help points where you can call staff.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/london-undergroun...
At this point everyone needs to get in the habit of using small claims court. You can often do it online in a few minutes these days.
Make a good faith effort to get your problem addressed, and record the fact that you've done so to use in your hearing if it gets that far. Then just file the claim. Generally they fold immediately, and this way you incentivize actual customer service in the only language they understand.
>At this point everyone needs to get in the habit of using small claims court. You can often do it online in a few minutes these days.
what country is this "small claims court" in? And are you sure this country's small claims works the way your country does?
Not every state allows you to file small claims against people outside the state, FYI.
What claim would there have to be to file on the scenario outlined?
Ah, I meant that post to be a reply to the ticket machine eating the 50 euro note.
Thank you for clarifying!
I do agree but also feel if people did this en masse, that system would get a rate limiter. After 2 claims per year you would be barred for being "vexatious"
Being realistic, if you have these sorts of issues more than twice a year there's probably something wrong and you should fix that. Everyone has a few of those stories, but the only people who consistently have them are likely looking for trouble and picking fights.
And that's exactly the line and slander they would use when they bring in new legislation to stop "abuse" of the system. You've proven my point
Only if the claims are illegitimate.
Many businesses build walls around themselves like this.
Hiding the customer service number. Making an FAQ that is missing the common but time-consuming questions. Chatbots instead of people.
I remember when amazon sent me a package once, said it was delivered, but it was nowhere to be found. There was no way to get help. They did have an FAQ at the time that said to check in the bushes.
What was annoying was the search auto-complete had many variations of "package not found says delivered"
Now, it is a little more filled out but still.
I've got an actual email address to a real business, but the humans* are struggling with the concept of "$company created the account with the wrong billing address, ignoring my agent who could have received it when my agent did contact $company, it's provably $company's fault that the bills were not received, so $company must tell me who this debt collector is and refund me for the late payment penalties and admit their own fault to the CRA".
* not that I could tell if they were LLMs
I just switched ISPs, and the new one has one of the most obnoxious phone processes I've ever interacted with.
I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want to try rebooting." (Pause)... "thank you for your call click"
First off, rebooting doesn't solve my problem. But I guess I have to try anyway?
So I call back, this time I do pick to reboot, and get "your modem will reboot in the next few minutes, and could take up to 10 minutes to come online. If things still aren't working, try our online support chat"
So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
Made me wonder if I should have switched.
> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
I had problems solved several times by rebooting modem. One time it was "reboot modem and access point in proper order", me naively rebooting them both at the same time didn't help, only phone support solved this problem.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer.
Hmm, I might be desensitivised from too much programming in erlang. It's implied that your program will encounter bugs or strange data and parts WILL be restarted, better account for that and plan on what to do on restart of each small part at the start of writing your program.
> So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
Because it's cheaper. Those who don't have support can offer lower prices. When people search for trinkets, they only have information about what is supported, there is no good information about quality of device and support, high price also not always means better support. SO they just go for lower price and hope not to suffer too much.
Yes, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40212967
Why did you switch? Can't have been their reputation for support.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
Why is rebooting offensive to you? State is hard; resetting your system to know state can fix many issues.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40212967
If your microwave had an error, you would be put off if you had to power cycle the whole house. Installed a new receptacle, sure, but operating an appliance? No way. Now you would have to reset your clocks everywhere at a minimum.
I have a linux computer running a public server that has not be restarted in three and a half years. This is what I expect.
Every time I have to reboot my work laptop due to work pushing some updates or that I have to reboot my windows machine because it is running unreasonably slow, I am reminded that inconsiderate assholes have become more lazy and are ok with polluting the whole system, mismanaging state and resiliency, and when the equivalent of the microwave has an error, the only solution is rebooting my house. We can do better.
> I have a linux computer running a public server that has not be restarted in three and a half years. This is what I expect.
I restart my Linux desktop every few weeks, when the kernel updates.
For a reliable server, you want to exercise the restart ritual somewhat regularly, because when anything goes wrong (eg with the hardware), you might have to restart anyway, so you want to be sure that this works.
Windows is awful at this. Completely weird problems with many apps (especially VPN) which get resolved with a reboot. Seriously? It is the whole culture around this OS which finds this acceptable.
Often this will be resolved by the network being quiet long enough for a reboot - with connection tables in intermediate firewalls timing out etc - rather than the actual reboot.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot.
This surprises me - as a programmer you should realise that reboots can often help. Cache invalidation is one of the notoriously hard CS problems and an awful lot of systems will start fresh on reboot.
> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
My current ISP is better, but my previous ISP cycled IP addresses at 2am (and lost connectivity for about 30 seconds at the same time) on a Friday night. I would semi-frequently be up playing games at that hour, and it was about 50/50 as to whether devices on my network would survive the blip. Rebooting the router had a 100% success rate.
I currently (unfortunately) have a google wifi mesh system. It works great, except about once a month it reports that absolutely everything is fine, all tests pass from my mobile device, but my laptop has no internet connectivity. Rebooting fixes it just fine.
> How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out?
Firmware is still software, like it or lump it. Modem firmware has been shitty for a long time. A major ISP [0] in the UK had an issue with their firmware that caused massive latency spikes under load. Alsom Power loss happens sometimes. The modem/router has to be able to turn on in the first place, so a "reboot" is just going through that process again. It's attempting to return to a "last known good".
[0] https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Hub-3-Com...
>If things still aren't working, try our online support chat
>So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
I wish everything had support chat. IMO it's much less hassle than having to call. It's usually trivial to get through the first layer of automated support and get a human on the line.
I agree, but;
Support chat is universally shitty. My mobile provider's website only works if you keep the browser window open, and times out if you go away for 2 minutes. The replies often take more than 2 minutes. I can only access "certain" information about my account if I'm on mobile data, except my carrier's website doesn't work if I am out of data. (granted, I am on a super budget mobile network, but still). In the last 18 months, the chat experience has been taken over by LLM's which are just acting as full text search for the doc pages that don't solve my problem.
I still choose web chat over any other method of interaction though.
I've started just sending physical, paper, letters if I need to communicate with a company. It seems to have a better success rate.
Norman talks about how systems need a way to veto or override the automatic decisions to be humane.
That book is now almost old enough to have a programming job.
I can provide another POV to that story. We checked in as a family of four, and we're assigned seats in four different rows, with a two and a four year old. Only when entering the plane we had the possibility address this to a human and we were assigned new seats.
So this might be the reason you had to change seats.
they claimed they had to change planes though i had selected that seat when booking the flight, and there were no humans available to address such issues
Does Germany have a consumer protection agency? I might have complained there after the flight.
It’s a way to fully automate a Brazil scenario. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)]
Since at least in that scenario, there were humans in the Bureaucracy that could (but didn’t particularly) feel bad.
In this scenario, no humans need to be directly involved, which allows the scope and scale to be even more Dystopian.
Of all the various useless laws that keep getting enacted, one that guarantees that every company needs to have a phone number, manned by actual human(s) with organic intelligence, advertised prominently on their products/advertisements, never gets passed.
Germany has this law for commercial websites. Mostly it makes people afraid to have websites.
Because that would cost them money, instead of forcing people to find their own workarounds (or die).
Many parts of gov’t aren’t far off, and those are the really scary ones.
Brazil iz good. Becauz dirty dogz got plugged!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/mediaviewer/rm557755905...
Meow!
I've long thought that that is one of the main functions of corporations. There's a reason they're called limited liability. The fact that you can conjure up new companies at a whim makes it easy to shuffle responsibility into an obscure corner.
This is a strong reason that corporations should not be considered people. People are long-lived entities with accountability and you can't just create or destroy them at will.
At a more basic level money eliminates the need for social obligation. There is no expectation of reciprocity or mutual respect. You pay for a product, it is delivered and that is the end of it. Corporations do this within their own internal economy or with partner companies. A cost centre pays an amount of money and delegates responsibility.
Enjoying the benefits of living in a society (a degree of trust, no deadly combat, services like police) without suffering its liabilities (mandatory politeness and respect).
It's the profitable course.
I agree with the feeling, but State orgs are effectively eternal (think the various level of government) and still great at diffusing accountability to various scapegoats
State orgs (and federal ones) often have length processes before they can do stuff though.
As well as after they do something there is typically a recourse path provided by that org for you to protest their decisions and if that doesn't resolve favorable you can also sue them.
Which differs from the article because the corporation doesn't provide any protest path nor did it have to publish any memo/etc describing how they're going to downsize cleaning for cost-savings. But you can still sue them (but good luck showing damages over an unclean room)!
"the corporation doesn't provide any protest path"
This. The problem with "voting with your wallet" is that you can't vote "no", you can only vote "yes" or abstain from voting altogether.
That can be said of many many democracies around the world.
> I've long thought that that is one of the main functions of corporations.
Ambrose Bierce already hit the nail on the head in 1911:
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
It has long since baffled me this isn't being talked about more – I guess everyone is just so used to it. As far as I'm concerned the entire concept of "fining a company" should be abolished and replaced with the criminal persecution of those who did the illegal thing.
Just to be clear, LLC is supposed to be about limited financial liability, not criminal liability. But we seem to have forgotten that on the way.
The buck has to stop somewhere and a human has to be responsible for things.
Oh sweet summer child. Companies are frequently structured and created in multiple jurisdictions to obscure beneficial ownership, responsibility, profits and taxes.
What I said is how it should be, not how it is.
Limited liability corporations are a relatively new concept and there is certainly scope to change how/when/where they could be created and run, for example.
I recently had to submit a copy of my drivers license to the feds, for my LLC. I have heard that they are working on the accountability shield for LLCs.
> People are long-lived entities with accountability and you can't just create or destroy them at will.
This notion is currently being contested
Yeah, this dysfunction is not a bug, it's the feature. In some ways, it's useful, because it allows positive risk-taking that could not be taken if anyone was actually held (or even just felt) accountable. But at this point, as a society, we've shifted too far towards enabling accountability-free behavior from corporations.
I think a good example of the dichotomy here is Starlink. On one hand, it's an incredibly useful service that often has a positive impact. On the other hand, a private corporation is just polluting our low earth orbit with thousands of satellites.
It's not clear to me where exactly the right balance for something like this should be, but I do think that as of today, we're too far on the lessez-faire side.
> I think a good example of the dichotomy here is Starlink. On one hand, it's an incredibly useful service that often has a positive impact. On the other hand, a private corporation is just polluting our low earth orbit with thousands of satellites.
Seems like a terrible example to me. I'm no fan of Musk, but I don't see how that is "polluting".
They provide an excellent service. They're a minor hindrance for astronomy, true, but I think it would be hard to make a good case for that a few people having a good view of the sky is more important than millions having good communications.
Then there's that there's nothing really special about Starlink. It's merely one of the first users of cheap rocket launches. It could be somebody else, or 1000 different entities launching smaller numbers, in the end the effect on astronomy would be the same.
"Then there's that there's nothing really special about Starlink"
I didn't say there was, and this isn't about Musk. I'm just using Starlink as an example, my point is not about Starlink.
"I don't see how that is polluting"
Starlink satellites create light pollution and disrupt radio frequencies. Astronomers are already running into issues with research due to the light from Starlink satellites. There's also the issue of reentry. We now have a Starlink reentry almost every single day, which is at least damaging to the ozone layer, and very likely causing other issues.
But like I said, this is not about Starlink. It's just an example to illustrate accountability sinks having both positive and negative effects.
I don't think it works at all, no.
There's no accountability sink to speak of here. "Accountability sink" in the article's meaning means that accountability got obscured, something bad happened (eg, lies on TV, terrible customer service), yet nobody can be clearly blamed for giving the order.
Here, it's Musk's invention, and he's clearly to blame for it. In fact Musk has a propensity to take more credit than he deserves, so it's almost the opposite from a sink really.
Musk is not accountable for Starlink. Starlink is an LLC, a limited liability company. There is no single person who is accountable for Starlink's satellites.
The chief difference here is that you can plausibly point at every investor in Starlink and say if they have the slightest idea of Starlink's business plan, they know that causes light pollution. There is exactly one degree of separation from putting satellites in the sky to causing light pollution. There's no plausible deniability there.
This article is more about the phenomenon where decisions are removed by multiple degrees. The locus of decision making is either obscured or non-existent, creating plausible deniability. This is often done by rewarding activities that don't obviously create harm but nevertheless require causing harm to carry out.
But that is how it works, isn't it? They're saying, "we want to make the Internet available to as many people as possible." They don't want the light pollution, and they don't create the light pollution.
It's analogous to the Fox example in the article, where somebody at the top says, "we want high viewership." They don't want their employees to lie to their audience, and they don't force them to lie to their audience.
Does the Fox leadership at some point become aware that "lying to the audience" is a result of their performance goals, just like the decision makers at Starlink become aware that light pollution is a result of their goals? They very likely do. Does that make them feel accountable for the negative side effects? Probably not, because they didn't tell anyone to lie and pollute the skies, somebody else did that.
Astronomy isn't the only issue with space pollution (e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)
Sorry but I find your example totally wrong. Things like radio frequencies and space launches are hard regulated by govs, no corporation can launch satellites at will without permission from the government(s).
Doesn't that apply to all companies? They have to follow the laws. Accountability sinks exist orthogonal to that.
Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin Random House) is a good companion to this concept, covering the "accountability sink" from the other side of those constructing or overseeing systems.
Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-m...
Brings to mind old wisdom:
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a Management Decision." IBM presentation, 1979
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore all Management Decisions shall be made by a computer." - Management, 2 seconds later.
Therefore all management decisions are made by the people writing the code
Hence coders are the new managers, managers just funnel the money around, a job which can be automated
Soon(tm)
> presentation, 1979
= Presentation, 21st Century
A computer is not alive. A computer system is a tool that can do harm. It can be disconnected or unplugged like any tool in a machine shop that begins to do harm or damage. But a tool is not responsible. Only people are responsible. Accountability is anchored in reality by personal cost.
= Notes
Management calculates the cost of not unplugging the computer that is doing harm. Management often calculates that it is possible to pay the monetary cost for the harm done.
People in management will abdicate personal responsibility. People try to avoid paying personal cost.
We often hold people accountable by forcing them to give back (e.g. community service, monetary fines, return of property), by sacrificing their reputation in one or more domains, by putting them in jail (they pay with their time), or in some societies, by putting them to death ("pay" with their lives).
Accountability is anchored in reality by personal cost.
Admittedly the context matters “we are trying to sell to Management, therefore let’s butter them up and tell them they make great decisions and they won’t get automated away” while the next page of the presentation says “we will Automate away 50% of the people Working for you saving globs of money for your next bonus”
IBM in 1979 was not doing anything different to 2024. They were just more relevant
See also: “To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.” —Paul Ehrlich
To err requires a computer
To really foul things up requires scalability
I want to note here that this is illegal in the EU. Any company that makes decisions algorithmically (EDIT: actually, by an AI, so maybe not entirely applicable here) must give people the ability to escalate to a human, and be able to give the user information for why that decision was made the way it was made.
It's much easier to hold an algorithm accountable than an organization of humans. You can reprogram an algorithm. But good look influencing an organization to change
That is not accountability. Can the algorithm be sent to jail if it commit crimes?
Yes. Not literally of course, but it can be deleted/decommissioned, which is even more effective than temporary imprisonment (it's equivalent to death penalty but without the moral component obviously).
Why should it be obvious that the moral component is absent? Removing an algorithm is like reducing the set of choices available to society… roughly equivalent to a law or regulation, or worse, a destructive act of coercion. There are moral implications of laws even though laws are not human
Is the point revenge or fixing the problem? Fixing the algorithm to never do that again is easy. Or is the point to instill fear?
If algorithm can do some thing wrong, but nobody should be responsible for it, everyone will just hide their crimes under algorithm and replace it when someone find problem.
If a mechanical device does something wrong, are we in the same conundrum?
I don't see what the problem is. There's malice, there's negligence, and there's accident. We can figure out which it was, and act accordingly. Must we collapse these to a single situation with a single solution?
>If a mechanical device does something wrong, are we in the same conundrum?
Sure! But oop mentioned a phenomenon that some companies can hide after algorithms and reject taking responsibility for it. If machines cause damage, people can easily find who's fault, but sometimes the same way does not work on software.
The point is that "accountability of an algorithm" is a category error.
That's reasonable. Let's just call it root cause analysis in this case.
The original point seemed to me to be "we can't use computers because they're not accountable". I say, we can, because we can do fault analysis and fix what is wrong. I won't say "we can hold them accountable", to avoid the category error.
I think folks may have different interpretations of accountability.
If your algorithm kills someone, is the accountability an improvement to the algorithm? A fine and no change to the algorithm? Imprisonment for related humans? Dissolution of some legal entity?
The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences for who are responsible for them. Those consequences can be good or bad, though it is often used to refer to bad.
An algorithm has no concept of consequences (unless programmed to be aware of such), and the more plausibly whoever wrote it can deny knowledge of the resulting consequences, also the more whoever wrote it can avoid consequences/accountability themselves. After all, we can tell Soldiers or Clerks that ‘just following orders’ is no excuse. But computers don’t do anything but follow orders.
Most people/organizations/etc have strong incentives to be able to avoid negative consequences, regardless of their actions or the results of their actions.
Everyone around them has strong incentives to ensure negative consequences for actions with foreseeable negative outcomes are applied to them.
Sometimes, organizations and people will find a way for the consequences of their actions to be borne by other people that have no actual control or ability to change actions being performed (scapegoat). Accountability ideally should not refer to that situation, but sometimes is abused to mean that.
That tends to result in particularly nasty outcomes.
> The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences
What I read is yes, the point is revenge. If I can offer you a different way of preventing harmful activity, apparently you're not interested. There has to be some unpleasant consequences inflicted, you insist on it.
I think you should reconsider.
I think they’re just right in this case.
Suppose I’m a bad actor that creates an unfair algorithm that overcharges the clients of my company. Eventually it’s discovered. The algorithm could be fixed, the servers decommissioned, whatever, but I’ve already won. If the people who requested the algorithm be made in that way, if the people who implemented it or ran it see no consequences, there’s absolutely nothing preventing me from doing the same thing another time, elsewhere.
Punishment for fraud seems sane, regardless of whether it’s enabled by code or me cooking some books by hand.
One could even argue (from a raw individual utility perspective - aka selfish) that if the person/people who did that suffered no negative consequences, they’d be fools to not do it again elsewhere.
The evolutionary function certainly encourages it, correct?
Ignoring that means that not applying consequences makes one actually culpable in the bad behavior occurring.
Especially if nothing changed re: rules or enforcement, etc.
Every rule/boundary/structure needs both a carrot, and a stick, to continue to exist long term.
Ideally, the stick never gets used. We aren’t dealing with ideals, however, we have to deal with reality.
On any sufficiently large scale, an inability/lack of will to use the stick, results in wide scale malfeasance. Because other constrains elsewhere result in wide scale push to break those rules/boundaries/structures for competitive reasons.
No carrot, magnifies the need to use the stick, eh? And turns it into nothing but beatings. Which is not sustainable either.
It has nothing to do with revenge. But if it makes you feel more comfortable, go ahead and call it that.
It’s ensuring cause and effect get coupled usefully. And is necessary for proper conditioning, and learning. One cannot learn properly if there is no ‘failure’ consequence correct?
All you need to do to verify this is, literally, look around at the structures you see everywhere, and what happens when they are or are not enforced. (Aka accountability vs a lack of it).
Interesting that you mention jail… the rule of law is kind of the ultimate accountability sink.
You now have to not only find someone responsible for the algorithm but also competent and with permission to do it. Isn't it clear that this is very hard?
"Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in."
Algorithms are used by people. An algorithm only allows "harmful and unaccountable systems" if people, as the agents imposing accountability, choose to not hold the people acting by way of the algorithm accountable on the basis of the use of the algorithm, but...that really has nothing to do with the algorithm. If you swapped in a specially-designated ritual sceptre for the algorithm in that sentence (or, perhaps more familiarly, allowed "status as a police officer" to confer both formal immunity from most civil liability and practical immunity from criminal prosecution for most harms done in that role), it functions exactly the same way: what enables harmful and unaccountable systems is when humans choose not to hold other humans accountable for harms, on whatever basis.
Yeah, I think you're conflating the arguments of "Weapons of Math Destruction" and "The Unaccountability Machine" here.
"The Unaccountability Machine," based on Mandy's summary in the OP, argues that organizations can become "accountability sinks" which make it impossible for anyone to be held accountable for problems those organizations cause. Put another way (from the perspective of their customers), they eliminate any recourse for problems arising from the organization which ought to in theory be able to address, but can't because of the form and function of the organization.
"Weapons of Math Destruction" argues that the scale of algorithmic systems often means that when harms arise, those harms happen to a lot of people. Cathy argues this scale itself necessitates treating these algorithmic systems differently because of their disproportionate possibility for harm.
Together, you can get big harmful algorithmic systems, able to operate at scale which would be impossible without technology, which exist in organizations that act as accountability sinks. So you get mass harm with no recourse to address it.
This is what I meant by the two pieces being complementary to each other.
This is a terrible example because it's simply not true:
> Davies gives the example of the case of Dominion Systems vs Fox News, in which Fox News repeatedly spread false stories about the election. No one at Fox seems to have explicitly made a decision to lie about voting machines; rather, there was an implicit understanding that they had to do whatever it took to keep their audience numbers up.
Rupert Murdoch conceded under oath that "Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election."[1] He knew the claims were false and decided not to direct the network to speak about it otherwise.
Communications from within Fox, by hosts, show they knew what they were saying was false.[2]
These two examples clearly fit the definition of lying [3].
The "External Links" section of Wikipedia gives references to the actual court documents that go into detail of who said what and knew what when [4]. There are many more instances which demonstrate that, indeed, people made explicit decisions to lie.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/28/1159819849/fox-news-dominion-...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/dominion-releases...
[3] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lie
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._F...
I think the point of the citation is that there wasn't an original decision to lie about it.
It happened without coordination and later on wasn't stopped by the people in management, either.
It was number-2 all the way up.
So there were many decisions to lie about it, and the lying was condoned from the top.
Voting machines are hacked every year at DEFCONs voting village. They're wildly insecure and no one should trust them. Frankly, any claims of manipulation of voting machines are at worst plausible.
And, yet these companies won their lawsuits, and no wide scale voter fraud was ever found.
So, your point is entirely irrelevant.
You're confusing terms here. Voter fraud is fraud by voter. This is not what we're talking about with the voting machine susceptibility.
No, you are confusing terms here. We are talking about Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network, which alleged that Fox had broadcast false statements that Dominion's voting machines had been rigged specifically to steal the 2020 election.
That is a wildly different than reporting on what is demonstrated at DEFCON's voting village. What are you trying to pull.
Here is a definition of voter fraud.
https://www.browardvotes.gov/voter-information/voter-fraud
We know what voter fraud is you disingenuous freak.
Winning or loosing a lawsuit doesn't say much about the truth of any matter. Especially when it's a civil suit between corporations, or a criminal suit in a jurisdiction that has plea deals.
One party agreed to pay the other party close to a billion dollars to stop the lawsuit from continuing. Why did they do that?
Accounts are hacked every second. They are wildly insecure and noone should trust them. Frankly saying you are just a hacked account is at worst plausible.
You logic is flawed at the core. With that train of thought you can infer everything.
Why trust voting it can be manipulated.
Is the objective truth of what I say contingent on whether it is a hacked account? I'd say no.
All voting systems can be manipulated, there's no need to make it so easy though.
In the days before voting machines, the dead people simply voted in alphabetical order, eg (1962) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41706655
[my recommendation: try to build a high trust society instead of patching epicycles onto the side of a low trust one]
My suspicion I'd that one of the major appeals of automation and especially "app-ification" for management and C-Suite types is specifically its ability to break accountability links.
A lot of corporations now seem to have a structure where the org chart contains the following pattern:
- a "management layer" (or several of them) which consists of product managers, software developers, ops people, etc. The main task of this group is to maintain and implement new features for the "software layer", i.e. the company's in-house IT infrastructure.
Working here feels very much like working in a tech company.
- a "software layer": This part is fully automated and consists of a massive software and hardware infrastructure that runs the day-to-day business of the company. The software layer has "interfaces" in the shape of specialized apps or devices that monitor and control the people in the "worker's layer".
- a "worker's layer": This group is fully human again. It consists of low-paid, frequently changing staff who perform most of the actual physical work that the business requires (and that can't be automated away yet) - think Uber drivers, delivery drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, etc.
They have no contact at all with the management layer and little contact, if any, with human higher-ups. They get almost all their instructions through the apps and other interfaces of the software layer. Companies frequently dispute that those people technically belong to the company at all.
Whether or not those people are classified as employees, the important point (from the management's POV) is that the software layer serves as a sort of "accountability firewall" between the other two layers.
Management only gives the high-level goal of how the software should perform, but the actual day-to-day interaction with the workers is exclusively done by the software itself.
The result is that any complaints from the worker's layer cannot go up past the software - and any exploitative behavior towards the workers can be chalked up as an unfortunate software error.
In my opinion it's even more complicated, as the "management layer" is also using these tactics against itself. "You must use an iPhone", "You cannot expense this trip with company card", "Your permission request to do XYZ in our cloud was automatically declined", "This tool only works in Google Chrome". Why? "The rules say so" / "The system says so". Who set "the rules"? Who set up "the system"? Nobody seems to know, and digging into it yourself is a herculean effort and usually a waste of time.
If you think back to less automated times, management was the programming —- you built instructions and procedures that allowed organisation to scale and improve your end product.
The only thing that changed is that now instructions and procedures are oftentimes executed by software and hardware, not by actual human beings. Hence the use of software engineering wing, in addition to your usual, sorry for the lack of better word, “meat programmers” aka organisational execs.
Interestingly, the end result customers get has not changed, despite many people coloring it that way. People still get same cup of coffee or a taxi ride, just quicker/cheaper/marginally better. But such incremental improvements were achievable in the business world before IT era using same exact means, through internal product management and imrovement of org procedures, applied to people and processes instead of pieces of software.
Yes, in principle nothing has changed since at least Fordian times - back then we had factory workers on one side and owners, managers and engineers on the other side, with the intermediate role perhaps being the foreman or something similar.
I still think there is some difference in kind, not just degree: A human operational exec at least has to engage with the workers personally, witness the conditions they are working in, is exposed to complaints, etc. Even the most uncaring foreman is therefore forced into a position where he is subjected to accountability. He also has personal contact with the upper layer and can pass on that accountability to his higher-ups.
In contrast, a software layer is physically unable to hear complaints and to pass them back up the chain. Because it's not a human, it cannot take accountability itself - however, it can still give higher-ups plausible deniability about "not having known" about problems. (A knock-on effect is also that it will prevent workers from even attempting to communicate the problem, because no one wants to talk to a wall)
Therefore it creates an accountability sink where there was none in the old structure.
(None in theory at least, of course there were enough other ways to be shielded from accountability even before computers)
My experience: only the good operational execs engage personally, and only for specific reasons of gathering feedback and improving the overall system.
You’d be surprised how often decisions are made without ever seeing people at work, or communicating with them in a meaningful way. There are managers who do engage first hand, but they are not real decision makers, and just relay the report on situation and context upstream / execute on decisions of others. Relay of accurate first hand information from workers to execs almost never happens.
As one of the neighbor threads accurately highlighted: this is by design, both on customer side and on worker’s side. Customers get vouchers, workers get retainers, among both there is a calculated percentage of people facing what they see as “accountability sink”, what is in reality a machine intentionally designed that way.
Nothing has changed for rich people who didn’t see their employees as people anyway. When you are the one stuck with a computer as your boss then tell me nothing has changed. Good luck getting a reference for a better job!
That’s what @vgr observed some time ago - people split into “above AI” and “below AI”, and the AI slowly moves up in the stack.
That's a really thought provoking article. And my thinking is this highlights the importance of government consumer protection agency/laws as the protection against that. I.e. when you fly through Europe or use European airlines, there is this EU law that gives you compensation of ~ 600 EUR if your flight is delayed by more than 3 hours or cancelled or whatever. This is a good insurance that no matter what BS is thrown at you at the airport by the company, you will get your compensation. And the process of getting the money is reasonably straightforward. What that gives is a way of avoiding any kind of airline systems, and just leads to the compensation. Also I hope that serves as an actual motivation for the airline to perform reasonably well, because otherwise they'll pay too much in fines. I think we really need this kind of protection laws in order to avoid the situation of chatbot-wall shielding companies from customers.
At least in my experience, I asked for compensation 3 times and got the money in every case (with different companies: American Airlines, United and Lufthansa). But I agree the system could be improved further.
I've asked for compensation twice (Swiss and Air Canada) and gotten it once (Air Canada). Even the successful case wasn't resolved without many many emails.
I experience this pretty often with the newfangled, automated government e-filing systems.
As a screen-reader-using person who cannot use pen and paper without assistance, I was once quite enamored by them, but I've changed my stance a bit.
The thing about pen and paper is that it accepts anything you put in, and it's up to a human to validate whether what you put in makes any sense. Computers aren't like that, if they tell you that the numbers in your application have to match up, you need to lie to the government to make them match up, even if you're a weird edge case where the numbers should, in fact, be slightly off and "inconsistent" with each other.
I called the local govt office responsible for this specific program, and they essentially told me to lie to the government in not so many words. Their system is centrally managed, they have no power of introducing updates to it, they wish they could fix it, but even they aren't empowered to do so.
When I was a grad student in STS I was considering doing a project on how software can function as an "agency adjuster" where individuals come to bear the risks of something (generally an economic transaction) and the majority of the profits go to the owner of the software. In many ways Uber & related services are about allowing individuals to take on very low-probability high-acuity downside risk for a small fee.
I think this sort of analysis is valid and fruitful in a very general sense. Software as a recently adopted vehicle in a long tradition of liability displacement / diffusion of responsibility / agency modification
Yah - it lies outside of the narrowly technical (though technical systems come up a lot) and part of what I would talk about would have been: how much is this a trick and how much of this is real? Like, is software doing slight of hand and really Uber (or whoever) should be taxed on an externality / risk? Or does this electronic machine of software genuinely create a new arrangement of responsibility? My unhelpful understanding is "it depends" and even in the Uber case it's a bit mixed, though on balance I think Uber is more of a scam than a truly new thing (even though there's some new there).
My intuition is similar; software can distribute responsibility in ways no previous vehicle could, by virtue of speed, scale, and mode of interaction (in a McLuhan-ish "medium as message" sense). But it's still an evolution of long pre-existing social dynamics, not (or relatively rarely) an absolute novelty. Scamming is an ancient art which we did not invent, I suspect, but rather discovered ourselves doing already. Only painstakingly (and still only partially) have we dragged the concept into the light of consciousness.
I feel the same way about artificial intelligence: it's not new, it's all around us, digital computation merely crystallizes the concept. But shiny objects should not distract us from the much more general phenomenon.
Hmm, the analysis with respect to FOSS could also interesting. might make less sense to consider profit/compensation. Might be more useful to think of responsibility flows.. (or sources as well as sinks)
Yah - I think there's value there too. I am a huge fan of FOSS ofc - and also it's good to look at how FOSS allows companies to avoid hiring developers because they can use FOSS products. The first benefit I think of is trying to come up with FOSS approaches that would convince or coerce companies to contribute back to the projects they use at least a little.
I’d seen situations where companies were forced to debug FOSS that caused problems in their proprietary setups.. that counts as persuasion, I presume?
>The comparisons to AI are obvious, in as much as delegating decisions to an algorithm is a convenient way to construct a sink.
There is a flag on my LinkedIn account that bars me from getting a "follow-me" link on my profile.
No one of their support team knows why. No one knows since when. No one knows when it will change.
We are already living in this world.
sounds like a bug
Even if it were, still no one seems accountable to fix it.
I was thinking about something similar today. Sometimes accountability can be a blocker, for example for hiring.
If you have 1 candidate, it's an easy call, if you have 3 candidates, you evaluate in less than a week. If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.
You can't evaluate all the information and make an informed decision, the optimal strategy is to flip a 100 sided die, but no one is going to be on the hook for that.
> If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.
That's not how accountability works, in the traditional sense.
What you described is Person A (accountable for hiring) hiring person B (responsible for screening and evaluating candidates). Person A is still accountable for the results of Person B. If Person B hired a sh*t candidate, it still lands on Person A for not setting up an adequate hiring system.
Being accountable for something doesn't forbid you from delegating to other people. It is very common for 1 person to be accountable for multiple people's work.
heh never works that way. an experienced bureucrat like you describe always has a shit-deflecting canopy. so whatever decisions he personally took are never attributable to him personally.
it just so happened.
what you’re describing is not someone who is accountable for something.
In the hiring example, perhaps the person A stops being accountable for hiring someone successful in the role, and rather they are accountable for successfully hiring persons B who is capable of hiring someone to fill the role.
Essentially creating an accountability chain. If you want to describe a logical chain of accountability instead as a “accountability sink”, then I’d go along with that.
It’s true that accountability chains can be difficult to keep track of and the longer they get, the blurrier they get.
The comments here are grossly oversimplifying this concept.
Sure you are a little bit responsible if your hiring manager hires a dud, but not as much. Similarly your hiring manager is not as responsible as the dud, accountability loses power in each chain.
You can fire your hiring manager and pick another one if he fails too often for example
The terms "shit umbrella" and "shit funnel" have been around for a long time, at least in the context of management in software development.
https://managementpatterns.blogspot.com/2013/01/pattern-shit...
I learned early on when I moved from development to management that a big part of my job was being accountable for everything my team did (short of outright sabotage). You don't hold junior devs accountable for anything, you do your best to monitor their work anytime they're working on something mission critical and to mentor them through the mistakes they make. Senior devs take on some or a lot of that monitoring and mentoring role, especially as the team size grows, but as their manager I am still accountable for any errors they make too (especially including letting errors from junior devs slip through).
Sometimes I think the most important part of my job is standing up before senior management and saying something like "My team made this series of decisions which resulted in the bad outcome we are here to discuss. I apologise and accept full responsibility. The team has learned from this, and we can assure you we will never repeat this mistake." And then deflecting and outright refusing to throw any of my team under the bus by naming them - to the point of being accused of insubordination occasionally.
(To be honest, I didn't internalise that quite early enough. There are probably a few apologies I should have made from back then...)
That's what TFA is saying, and they call it an accountability sink.
You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do. At the end of the day it's a trolley problem (the real one, not deciding between two bad things, but looking at how people typically define reponsibility)
One way or another you gotta own the decisions you make and deal with it. Even if the decision is to let someone else make the decision.
The issue is that, yes, absolving yourself of accountability sure does free you to scale in ways previously thought unimaginable, it doesn't mean you absolve yourself of responsibility. The cure is keeping accountability in favor of scaling which means a much smaller scale to everything we have been doing.
Another way to think about it. If you said you would give me 1 million dollars but I had to fully own up to what 1000 random people do in the next 24 hours I'd say thats a pretty raw deal. Basically no chance that a million will cover the chaos that a few of those 1000 people could cause. What some people do is take the million and then figure out how to rid themselves of the reponsibility.
> You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do.
Sure. And the article allows for that. You need to have "an account" that acknowledges that at the time you didn't and couldn't have enough information to completely de risk the decision, but that you'd discussed and agreed that the 1/100 (or 1/5 or 1/10,000) risk of the bad outcome was a known and acceptable risk.
"where an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event?"
Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee B doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee C doing their job correctly according to the process, and the end result is shit, then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself. As more and more employees are involved, and the processes get more and more hierarchical (rather than "employee A", you have "middle-manager M"), then the person with accountability is higher and higher up the hierarchy, who also has more and more power and responsibility to fix it.
The idea of "unaccountable" failures only makes sense if both (a) the problem is so systemic that actually an executive is accountable, (b) the executive is so far removed in the hierarchy from the line employees doing the work that nobody knows each other or sometimes even sits on the same campus, (c) the levers available to the executive to fix the problem are insufficient for fixing the problem, e.g. the underlying root cause is a culture problem, but culture is determined by who you hire, fire, and promote, while hiring and firing are handled by "outside" HR who are unaccountable to the executive who is supposedly accountable. But really this is another way of saying that accountability is simply another level higher, i.e. it is the CEO who is accountable since both the executive and HR are accountable to the CEO.
No, you have to have an astoundingly large organization (like government) to really have unaccountability sinks, where Congress pass laws with explicit intent for some desired outcome, but after passing through 14 committees and working groups the real-language policy has been distorted to produce the exact opposite effect, like a great big game of telephone, one defined by everyone trying to de-risk, because the only genuine shared culture across large organizations is de-risking, and it is simply not possible to actually put in place both policy and real-life changes to hiring, firing, and promotion practices in the public sector to start to take more risks, because at the end of the day, even the politicians in Congress are trying to de-risk, and civil servants burning taxpayer money on riskier schemes is not politically popular, though maybe it should be, considering the costs of de-risked culture.
> Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process... then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself.
The book's point is that while this _should_ be the case, all too often it's not. AFAIK, nobody has been charged with forging documents in the case of Wells Fargo cross selling. Not the counter clerks who directly responded to incentives and management pressure nor the executives who built that system.
> nor the executives who built that system
This is exactly why being an executive of a large organization is so incredibly difficult to pull off well. Sure, you can let your assistant fill your calendar with a bunch of meetings you don't want to be in to spend 95% of the meeting listening, 4% being the arbiter who tells people what they already knew they needed to do but refused to do it until asked by someone in authority, and 1% saying you'll take it further up the ladder. You will also fail hard because you will be constantly blindsided by people either fucking up (at best) or gaming (at worst) the processes for which you are responsible. Small example litmus test: in organizations that use Jira, whether the executives are comfortable with JQL and building their own dashboards to tell them what they need to know, or whether they expect their direct reports to present their work. If it's the latter, how can an executive be surprised that their reports are always coming in with sunny faces and graphs going up and to the right?
That too many companies are not willing to hold executives accountable for processes that they are, in theory, supposed to be accountable for is an entirely different problem. The law proscribes, the officer arrests, and the judge presides, but all rests upon the jury to convict. If a company's "jury" is not willing to "convict", because the crime is one of negligence and not treason, then the company has larger problems and I'd like to short their stock, please.
Also, usually these situations involve intentionally (or not, depending on how charitable one is being) passing back and forth between different divisions/groups.
So the only one with consistent power over all groups is an executive so high up the food chain (in some cases not even the CEO!) that they can plausibly claim ignorance.
I think "accountability" here was the wrong word to begin with. I believe they are more talking about "ability for feedback" or even better "just in time corrections". Feedback exists, but from my experience nobody reads those form submissions - maybe an AI these days that will create a summary... The latter is purposefully removed from all processes :(
Douglas Adams was here in 1982 with the invention of the SEP field
‘An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.
The narration then explains:
The Somebody Else's Problem field... relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else's_problem
This article seems to redefine the word "accountability". In the first sentence:
> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.
Why not just call it "no-consequence sinks"?
It's somewhat of an oxymoron to say "accountability" isn't working because there's no consequence. Without any consequence there is no accountability. So why call it accountability in the first place?
This article is describing something along the lines of "shared accountability" which, in project management, is a well known phenomenon: if multiple people are accountable for something, then no one is accountable.
If someone is accountable for something that they can't do fully themselves, they are still accountable for setting up systems (maybe even people to help) to scale their ability to remain accountable for the thing.
I think it’s that the accountability falls into the sink and doesn’t reach the decision maker. I still find accountability poorly defined, even after the effort. Clicking through to the definition helps.
It’s all kinda mushy. Being accountable is hearing and knowing a story. I don’t see why that has to correlate with decision power.
The point of the article could be made much more clearly by talking about systems that leave decision makers not aware of the consequences of their decisions. All the anecdotes in the article fit that pattern.
I think people don’t use the language of decision-consequences because it doesn’t capture an emotional aspect they’d rather not say out loud. They want the decision maker to feel their pain, they want the decision maker to hurt.
Decision makers can be aware of how many unready rooms are caused by less cleaning staff, how many flights they’re cancelling. I’d actually bet they are. But that’s not enough, the harmed person wants to tell their story.
In the article, there are human agents involved at all times; sometimes people create accountability sinks even without humans.
You're a neolithic farmer, and plant your barley, but that year there's a drought; you suffer the consequences, but who (or what) do you hold accountable?
Sounds like you perfectly understood the article. I don't get what you're complaining about. You agree but don't like the language?
Basically, yea. Maybe being pedantic.
In certain fields, there is a serious and distinct difference between Accountability, Responsibility, Consulting, and Informing.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_ma...
There’s a whole philosophy behind it. My spidey senses tingle when those words get misconstrued.
I get this, but I think we can recognize the author might not be from the same background. Which I think you can talk about the point while noting what language is used in your community.
After all, is it the words or the ideas behind the words that matter more? We should always be trying to improve our language, but I'm worried if we prioritize words over meanings. I feel it's an important thing considering how language is constantly evolving.
Author is describing a specific phenomena different from shared accountability.
I disagree with the authors definition of accountability:
> The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.
No.
You can absolutely be accountable for something that you can’t change a decision about. Simple example: You’re a branding agency and you decide to rename X to Y. (No pun intended). The rebrand to Y fails. You’re accountable for the failure, but likely don’t have the ability to change anything by the time you know the results of your decision.
Edit: ok, fair I agree. Bad example. A simpler example would be the person in the article continuing to point the the boss above them until there’s no one left. The chain would break somewhere along the way, but the broken chain is communication rather than one of accountability.
The information may not reach the person able to make a change. But that doesn’t make them not accountable. If that person is unable to make a change because they’re in vacation for a month without anyone filling in, that person is accountable for both the results AND future results that are caused by not having someone monitor/reroute their acckuntability.
It's not clear from the article (which I largely agree with), but that "ability to change the decision" can just as easily refer to change the decision before it is made, instead of any ability to change it afterwards.
Amazon's concept of "two way and one way doors" is useful here. A two way door decision lets you go back if the decision turns out to be bad and can be made with significantly less scrutiny that a one way door decision which you cannot back out of after you've acted on it.
It's much like the distinction between responsibility and blame. At least in English, it seems like a lot of different meanings often get blurred together.
At its root, responsibility is about who responds, rather than who causes.
In that example, accountability is not with the branding firm at any point. Someone at the client that hired the branding firm is accountable for approving the rebrand and someone at the client is accountable for leaving it in place.
The branding firm certainly does not seem to have performed well, from the scenario you described. But accountability is not the same as performance or even culpability.
Replace the word "change" to "make" and it may be more intuitive
we can argue semantics all day but when I see 'accountability' to me it means 'this person's ass is on the line'
shared accountability is spreading that risk around to a group (but I don't think it necessarily eliminates that accountability – you can fire an entire department if you need to)
author's point, which I think is interesting, is that there's bermuda triangles where accountability cannot occur and that these can manifest naturally, outside of any traditional RACI
In my country they enacted this system for student management that is national.
It handles signups, restauration and housing services, grades, everything.
One example is that the grades are entered by professors and mistakes happen all the time, for everyone, due to the insane server load.
There's no one to complain to, because the excuse is always "it's the system, not us"
I feel like the article, or perhaps just the example, is missing the point.
>> a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room.
This reads from the perspective of a person checking in. But it should read from the perspective of the person who made the decision.
The decision was made like this; On most days we have too many cleaners. If we reduce the cleaners we reduce expenses by x.
On some days some customers will need to wait to check-in. Let's move checkin time from 1pm to 2pm (now in some cases to 4pm) to compensate. n% of customers arrive after 4pm anyway. We start cleaning early, so chances are we can accommodate early checkin where necessary.
Where there's no room available before 4pm, some % will complain. Most of those will be placated with a voucher [1] which cost us nothing.
Some small fraction will declare "they'll never use us again". Some will (for reasons) but we'll lose a few.
But the savings outweigh the lost business. Put some of the savings into marketing and sales will go up. Costs remain lower. More profit.
There is perfect accountability of this plan - the board watches to see if profits go up. They don't care about an individual guest with individual problems. The goal of the business is not to "make everyone happy". It's to "make enough people happy" to keep profits.
[1] the existance of the voucher proves this possibility was accounted for.
So accountability in this case is working - except for the customer who didn't get what they want. The customer feels frustrated, so from their perspective there's a failure. But there are other perspectives in play. And they are working as designed.
The economic calculation is often an accountability sink too. We can say that the economy has spoken, profit was made, case closed.
But we can also look for accountability in the political system. Maybe the hotel should be obliged by the law to pay real money instead of a voucher?
Came here to say this.
And even in the case where the company's decision is arguably just "bad," it still might not be a problem from the company's point of view.
Companies (including start-ups) create buggy products all the time and don't care, and aren't very responsive to requests for support, as long as money is coming in. I don't think they are using special accountability-flushing techniques. It takes real work, intention, experience, and power in a company to create feedback channels, and use them, and ensure that the customer has an experience of quality. It doesn't happen by magic or by default.
I rather think accountability improved a lot. Esp. with the decline of buerocratic walls.
Accountibility always was down. Back in aristocracy you were never allowed to ask for support. Only in modern civilisation this improved. Middle management, the clueless in the Gervais principle, need their walls.
Don't be fooled by the decline of customer support in big orgs, like Google, Apple, or Amazon. They believe that support cannot scale, or if it's really needed, it needs to be outsourced to India or East Asia.
> They believe that support cannot scale, or if it's really needed, it needs to be outsourced to India or East Asia.
I disagree. They believe that support shouldn't scale with the size of the business, and should provide economies.
Tom Schelling's 'The Strategy of Conflict' touches on similar themes, but mostly in a more positive light.
One of his examples is that you should make yourself unavailable for contact, when you suspect someone is trying to blackmail you.
That's exactly the same severing of a link as described in the article.
> you should make yourself unavailable for contact, when you suspect someone is trying to blackmail you.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how often does blackmail happen that it rises to the level of needing strategic advice like "make yourself unavailable" ?
Who is Tom Schelling's audience?
> Who is Tom Schelling's audience?
Politicians setting policies for use of nuclear weapons during the cold war, IIRC. Among others, at least.
I read parts of that book many years ago, I recall the major theme is that voluntarily sacrificing control over the situation can be a powerful way to force the other party to do what you want. Like if you and me are playing "chicken", speeding towards each other and wanting the other to turn away first, you ripping out your steering wheel and throwing it out for me to see is a guaranteed way to force me to turn first and lose. This kind of stuff.
I guess it ties into the larger topic here in that you can avoid being held accountable if you remove the ability to make any choices yourself.
This is how we get a Dr. Strangelove situation. If both people take that advice then they both crash into each other, even if they realize at the last minute it was a terrible idea.
That's why you should read the whole book, instead of just the three line summary in a comment.
> Who is Tom Schelling's audience?
Parents, of course.
You might think I'm joking, but dealing with toddlers throwing tantrums is a prime example in some of his books.
What the article describes seems like a parallel concept (and an important one.) I wouldn't call them Accountability Sinks, though, as they seem more like Accountability Avoiders. Here are things we might think of as sinks in the real world:
- "Sin Eaters"
- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company
- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)
- Certain religious martyrs
Interesting. Wonder sometimes how much of consulting business is motivated by accountability avoidance - "accountability sinks" for hire
Consultant here: A lot of it.
Ideally, a consultant is hired for their specialist skills, rare experience, sage advice on niche topics, etc...
In practice, about half the work I do is to act as a lightning rod so that the guy with the power to sign the cheque for my time doesn't get fired if things go sideways. Instead, they can just blame me, shrug their shoulders, and hire another consultant.
I've had a customer where I got "fired" for an "error". My coworker replaced me. Then he was fired, and I replaced him. We alternated like this for years. Upper management just saw the "bad" consultants get fired for their incompetence, they never noticed that we were the same two guys over and over.
I don’t know how much it works with consulting because someone has to approve paying them. If they do a bad job you can blame whoever brought them in. It does make it easier to do something you were going to do anyways though.
There was a leaked memo essentially instructing to form a committee when you make an illegal decision so that one person cannot be sent to jail. Does anyone remember this? I've had a hard time finding it
patio11 has an episode of his podcast Complex Systems where he interviews the author of this book. It’s well worth a listen / read, as is the book itself. https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...
Taleb's Skin in the Game seem to be related to this, but from a different optic. Goodhart's Law is also mentioned, but is not the core argument. In the end, is about agency, who have it, and system dynamics to get rid of responsibility.
True.
The modern company is a very very limited liability company:
- Cut corners so your jets crash and kill people (Boeing)?
- Cheat on emissions testing so your product kill people (VW)?
- Hush up drug trial results so you kills people (Pfizer)?
- Sloppy security leads to hundreds of millions of people's personal data being leaked (too many to mention)?
What happens to those in charge? Nothing. Perhaps they leave with a big golden handshake. If it's really bad, they get a don't do it again agreement with the Feds.
No accountability means no feedback/skin in the game. So nothing gets better.
Liability and retroactive clawbacks need to be introduced, particularly for very large organizations that like the government, don’t face real competition.
The EU and the FTC are slowly reintroducing the concept of liability to big corps, especially the big tech. Is the world healing?
Accountability sinks sounds a lot like the Toyota factory story, where on the contrary, every employee in the factory could pull the 'stop' lever if they thought there was a quality problem. Which of course drastically increased quality and feedback because the process is interrupted and stops.
But I don't think it is quite so black and white in the world. Because the legal system is also a way to give feedback to companies. And it can stop them in their tracks.
This is a small part of business reality. It's not clear how calling out a specific aspect really helps; indeed, it may hurt when business leaders learn how to do this more effectively. It's not at all clear that calling people irresponsible or unaccountable is actually effective at changing the transaction features; it likely makes things worse.
Transaction cost economics since the 1960's has been enumerating aspects like these, and showing they in fact determine the shape of business organizations and markets. Exported costs (implied in accountability sink) are mostly the rule rather than the exception.
What to do with them? A primary TCE finding is that if there were no transaction costs to adjudicating liability, it wouldn't matter from the social cost perspective where the liability lay (with the perpetrator or the victim) because they would adjudicate it down to their mitigation costs. As a result, the main policy goal for assigning liability (if you want to minimize the total cost to society) is actually to minimize and correct for adjudication transaction costs. (hence, no-fault divorce and car insurance)
The same dynamics are at play in the market and within organizations.
As a participant if your goal is your own profit, you can gain by making it harder to adjudicate and reducing the benefits thereof (hence binding arbitration, waivers, and lack of effective feedback). Doing so is becoming much simpler as virtual transaction interfaces and remote (even foreign) support afforded by software replace face-to-face interactions bound by social convention.
And who wouldn't want to? If you're head of customer support or developer relations, would you document your bugs or face the wrath of customers for things which can't change fast enough? You'd want to protect yourself and your staff from all the negativity. Indeed, with fixed salaries, your only way of improving your lot is to make your job easier.
To me the solution is to identify when incorporating the feedback actually benefits the participants. There, too, the scalability of virtualized software interfaces can help, e.g., the phone tree that automates simple stuff most people need and vectors complex questions to real people who aren't so harried, or the departing-customer survey querying whether it was price, quality, or service that drove one away.
You have to make accountability profitable.
I liked this article a lot - it made me think about the ways large companies operate from a different viewpoint.
At the same time, though, I think it's a mistake to leave out the fact that, in many ways, modern society is just so fundamentally complex that we (as a society at large) deliberately forego demanding accountability because we believe the system is so complex that it's impossible to assign blame to a single person.
For example, given this is HN and many of us are software developers, how many times have we collectively supported "blameless cultures" when it comes to identifying and fixing software defects. We do this because we believe that software is so complex, and "to err is human", that it would be a disservice to assign blame to an individual - we say instead that the process should assume mistakes are inevitable, and then improve the process to find those mistakes earlier in the software lifecycle.
But while I believe a "blameless culture" is valuable, I think a lot of times you can identify who was at fault. I mean, somebody at CrowdStrike decided to push a data update, without verifying it first, that bluescreened a good portion of the world's Windows machines and caused billions in damages.
I just think that if you believe "accountability sinks" are always a bad thing, don't forget the flip side: would things always be better if we could always assign "root cause blame" to a specific individual?
I think you are conflating accountability and blame when I don't think those terms can be used interchangeably here. Accountability can be used as a way of assigning blame, but that isn't all that it is good for.
Accountability, at least as presented here, is about feeeback between those affected by a decision and those making it. In a "blameless culture", people are still held to account for their decisions and actions but are not blamed for their results.
I would argue that a blameless culture actually makes accountability sinks less likely to develop. In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture.
Thanks, I found your response really helpful, and it helped identify some of the mistakes in my thinking. "In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture." - that really made a lot of sense to me.
That wasn't a thought I had articulated before I read your comment, so your comment was also very productive for me.
A blameless postmortem culture says that when a human error is identified in the causal chain leading to an incident, there will be no consequences for the individual. In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.
> In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.
The two concepts we are talking about are each talked about under each label so there is enough ambiguity in both words that this is true. However choosing to use 'blame' in the opposite sense from the one being used in that context adds nothing to the conversation.
Systems Theory would describe this as "intrinsic responsibility".
From Donella Meadows: “Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision-makers.
Super interesting concept, because these complaints tend to end up at the bottom of top management backlog due to amount of time and attention required to analyse these. In real life it just does not work unless your org is in the low hundreds of customers.
This could change if technology could solve aggregation and analysis problem, making ready-made decision propositions to management. High risk of this mechanism just becoming another accountability sink, though.
Another solution is to build large organisations out of federated micro-orgs, where such intristic responsibility is feasible.
>> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.
Government and Civil Servant are the biggest example. I guess its time to re-watch "Yes Minister".
That is a problem of organisation size, not so much whether the organisation is private or public.
I dont believe the largest company on planet earth by market cap has the problem as bad as government, even in a smallish country.
I guess you haven’t worked in many large companies. I’m currently working for a large American company, and the waste and inefficiencies there beat most Swedish government agencies I’ve ever have had to deal with.
I wouldn't be surprised with Waste and inefficiencies, but this is about Accountability. And I did work in both Fortune 500 companies and within Government.
I read your Comment with Pleasure, sir.
The future iterations of this are purely terrifying. This is so elegantly demonstrated by the Oscar Nominated short film “Please Hold” from 2022. Picked up by mistake by a roving police drone, a young man is incarcerated autonomously and has no way of release outside of money or time.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt11383280/?lang=en&ref_=ext_shr_ln...
In the 400 blows, Truffaut plays a schoolteacher whose disciplinary methods in the classroom only accentuate the rebelliousness of a boy. At home, this trickles down and he decides to run and drink milk. At the end, we find him on a beach and the film ends.
Enforcing copyright law through an honest projection of 35mm film footage is a philanthropic endeavour. Making sure that every member of the production team, even the gaffers and stage hands take part in the exclusivity of re-capitalisation efforts, like the Fox complaint, is purely, legalistic sleight of hand.
you can't have accountability in a world where you can be a good family member and work for a company that manufactures bombs that kill families. This doesnt compute in humans. They cant deal with that. If you cant handle accountability for that ... who cares about you getting into your hotel room a little later or missing a flight or not getting health insurance ... no biggie.
what you can have is a discussion about this or a blog post that is read by people and maybe some new subscribers, so no worries - all is not lost. :)
That suddenly reminded me of a Redditor talking about how some acquaintance of theirs works for a US military technology company, but is only involved in non-weapons research that has civilian applications.
When pressed, the Redditor said that the their friend was working on the mathematical theory for computers to control planes that have no power, such as under emergency landing conditions. I.e.: If the engine dies, the auto pilot can help steer the plane onto a runway.
"No, your friend is working on precision glide bombs. The emergency landing thing is just marketing to make it palatable. She might not even know, but that's definitely what she'd doing."
That stuck with me: someone could be working on bomb technology and not even know it.
Talk about an accountability sink!
I've observed a phenomenon in corporate accountability resembling quantum behavior:
1. Macro level: Departments claim broad accountability.
2. Micro level: Pinpointing task ownership causes accountability to vanish.
3. Indefinite states: Ambiguous tasks linger without resolution.
4. Entanglement: Dependent tasks inherit this ambiguity.
This creates a system where responsibility exists in superposition, tasks remain unresolved, and accountability becomes increasingly delocalized.
When stock you've held for years rockets to the moon, and your major banking institution with 100 billion dollar annual revenue experiences "technical difficulties" at the login page. You can't sell your meagre crumbs until the spaceship has completed its orbit and you're left with no doubt about who the system doesn't work for.
My theory is all developed societies converge on having no accountability in the governing positions. Of course, I may and most like am wrong but if you look at say politics you must at least think about this being a real possibility
There has been a lot of talk of silos in the company I work for and the need to break them down. This looks like it could be a big part of why they have been so hard to tackle.
Organizations exist to remove moral culpability
Judge, Jury and Executioner Firing Squad Limited Liability Organisation
Humans like to sleep at night. An emergent property of our rule of law is that it exists in a way to reduce the moral culpability of any individual. A police man, a jury member, a judge, a inspector, an executioner, a jailer, they all exist in very neat boxes. These boxes allow them to sleep at night. Surely the Judge has few qualms going by the recommended mandatory minimum, after the jury, who is assured the judge will provide a fair sentence, and the executioner doubly so, with double the potential moral hazard, is certain at least two other parties have done their due diligence.
these systems prevent a single actor from acting. More like they allow a series of hand offs, so by the time the jailer is slamming the doors shut, they are bereft of any investment in the morality of the outcome
The firing squad, with seven guns, all line up, with just one loaded. The rest are blanks. Each man can sleep at night, regardless if the murdered man was surely deserving of death
large institutions, organizations and objects are scale are fully inhumane
I would rather have my jailer be my judge and my executioner be each man or woman on the jury. Isolating each of these things allows the individuals to have almost a powerless notion of 'completing our task'. As if all tasks completed would add up to a moral outcome
Should juries be formed to perform the whipping of an individual, the institutionalization in their own homes, the judge forced to starve a prisoner in his cell, i find the outcomes would be different
The right to a trial by jury was specifically meant to prevent personal bias from the judge affecting the outcome of the trial.
Letting juries perform executions and judges be responsible for the imprisonment of the guilty just creates a massive perverse incentive for sadistic individuals.
You wrongly assume that either judge or jury would be more empathetic if they were burdened with the weight of these things. Instead, you'll get the people you least want in charge of these things doing them.
Aside from the method of using blanks at executions, everything else about the system protects the convicted, not the people in the system itself.
not just the moral piece, but the passive nature. Once I do this, then it goes to the next person. I don't need wait for the taxpayer to come by and demand ransom for my work to send money off to the capital so they can fund wars in far away lands, it just comes right out of my paycheque
I agree with the description. But make no judgment of its morality or pretend to have a better system, no shred of humility in that.
Of course you can run a political party suggesting that this division of powers thing was a step in the wrong direction, or better yet, take a trip to any of the dozens of countries with superdictators.
“The blood of the First Men still flows in the veins of the Starks, and we hold to the belief that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”
certainly draws some impractical inspiration. I wrote that years ago, before I ever read ASOIAF
Our meat is bought from the butcher, delivered to the chef so it comes not as an animal, but part of a tasty dish.
If we eat meat, we should kill it ourselves.
I get a lot of shit for saying this, but I agree completely!
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with eating animals. But I have a particularly carnivorous friend who thinks hunting is for sociopaths, because he “loves animals”.
If I wouldn’t harvest it, I won’t eat it. And I definitely would be too timid to slaughter a freaking cow lol
I think it's a matter of hygiene and speed. Sure I could butcher a chicken, maybe have a shot at a bigger animal like a goat or cow. I've seen it multiple times since I live in a country that regularly do animal sacrifice. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to do it as clean or as fast as the usual butcher.
It does feel different from market-bought meat though, at least for me.
If someone is unable to kill an animal, should they eat the animal? It is another matter to ask everyone to raise their own livestock.
The man who issues the sentence must swing the sword
> Each man can sleep at night, regardless if the murdered man was surely deserving of death
Surely this line of reasoning requires the presence of omniscient judgement (ie the abrahamic god) to make sense. Otherwise all gunmen would (and should) assume practical responsibility
closely related but in reverse: subsidiarity.
Yeah, but when you post the linkedin profile of the person doing the thing, people call you a scumbag. It's a hard social norm to move the dial on.
It's a reasonable thing to do. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. If you could demand responsibility from any grievance you have from anyone they could dement responsibility from you for the distress you caused them with your grievance.
It's in the name, limited liability company.
Yawn. Isn't that exactly what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film) & https://thecorporation.com/film/ was about twentyone years ago? (Time flies!)
As bottom line at least? Can't have the one without the other, just different aspects of the same shit.
ahem at least in the Western world corporations were invented by the Church, an entity well known to me not accountable....look at the 94 apologies and the Pope's words before and after each apology....
By the way this is what bitcoin was set up to solve...notice it not being solved.
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I find that the word "accountability" almost always obscures what's being talked about. If we remove it, we can instead talk about understanding and feedback:
As organizations become more complex, it's difficult to understand the consequences of many high-level decisions. Unless great effort is made to gather feedback, it won't happen.
Not only that: the lack of immediate, human communication results in one-way feedback mechanisms, like suggestion boxes and surveys. Many companies clearly want to make this work, because we're constantly prompted and sometimes paid to fill out surveys. But the result is survey fatigue.
The person giving feedback needs to be reassured (by people, not machines) that their feedback matters, or they won't be bothered to do it. Often, it's socially awkward to give negative feedback, so people don't. And often, the employees directly on the scene have incentive to encourage customers to avoid negativity when they fill out surveys.
One way to show that feedback matters is to respond to complaints with some sort of assistance. In the example in the article, that's a voucher. Perhaps somewhere in the organization, that voucher counts as a cost, but it's pretty unsatisfying.
In some organizations, managers are encouraged to work at the support desk occasionally as a more immediate way to understand what's going on. (I remember reading about how Craig Newmark would do this for his website.)
You're really good at bullshitting and saying nothing at the same time. Feedback and communication is pointless without accountability. I'm sure this sounded smart when you were typing it out but man, this is dumb. Like, this is literally what lack of accountability sounds like.