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Accountability Sinks

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Re: Accountability Sinks

#181

Post by gsf_emergency »

divan wrote: post #68
gsf_emergency wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you combine those two frameworks, you could conclude that to be accountable for something you must have the power to change it and understand what you are trying to accomplish when you do. You need both the power and the story of how that power gets used.

This, and I think it gets deeper. I started reading more about history of "just culture" and it seems like historically it was the dominant culture of justice in the tribes and smaller communities. It's the _just culture_ focused on repairing the damage – for the victim and for the community – and trying to fix the reasons and integrate the offender back into life (otherwise community would end up being a bloodbath o…

My eyes opened a little bit!

"Sidney Dekker" & "lese majeste" or even "Wilhoit" returned nothing interesting, so that's a new open secret (if I didn't totally misunderstand, that is)

Aside: does that make "The United States " a careless sovereign (monarch) in your book? -- most criminal cases are "The U.S. vs ____": not only are community/rehabilitation afterthoughts, nobody looks forward to any pleasure of a Majesty. The Judge+Jury as Middle Finger & Thumb of the Invisible Hand?

Re: Accountability Sinks

#183

Post by reneherse »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #164
smallmancontrov wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every police show aggressively pushes the "civil rights bad" angle. Maybe once a season they will graciously consider "maybe civil rights good?" for part of an episode before concluding "no, civil rights bad."

It seems to be a hallmark of Dick Wolf's shows. His son is getting into the act, but seems to be more interested in depicting "the right way." His show is an Amazon show, named On Call : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14582876/ I enjoyed it.

I noticed the difference in this show as well, and I hope it continues.

Besides any conscious philosophy of the producers & writers, perhaps making the show more character driven as opposed to procedural has an impact on the stories. Maybe it's easier to understand when a suspect's rights are being violated (and to not be banal about it) when you're writing a deeper portrayal of the person who wields the power.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#184

Post by rfrey »

t_luke wrote: post #153

The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible. The people who get what th…

I was once on the phone with a cell phone company customer support rep who was clearly as dis-empowered as it's possible for a worker to be. He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me, so I used my normal tactic of just refusing to give up - I was friendly enough but refused to end the call. He was refusing to escalate my call, but couldn't help me himself.

20 or 25 minutes in I realized that wasn't going to work, so I asked if they had a protocol to escalate in an abusive situation. He said "ummm....". I said, "hey, you're doing a great job, and I hope the rest of your day goes better, and I hope you know you're not a motherfucker, you motherfucker."

I think (hope?) he stifled a laugh and said "I'm afraid I'll have to escalate this call to my manager, sir."

Re: Accountability Sinks

#185

Post by EasyMark »

keyringlight wrote: post #98
xg15 wrote: post #49

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…

One of the things that strikes me about 24 is that it started running about 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a debate about running it or edits, but in retrospect it does seem like the timing worked and fit with the public mood of the time. What would be interesting is how 9/11 and following real life events influenced the show's writing in later series.

You don't put together and film a show in 2 months if that's what you're implying here. it was planned for a long time before that

Re: Accountability Sinks

#186

Post by titzer »

> Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.

Welcome to scale. Every business that wants to grow faces this, and those that grow exponentially face this way before they could ever have established a company culture of treating people like humans, which only comes with years of face-to-face interactions, sometimes that don't go so well. Customers sometimes disappointed and you have to make it up to them; when they do, they feel valued. But in today's economy means you can endlessly screw customers, and as long as your business/your userbase/the sector keeps appearing to grow before your exit, giving a shit is an active impediment to that sweet sweet millionaire payoff in the end.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#187

Post by TeMPOraL »

motohagiography wrote: post #161
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

My go-to example of a whole mesh of "accountability sinks" is... cybersecurity. In the real world, this field is really not about the tech and math and crypto - almost all of it is about distributing and dispersing liability through contractual means. That's why you install endpoint security tools. That's why you're forced to fulfill all kinds of requirements, some of them nonsensical or counterproductive, but necess…

Security is closer to product management and marketing than engineering. It's a narrative and the mirror image of product and marketing, where instead of creating something people want based on desire, it's managing the things people explicitly don't want. When organizations don't have product management, they have anti-product management, which is security. We could say, "There is no Anti-Product Division." Specific…

I worked in GRC space for a while, which is where I finally realized the things I wrote above. Our product intended to give CISOs greater visibility into threats and their impacts, making it easy to engage in probabilistic forecasting to prioritize mitigations. Working on designing and building it made me see the field from the perspective of our customers, and from their POV, cyber-threats are all denominated in dollars, mitigating threats boils down to not having to pay corresponding dollars, and that it's often more effective to ensure someone else pays than to address the underlying technological or social vulnerability.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#188

Post by oleggromov »

vishnugupta wrote: post #130
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…

OMG this stirred my memories. I was interviewing with companies in Amsterdam and Berlin. The Berlin recruiter made onward and return flight bookings for me from India. I though went to Amsterdam first on a separate flight because I was juggling the schedule. I thought it’s no big deal didn’t bother informing the recruiter of my side arrangement. I then took a train to Berlin from Amsterdam, finished the interview and…

Sorry to hear that. Sounds like not a lot of fun!

Re: Accountability Sinks

#189

Post by buran77 »

rfrey wrote: post #184
t_luke wrote: post #153

The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible. The people who get what th…

I was once on the phone with a cell phone company customer support rep who was clearly as dis-empowered as it's possible for a worker to be. He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me, so I used my normal tactic of just refusing to give up - I was friendly enough but refused to end the call. He was refusing to escalate my call, but couldn't help me himself. 20 or 25 minutes in I realized that wasn't going to work, s…

> He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me

Plenty of big companies found a workaround. The "forever on hold" routine where they don't hang up, you will eventually. This works perfectly for toll free numbers (so you can't claim you had to pay for the call) and provides just the right amount of plausible deniability (took longer than expected to find an answer, it was an accident, etc.).

I have my suspicions that in some cases this also prevents the survey going out to the customer. All the more reason to abuse it.

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