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Accountability Sinks

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Re: Accountability Sinks

#41

Post by Pamar »

oleggromov wrote: post #37

I once booked a plane ticket from my home town airport to another country. The purchase notification said something like "PVA" instead of "POV". I looked it up and turned out, the newly built airport that had this exact code was about to open. In a week or so, so I assumed that I'm indeed flying from the new one and forgot about it. The purchase was made through a booking aggregator similar to Expedia. On the day of…

Yes, sorry for your problem but no-shows automatically invalidate everything else. If you decide to cancel part of a trip due to unexpected events, train strikes or whatever that is not directly under control of the airline itself you must contact them and make sure they will not cancel the rest (including the return flight).

Re: Accountability Sinks

#42

Post by ninalanyon »

> Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage.

I disagree, slightly. We have to expect some degree of ethical behaviour from everyone, even those who nominally have no room to manoeuvre. If everyone in such positions were to disobey unjust orders the orders would eventually have to change.

Walking away stewing in rage does nothing except fill you with damaging hormones.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#43

Post by rollcat »

satisfice wrote: post #24

I am deeply suspicious of "blameless" post mortems. I agree that we should work in ways that minimize fear. We should, to some degree, celebrate the learning we glean from our failures. But I keep seeing "blameless" being construed as lying about why something happened. It's construed in such as way that anyone can hide from their misdeeds. People screw up, and we need to hold them accountable, and THEY need to hold…

Sometimes failure comes from inherent risks. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. You can't account for every possible factor, you'll be stuck in analysis paralysis while the world moves on.

If we're speaking of a justice system in more general terms, I agree with your line of thinking. I believe that repairing the damage and reintegrating with society would be far more effective than incarceration or other forms of punishment. Fear is a seed, you reap what you sow.

(Yes there are extreme cases. Still the long-term goal should be to minimise harm, not bring punishment.)

Re: Accountability Sinks

#44

Post by rollcat »

blueflow wrote: post #6
immibis wrote: post #4

It's interesting we always talked about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials when talking about accountability, as if similar atrocities aren't currently happening. It's because breaking an accountability sink of people who are long dead doesn't have any impact other than the explanation itself. Breaking an accountability sink of currently living people and currently active wars is much more dangerous.

Did you imply that there is another Holocaust currently ongoing?

Look at what's happening in the US right now. People getting snatched off the streets. This is how it starts.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#45

Post by dijit »

throwanem wrote: post #35

I'd say he loves the sound of his own voice, but everything worthwhile here is in a blockquote. Oh well, even a poor collator has value as such.

And what value did this comment create?

While we’re being unnecessarily rude, and discussing people who enjoy the sounds of their own voice and lacking substance.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#46

Post by ffsm8 »

It's only related to what he wrote but it reminded me of something that low-key annoys me whenever I hear Americans talk about the Holocaust.

I know he only touches on it very slightly and indirectly raises a related point to what annoys me about most coverage about it.

It's pretty simply that the people that were systematically slaughtered during that time period were classified to be Jews, Gypsies and other "undesirables", but they were first and foremost German and identified as such. Nazi Germany didn't kill "other" people, it systematically alienated groups of the population to then eradicate them, by first walling them off to make communication impossible, then spreading enough propaganda to make the average Joe no longer consider them his neighbor.

Seeing the social climate all over the world change, chief among them Americas, does make me think this lesson hasn't been taken in whatsoever.

The first step to atrocities is always to cut of communication between the groups, and people nowadays are actively doing that themselves now - not artificially enforced like it was back then.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#47

Post by franze »

I'm now in a stage of my consulting career where I sometimes really get called into big organisation just to find out, that whatever they need to do is already panned out and they all want to do it! Still they call me cause ... it's a big decision and the "higher ups" (which quite often are not even part of the workshop/session then) want an external expert voice. cause the responsibility for this decision lies with them and they can not share it up or sideways, so they share the responsibility partly external.

As the plan quote often (not always) is already very good I mostly end up making sure the goal is measurable in a quantitative and qualitative way, trends towards to and away from the goal are visually available and distributed , and its clear who is responsible to look and report them.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#48

Post by oleggromov »

Pamar wrote: post #41
oleggromov wrote: post #37

I once booked a plane ticket from my home town airport to another country. The purchase notification said something like "PVA" instead of "POV". I looked it up and turned out, the newly built airport that had this exact code was about to open. In a week or so, so I assumed that I'm indeed flying from the new one and forgot about it. The purchase was made through a booking aggregator similar to Expedia. On the day of…

Yes, sorry for your problem but no-shows automatically invalidate everything else. If you decide to cancel part of a trip due to unexpected events, train strikes or whatever that is not directly under control of the airline itself you must contact them and make sure they will not cancel the rest (including the return flight).

Leaving aside the no-show rule, which doesn't make much sense to me, this situation is a good example of an accountability sink.

The intermediary I booked the tickets with made an obvious mistake and showed the wrong airport code. Maybe the airport opening was meant to happen earlier, and the intermediary had already updated their emails or something like that. They refused to do anything meaningful and did not even acknowledge their mistake.

The fact that I was compensated by the airline that had nothing to do with this mistake is even more astonishing to me, although they were obviously protecting their brand reputation.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#49

Post by xg15 »

One example that's missing from the list is the TV series 24. A recurring plot point was that, yes, of course torture is bad and it's against the rules and we don't do it, etc etc, but it just so happens that here is such an exceptional, unprecedented, deeply urgent emergency situation where we need to have the information now or horrible things will happen, we need the hero who breaks the rules and goes on torturing anyway. [1]

Fast-forward a few years and you find there were in fact many such "heroes" in reality - in Abu Ghraib and in the Black Sites - and the situation weren't exceptional at all.

So accountability sinks can also be used as calculated ways to undermine your own ostensible ethical guardrails.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/24-jack...

Re: Accountability Sinks

#50

Post by pcthrowaway »

bflesch wrote: post #30
queuep wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the author gives what, 10 examples, and one of them is about himself and his own experiences, and one of them is from a hospital. And from that you convey that the author must have some kind of ego? I don't think that's justified critique.

The word "hero" is mentioned twice in the whole article. Once in the section before he talks about his own work, and once in the section directly following it. > As one of the commenters noted: "Amazing! The guy broke every possible rule. If he wasn't a fucking hero, he would be fired on the spot." > ** > Once, I used to work as an SRE for Gmail. SREs are people responsible for the site being up and running. If there…

Not to mention, he has awareness of the ways people absolved themselves of responsibility during the holocaust, but fails to take accountability for his work at a company supporting an ongoing genocide (whether or not he had any involvement with Project Lavender)
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