Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Accountability sinks

aworkinglibrary.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 316 posts

Re: Accountability sinks

#91

Post by shkkmo »

closeparen wrote: post #87
shkkmo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acti…

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.

Re: Accountability sinks

#92

Post by jsemrau »

>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.

Re: Accountability sinks

#93

Post by spit2wind »

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...

Re: Accountability sinks

#94

Post by BartjeD »

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.

Re: Accountability sinks

#95

Post by BartjeD »

spit2wind wrote: post #93

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 conce…

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.

Re: Accountability sinks

#96

Post by melagonster »

lucianbr wrote: post #59
conradolandia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not accountability. Can the algorithm be sent to jail if it commit crimes?

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.

Re: Accountability sinks

#98

Post by noisy_boy »

lazide wrote: post #73
rougka wrote: post #64

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 comput…

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.

Re: Accountability sinks

#99

Post by lucianbr »

lazide wrote: post #75
lucianbr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 mo…

> 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.

Re: Accountability sinks

#100

Post by rurban »

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.

Post reply on HN