Accountability Sinks

But the important thing to recognise is there are always people who can overrule a given formal process and they are being held accountable to something. The issue becomes what their incentives are. In the success stories in this article (like the one where the doctor saves a bunch of people) the incentives lead to a good outcome when the formal system is discarded. In the leading ground squirrel example someone without doubt had the power to prevent the madness and didn't because their incentives led them to sit quietly in the background hidden from history's eye. Ditto the Nazi example - obviously there was someone (probably quite a few someones) who could have stopped the killing. They didn't override the system because they through it was performing to spec, and it is probably difficult to prove they were in hindsight because informal systems don't get recorded.

I remember many messes where I just stood there thinking to myself "alright nicbou, what did we learn today?"

Notwithstanding the rest of the column, this particular example brings the following thought to mind:

It could actually be argued that getting angry at the gate attendant is not a "bad people" response. Suppose that under those circumstances, the typical individual passenger would demand the gate attendant to either let them onto the flight, or compensate them reasonably on the spot, and if denied - even with a "it's not within my authority" - inform their fellow passengers, which would support the demand physically to the extent of blocking boarding, and essentially encircling the gate attendant until they yield (probably by letting the original passenger onto the plane), and if security gets involved - there would be a brawl, and people on all sides would get beaten. Now, the individual(s) would would do such a thing may well suffer for it, but in terms of the overall public - gate attendants will know that if they try to do something unacceptable, it will fail, and they will personally face great discomfort and perhaps even violence. And airports would know that such bumps result in mini-riots. So, to the gate attendant, such an order would be the equivalent of being told by the company to punch a passenger in the face; they would just not do it. And the airport would warn airlines to not do something like that, otherwise they would face higher airport fees or some other penalty. And once the company realizes, that it can't get gate attendants to bump passengers this way, it will simply not do it, or authorize decent compensation on the spot etc.

Bottom line - willingness to resist, minor ability to organize, and some willingness to sacrifice for the public benefit - can dismantle some of these accountability sinks.

a good "collective response" would be to deny the non-agency of the gate attendant. That is,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853663