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 necessary to check boxes on a compliance checklist. That's why you have external auditors come to check whether you really check those boxes. It's all that so, when something happens - because something will eventually happen - you can point back to all these measures, and say: "we've implemented all best practices, contracted out the hard parts to world-renowned experts, and had third party audits to verify that - there was nothing more we could do, therefore it's not our fault".
With that in mind, look at the world from the perspective of some corporations, B2B companies selling to those corporations, other suppliers, etc.; notice how e.g. smaller companies are forced to adhere to certain standards of practice to even be considered by the larger ones, etc. It all creates a mesh, through which liability for anything is dispersed, so that ultimately no one is to blame, everyone provably did their best, and the only thing that happens is that some corporate insurance policies get liquidated, and affected customers get a complimentary free credit check or some other nonsense.
I'm not even saying this is bad, per se - there are plenty of situations where discharging all liability through insurance is the best thing to do; see e.g. how maritime shipping handles accidents at sea. It's just that understanding this explains a lot of paradoxes of cybersecurity as a field. It all makes much more sense when you realize it's primarily about liability management, not about hat-wearing hackers fighting other hackers with differently colored hats.
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 they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.
Having been on both sides of this—working behind a counter and answering phones at various jobs long ago, and being someone who often surprises family and friends with my ability to extract good outcomes from customer service—I think it’s somewhat of a misconception that being as unpleasant as possible is actually effective at getting results.
I fully understand that the godawful CS mazes many companies set up wind up pushing people in that direction, and that it feels like the only option, but I believe quite strongly that being patient and polite but persistent winds up being much more effective than being unpleasant.
As a small case in point: I worked summers in a tiny ice cream shop, most of the time solo. The shop had a small bathroom for employees only—it was through a food prep area where customers were not allowed by health code. I had some leeway to let people back there as it was pretty low-risk, and I would in the evenings when no other businesses were open, or if a little kid was having an emergency. People who were unpleasant from the get-go when placing their order, however, were simply told we had no bathroom at all. People who started shouting when I told them I wasn’t supposed to let people back there (not uncommon!) and suggested a nearby business were never granted exceptions.
Yes unfortunately I've observed this in some support systems.
The best way is to thread the needle between being extremely personally polite to the other human on the line, but going through the required machinations on their runbook to trigger an escalation.
That is - you don't really have to behave unpleasant (raise voice, swear, be impolite, threaten) but you should just refuse to get off the line, demand escalation, and importantly emphasize with their predicament in needing to escalate you. Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue".
I had a cellphone provider send me a $3000 bill because someone apparently was able to open 5 lines & new devices in my name/address. I went through the first few steps of their runbook including going to police department, getting report filed, and providing them the report number. They then tried to demand further work from me and I escalated.
At that point I turned it around - what evidence do you have that I opened this line. Show me the store security footage of me buying the phones, show me the scan of my drivers license, show me my social security number? Tim, are you saying I can just go to the store with your name & address and open 5 lines in your name? Being able to point out the asymmetry of evidence, unreasonableness of their demands, and putting the support staff in my shoes.. they relented and cleared the case.
If you behave unpleasant enough I'll go out of my way to make sure your behavior does not pay off. I will note your abrasive behavior in the ticket or might even mark your mail as spam. On telephone our line will suddenly experience technical difficulties. And throughout I will remain as friendly and patient as ever.
I will warn superiors about you, so once you escalate they already have a colorful 3D image of your wonderful personality in mind. Whether that 100% is in your favor, you can guess.
Play asshole games? Win asshole prices.
Behave like a decent person with empathy instead, press the right buttons and I might even skip some of the company rules for you. Many people in support do not give a single damn if they lose their job over you and you might just be worth it.
These are not sfter-the-fact shower thoughts, these are actually lived experiences from the trenches and I know how other people in those roles think.
Persistence pays off, being an asshole not so much
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."
I have seen this as well, watching customer support issues get escalated to engineering. Many times, engineering tries to blow off the issue. It was fascinating to me how quickly an issue got escalated to numerous engineering managers, directors, leads, etc when the customer threaten to cancel their contract.
I was even more blown away when the whole thing becomes old, forgotten news the moment the customer stopped threatening to cancel the contract, even if the underlying problem remains.
This really reinforces the lesson that the main power structures of the world does not listen to "reason" - it only responds to incentives, whether they're airlines or ginormous tech companies.
Hacker News has also repeatedly noticed the same thing whenever a big tech customer issue hits the top of Hacker News, and the comments point out that the only way that customer got help was when it got enough attention to cause a reputation risk to the big tech company.
This has become the norm in customer service. That is why a taboo has been invoked by companies against being a "Karen". That's how they get you. The ugliest thing you can be today is a customer who knows they're right and won't roll over.
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.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced Section 31, an organisation which regularly acted in the way you describe the characters from 24. They operated outside official channels and used questionable methods to do whatever was necessary “for the good of the Federation”. The character of Odo criticised it well:
> Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?
I watched a season of Chicago PD, and noticed that they had a convenient "plot accelerator."
Whenever they got to a point, where the detectives and CSI would be painstakingly going through the evidence, sifting out clues, they'd throw the suspect into "the cage," and beat a confession out of them.
Well, it's the motive behind any atrocity committed during war, what's a few cracked eggs if there is a grand goal in mind. There are always people in places who feel like it's a historical duty to carry out those plans. And the war crimes stay in the past and get forgotten but nobody can deny the new reality on the ground. You can ethnically cleanse an area and in a 100 years that becomes barely a historical footnote and a new reality emerges and nobody can dispute that the area is occupied by a nation that claims rights based on self determination. Same for settler colonialism, they're not invading, just changing the actual conditions as a precursor to claiming political legitimacy.
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.
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.
> 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.
"Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell the solution in the first five minutes."
- Gerald Marvin Weinberg
The Secrets of Consulting
>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.
Unrelated to the post, but it sounds like you and I do similar work and have arrived at similar conclusions but I often fail to get organizations to actually spend the correct amount of time identifying these success indicators - which I think are critical to focus and scope stability. I’d love to chat sometime.
I once worked on a public sector project as a consultant, spent a year doing studies for similar projects that had been done elsewhere, resulted in a document presenting a budget and timeline with options that I presented to their board of elected officials. They wanted the number and timeline to be half of what we showed, and scope unchanged.
I opened my mouth to argue, my partner at the time cut me short "we'll see what's possible".
We spent the next couple months massaging numbers under his supervision removing all contingency, selecting the most optimistic paths and assumptions, and plain lowering numbers. Until, for all intents and purposes, our document was the same but showing the numbers they wanted with out signature at the bottom.
They were very happy with our work. They're elected officials you see, they are concerned with re-election and appearing to behave reasonably with money. I got a promotion out of it.
The project ended costing 30% more than what we initially planned and took 30% more than our estimate.
This is no secret, most of "big 4" consulting is about telling directors what they want to hear anyway (eg layoffs) but wrapping that in a glossy report with a logo on it
I always remind myself when I have to go to the DMV[0] that I should plan on leaving with nothing more than another action or set of actions to take. I never enter the DMV expecting to complete a process, and the workers behind the counter always have this visible, visceral response when I DONT lose my fucking mind at their response to something. When I continue to be pleasant and understanding it’s like they suddenly come alive. It’s a depressing state of affairs because I understand exactly what they expect and why.
0: for non-Americans and for Americans from other states that may use different terms, the DMV is the department of motor vehicles in many US states and is the central place to get your drivers license, take the drivers test, register your car, get vehicle license plates, etc. Many processes that have many requirements that often are unfulfilled when people show up asking for things.
When dealing with companies, small claims court can be an amazing tool to fix the "nobody is responsible so you hit a wall" issue. The court sends a letter to the company, and either the company figures out who is responsible for dealing with it, or whatever process for collecting unpaid judgements eventually deals with the company (e.g. the famous "sheriff comes to repo the bank's furniture" example).
For companies, this is also fine, because in most cases the built-in processes work well enough, and in others people just give up, that handling the escalations through their legal department is manageable.
Unfortunately, this approach only helps for the subset of cases where the issue is monetary and/or can wait (and only if it happened in a country with a working small claims system).
The squirrel example sounds terrible, but people don't realize the danger that moving pathogen-carrying specimen across ecosystems poses. Introducing a disease into your local environment can have devastating consquences for wildlife or farming or both.
Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. There are many such examples and similar examples exist for wild ecosystems.
So, while it may seem cruel to kill a few hundred squirrels, the precaution is justified. The "guilt", if there is any, is with whoever didn't ensure all the paperwork is in order.
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 travel I took a taxi to the new airport, which is 40 km outside the city. The taxi driver couldn't care less about where I was going. Upon arrival, there was much fewer people than I expected but I shrugged it off. At the entrance though I was asked where I was going and if I was an employee. Apparently the new airport was still closed and my fight was from the old, still functioning one. The one with the code not shown in the ticket purchase receipts.
Panicking since it was only about an hour until departure, I took a taxi back to the old airport, which was a desperate 40-50 minute drive to only realize the plane had already left.
I was flying abroad, with a connection the next morning, about 10 hours later. So I thought that the problem could be solved by just arriving there by any other flight, which I booked almost immediately. However, the airline representative (yes, there was a human to speak to that I could reach easily by phone) told me that a no-show for any segment of the flight invalidates all subsequent ones. There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time.
I ended up buying 2 new tickets, of course more expensive and less convenient ones. This taught me an important and rather expensive lesson on why connected flights with a single airline are sometimes the worst.
Funnily enough, I was bitten by this rule one more time when I didn't show to a flight in to the country due to visa issues (it was covid time) and wasn't allowed on the flight out of it because I didn't show up to the 1st flight, the flights being 1 week apart - but booked in one go.
As to the previous situation, I managed to get compensated by the airline (not even the intermediary!) about a year later after posting a huge rant on Facebook and getting their attention to the situation.
> There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time.
Yeah they generally have the capability to prevent that auto cancellation of your segments (within a certain time frame) but in this case unfortunately they were unwilling or it was too late to catch it.
It's generally to protect revenue because buying A-B-C instead of B-C can be cheaper, and hoards of people used to just segments to save money. So they just assume everyone is trying to cheat them.
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 went to the airport for my return flight that was booked by the recruiter. To my absolute horror I was told that since my onward journey was a no show the whole PNR was cancelled. I felt like an idiot. Since then I double and triple check whenever I’m booking flight tickets.
> So I thought that the problem could be solved by just arriving there by any other flight, which I booked almost immediately.
Why did you do that? Especially when that cost you extra money?
You should have talked to the airline directly, explained you'd missed your flight because they gave you the wrong airport, and the airline would have rebooked you and everything would have been fine. People miss flights all the time and this is an entirely normal process.
It's been standard practice for a long time if you miss a first leg, that you forfeit the rest. They're going to reuse those seats for e.g. other people who missed their original flights. It's a type of flexibility built into the whole system.
Connecting flights are super useful because you can work with the airline to reschedule the whole thing, and the airline is responsible if you can't make a connection because an earlier leg is delayed.
I truly don't understand why you would have taken it into your own hands to buy a separate replacement ticket on your own, instead of talking to the airline. Even in your second example, why didn't you work with the airline to reschedule your missed flight? Even if they for some reason can't reschedule, they will often keep your return flight valid if you have an obviously good reason (e.g. a visa issue during COVID). But you do have to contact them immediately.
I'm sorry you didn't know how all this worked, but when in doubt, contact customer service ASAP to see if they can help. Don't just go buy separate tickets on your own, and then assume later legs will still be valid. That's not how it works.
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).
According to Dutch law, you lose your Dutch citizenship if you accept another nationality. The Dutch embassies (who are responsible for renewing Dutch passports abroad) are well aware of this law and have processes in place to refuse a passport renewal if you can’t provide proof of temporary residence in the country you reside in. The local institutions however, don’t have these processes in place and are generally not aware of this law because it only happens to a tiny little percentage of the population. And nobody updates the national registry with your new nationality because that’s the responsibility of local municipalities, not the Department of Foreign Affairs. So if you decide to simply renew your passport in the Netherlands instead of abroad, they’ll just give you a new passport because you’re still registered as a Dutch citizen at the local level and they don’t have a process in place to check your foreign nationality.
Don’t ask me how I know :) It is one of the few accountability sinks that doesn’t affect me negatively.
I have a feeling that AI will be used to replace the folks that might get squeamish.
If I understand it correctly, that's what United Healthcare was doing, that got people so mad at the guy that was shot. He brought in "AI Denial Bots," so the company could knowingly cause the death of their customers, without having any "soft" humans in the process.
> Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage.
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,
1) About 8 years ago I was gifted a copy of Ray Dalio's Principles. Being a process aficionado who thought the way to prevent bureaucracy was to ground process in principles, I was very excited. But halfway through I gave up. All the experience, the observations, the case studies that had led Dalio to each insight, had been lost in the distillation process. The reader was only getting a Plato's Cave version. I used to love writing spec-like process docs with lots of "shoulds" and "mays" for my teams, but now I largely write examples.
2) I live in a Commonwealth country, and as I understand (IANAL), common law, or judge made law, plays a larger role in the justice system here than in the US, where the letter of the law seem to matter more. I used to think the US system superior (less arbitrary), but now I'm not sure. Case law seems to provide a great deal of context that no statute could ever hope to codify in writing. It also carries the weight of history, and therefore is harder to abruptly change (for better or for worse).
3) Are human beings actually accountability sinks? This is only possible if they are causal originators, or in Aristotlean terms, "prime movers", or have pure agency, or are causa sui. But the question is, once we subtract environment (e.g. good parenting / bad parenting) and genetics (e.g. empathy, propensity toward anger), how much agency is actually left? Is it correct for our legal and ethical systems to terminate the chain of causality at the nearest human being?
I read most of this agreeing with everything the author was saying, sometimes in a "I already thought that" but often in a "huh, that's a really cool insight." I quite like the style too.
As a Brit though, I was completely blindsided by the inclusion of Dom Cummings. I'd forgotten he existed. Seeing his and Boris' attitude to PPE provision discussed in a positive light without any mention of the associated scandal[1] made me a bit uncomfortable. Without getting too political, they claimed to have solved a problem, but whether or not it was a justifiable, sensible or legitimate solution is probably going to be debated for decades.
I think this is one of the most fascinating aspects of solo non-stop around the world sailing: You have no one to blame other than yourself. It puts you into a mindset that is unique in this day and age. The sailors, when interviewed after their ordeal, also mention it a lot.
(A very short overview of Dan Davies' book, quoted in TFA, that came up with the term)
EDIT: complementing book mentioned in that thread
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.
Greaber, if I remember right, argues that modern bureaucracy started with efficient means of communication. He squares the Deutsche Post as the milestone, as they made the whole population available to be controlled. Now the state could send them letters, count them, enlist them in the military etc.. It's a brilliant observation: communication technology is the main tool of the bureaucracy. The tangent he takes fron there is even more brilliant: we have been heavily focusing and improving the communication tech (telephone, fax, tv, radio, internet, social media) but not necessarily the tech to reduce thr burden of work for the masses (robots!). If you would ask someone 100 years ago how the future would look like, people would almost invariably say they would need to work less in the future, abd at some point they invariably expected to have robots do all the work. Yet, all we got is smartphones that watch every movement of us, makes us available to the employer anywhere and anytime, hence more means to control us by state or, exceedingly, private bureaucracies. There's a reason why AI boom is happening, as this is the next tech on the bureaucracy tree.
This being said, none of these tech are bad by themselves. It is the shape they took and the way they are used in contemporary society. To tie with the OP: we have communication tools available to us that is billions of times more efficient and effective yet the customer service, or any interaction with any big corporation (as a customer or employee) or state got so much worse and impersonal. Impersonal as in, individual cases do not exist anymore, only policies. One could have expected to escalate a claim back in late 19th century by just writing letters and eventually get to someone, or even just show up at the offices of a company and get their problem resolved (this is still the case in developing countries). Can we expect this now?
Another major accountability sink is employment. Employee is shielded from financial responsibility for the damage he incurs while working. While he may be punished for disobeying orders or acting criminally, he's not financially responsible for the fallout (especially if he was only doing the things he was ordered to do and/or reasonable things). Doing a job is inherently risky behavior. If you are doing it in a context of financial amplifier (a company) in a regulated society that can quickly hunt you down and destroy your life if you misstep then in the absence of accountability sink protections barely anyone would be brave enough to get employed. That's also why LLC exist. To enable risk taking by promising to not hunt you to the bottom if you fail.
Another fun one is asking for a higher salary - for obvious reasons moderately sized companies have formal systems that make it logically impossible to do on an employees initiative (the boss doesn't control salaries, payroll doesn't control salaries and all the formal systems point to the boss and payroll). The real approach is that a worker has to somehow convince one of the people with serious power to overrule the default systems.
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.
Interesting article, but picking Johnson and Cummings's handling of Covid as a positive example is a very odd choice, given their falling out and the numerous corruption allegations and parliamentary inquiries into their actions since then.
Surely it is that specific example that counts. It seems perverse to dismiss one sensible decision on the grounds that the persons concerned made many other bad decisions. It's the decision that is the focus not the persons making it.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 months ago|reply
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 necessary to check boxes on a compliance checklist. That's why you have external auditors come to check whether you really check those boxes. It's all that so, when something happens - because something will eventually happen - you can point back to all these measures, and say: "we've implemented all best practices, contracted out the hard parts to world-renowned experts, and had third party audits to verify that - there was nothing more we could do, therefore it's not our fault".
With that in mind, look at the world from the perspective of some corporations, B2B companies selling to those corporations, other suppliers, etc.; notice how e.g. smaller companies are forced to adhere to certain standards of practice to even be considered by the larger ones, etc. It all creates a mesh, through which liability for anything is dispersed, so that ultimately no one is to blame, everyone provably did their best, and the only thing that happens is that some corporate insurance policies get liquidated, and affected customers get a complimentary free credit check or some other nonsense.
I'm not even saying this is bad, per se - there are plenty of situations where discharging all liability through insurance is the best thing to do; see e.g. how maritime shipping handles accidents at sea. It's just that understanding this explains a lot of paradoxes of cybersecurity as a field. It all makes much more sense when you realize it's primarily about liability management, not about hat-wearing hackers fighting other hackers with differently colored hats.
[+] [-] t_luke|10 months ago|reply
The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.
[+] [-] macNchz|10 months ago|reply
I fully understand that the godawful CS mazes many companies set up wind up pushing people in that direction, and that it feels like the only option, but I believe quite strongly that being patient and polite but persistent winds up being much more effective than being unpleasant.
As a small case in point: I worked summers in a tiny ice cream shop, most of the time solo. The shop had a small bathroom for employees only—it was through a food prep area where customers were not allowed by health code. I had some leeway to let people back there as it was pretty low-risk, and I would in the evenings when no other businesses were open, or if a little kid was having an emergency. People who were unpleasant from the get-go when placing their order, however, were simply told we had no bathroom at all. People who started shouting when I told them I wasn’t supposed to let people back there (not uncommon!) and suggested a nearby business were never granted exceptions.
[+] [-] steveBK123|10 months ago|reply
That is - you don't really have to behave unpleasant (raise voice, swear, be impolite, threaten) but you should just refuse to get off the line, demand escalation, and importantly emphasize with their predicament in needing to escalate you. Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue".
I had a cellphone provider send me a $3000 bill because someone apparently was able to open 5 lines & new devices in my name/address. I went through the first few steps of their runbook including going to police department, getting report filed, and providing them the report number. They then tried to demand further work from me and I escalated.
At that point I turned it around - what evidence do you have that I opened this line. Show me the store security footage of me buying the phones, show me the scan of my drivers license, show me my social security number? Tim, are you saying I can just go to the store with your name & address and open 5 lines in your name? Being able to point out the asymmetry of evidence, unreasonableness of their demands, and putting the support staff in my shoes.. they relented and cleared the case.
[+] [-] atoav|10 months ago|reply
If you behave unpleasant enough I'll go out of my way to make sure your behavior does not pay off. I will note your abrasive behavior in the ticket or might even mark your mail as spam. On telephone our line will suddenly experience technical difficulties. And throughout I will remain as friendly and patient as ever.
I will warn superiors about you, so once you escalate they already have a colorful 3D image of your wonderful personality in mind. Whether that 100% is in your favor, you can guess.
Play asshole games? Win asshole prices.
Behave like a decent person with empathy instead, press the right buttons and I might even skip some of the company rules for you. Many people in support do not give a single damn if they lose their job over you and you might just be worth it.
These are not sfter-the-fact shower thoughts, these are actually lived experiences from the trenches and I know how other people in those roles think.
Persistence pays off, being an asshole not so much
[+] [-] rfrey|10 months ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] dividuum|10 months ago|reply
Thus creating an asshole filter: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html
[+] [-] etruong42|10 months ago|reply
I was even more blown away when the whole thing becomes old, forgotten news the moment the customer stopped threatening to cancel the contract, even if the underlying problem remains.
This really reinforces the lesson that the main power structures of the world does not listen to "reason" - it only responds to incentives, whether they're airlines or ginormous tech companies.
Hacker News has also repeatedly noticed the same thing whenever a big tech customer issue hits the top of Hacker News, and the comments point out that the only way that customer got help was when it got enough attention to cause a reputation risk to the big tech company.
[+] [-] antithesizer|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|10 months ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] latexr|10 months ago|reply
> Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Section_31
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|10 months ago|reply
Whenever they got to a point, where the detectives and CSI would be painstakingly going through the evidence, sifting out clues, they'd throw the suspect into "the cage," and beat a confession out of them.
[+] [-] dsego|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vishnugupta|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] euroderf|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] keyringlight|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] amos-burton|10 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] franze|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] belter|10 months ago|reply
"Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell the solution in the first five minutes."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/566213.The_Secrets_of_Co...[+] [-] apercu|10 months ago|reply
Unrelated to the post, but it sounds like you and I do similar work and have arrived at similar conclusions but I often fail to get organizations to actually spend the correct amount of time identifying these success indicators - which I think are critical to focus and scope stability. I’d love to chat sometime.
[+] [-] charles_f|10 months ago|reply
I opened my mouth to argue, my partner at the time cut me short "we'll see what's possible".
We spent the next couple months massaging numbers under his supervision removing all contingency, selecting the most optimistic paths and assumptions, and plain lowering numbers. Until, for all intents and purposes, our document was the same but showing the numbers they wanted with out signature at the bottom.
They were very happy with our work. They're elected officials you see, they are concerned with re-election and appearing to behave reasonably with money. I got a promotion out of it.
The project ended costing 30% more than what we initially planned and took 30% more than our estimate.
[+] [-] cbsmith|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|10 months ago|reply
There's a classic article (2010) about it: https://thetech.com/2010/04/09/dubai-v130-n18 (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257644)
The difference is that while the decision has been made, it isn't necessarily very good.
[+] [-] apples_oranges|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cheschire|10 months ago|reply
0: for non-Americans and for Americans from other states that may use different terms, the DMV is the department of motor vehicles in many US states and is the central place to get your drivers license, take the drivers test, register your car, get vehicle license plates, etc. Many processes that have many requirements that often are unfulfilled when people show up asking for things.
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|10 months ago|reply
For companies, this is also fine, because in most cases the built-in processes work well enough, and in others people just give up, that handling the escalations through their legal department is manageable.
Unfortunately, this approach only helps for the subset of cases where the issue is monetary and/or can wait (and only if it happened in a country with a working small claims system).
[+] [-] svilen_dobrev|10 months ago|reply
Anti-social Punishment: https://250bpm.com/blog:132/
Technocratic Plimsoll Line: https://250bpm.com/blog:176/
seems lesswrong has all of them, older and newer: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/sustrik?from=post_header
[+] [-] yusina|10 months ago|reply
Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. There are many such examples and similar examples exist for wild ecosystems.
So, while it may seem cruel to kill a few hundred squirrels, the precaution is justified. The "guilt", if there is any, is with whoever didn't ensure all the paperwork is in order.
[+] [-] oleggromov|10 months ago|reply
On the day of travel I took a taxi to the new airport, which is 40 km outside the city. The taxi driver couldn't care less about where I was going. Upon arrival, there was much fewer people than I expected but I shrugged it off. At the entrance though I was asked where I was going and if I was an employee. Apparently the new airport was still closed and my fight was from the old, still functioning one. The one with the code not shown in the ticket purchase receipts.
Panicking since it was only about an hour until departure, I took a taxi back to the old airport, which was a desperate 40-50 minute drive to only realize the plane had already left.
I was flying abroad, with a connection the next morning, about 10 hours later. So I thought that the problem could be solved by just arriving there by any other flight, which I booked almost immediately. However, the airline representative (yes, there was a human to speak to that I could reach easily by phone) told me that a no-show for any segment of the flight invalidates all subsequent ones. There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time.
I ended up buying 2 new tickets, of course more expensive and less convenient ones. This taught me an important and rather expensive lesson on why connected flights with a single airline are sometimes the worst.
Funnily enough, I was bitten by this rule one more time when I didn't show to a flight in to the country due to visa issues (it was covid time) and wasn't allowed on the flight out of it because I didn't show up to the 1st flight, the flights being 1 week apart - but booked in one go.
As to the previous situation, I managed to get compensated by the airline (not even the intermediary!) about a year later after posting a huge rant on Facebook and getting their attention to the situation.
[+] [-] switch007|10 months ago|reply
Yeah they generally have the capability to prevent that auto cancellation of your segments (within a certain time frame) but in this case unfortunately they were unwilling or it was too late to catch it.
It's generally to protect revenue because buying A-B-C instead of B-C can be cheaper, and hoards of people used to just segments to save money. So they just assume everyone is trying to cheat them.
[+] [-] vishnugupta|10 months ago|reply
I then took a train to Berlin from Amsterdam, finished the interview and went to the airport for my return flight that was booked by the recruiter. To my absolute horror I was told that since my onward journey was a no show the whole PNR was cancelled. I felt like an idiot. Since then I double and triple check whenever I’m booking flight tickets.
[+] [-] crazygringo|10 months ago|reply
Why did you do that? Especially when that cost you extra money?
You should have talked to the airline directly, explained you'd missed your flight because they gave you the wrong airport, and the airline would have rebooked you and everything would have been fine. People miss flights all the time and this is an entirely normal process.
It's been standard practice for a long time if you miss a first leg, that you forfeit the rest. They're going to reuse those seats for e.g. other people who missed their original flights. It's a type of flexibility built into the whole system.
Connecting flights are super useful because you can work with the airline to reschedule the whole thing, and the airline is responsible if you can't make a connection because an earlier leg is delayed.
I truly don't understand why you would have taken it into your own hands to buy a separate replacement ticket on your own, instead of talking to the airline. Even in your second example, why didn't you work with the airline to reschedule your missed flight? Even if they for some reason can't reschedule, they will often keep your return flight valid if you have an obviously good reason (e.g. a visa issue during COVID). But you do have to contact them immediately.
I'm sorry you didn't know how all this worked, but when in doubt, contact customer service ASAP to see if they can help. Don't just go buy separate tickets on your own, and then assume later legs will still be valid. That's not how it works.
[+] [-] Pamar|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] melvinmelih|10 months ago|reply
Don’t ask me how I know :) It is one of the few accountability sinks that doesn’t affect me negatively.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|10 months ago|reply
If I understand it correctly, that's what United Healthcare was doing, that got people so mad at the guy that was shot. He brought in "AI Denial Bots," so the company could knowingly cause the death of their customers, without having any "soft" humans in the process.
[+] [-] einpoklum|10 months ago|reply
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,
[+] [-] hliyan|10 months ago|reply
1) About 8 years ago I was gifted a copy of Ray Dalio's Principles. Being a process aficionado who thought the way to prevent bureaucracy was to ground process in principles, I was very excited. But halfway through I gave up. All the experience, the observations, the case studies that had led Dalio to each insight, had been lost in the distillation process. The reader was only getting a Plato's Cave version. I used to love writing spec-like process docs with lots of "shoulds" and "mays" for my teams, but now I largely write examples.
2) I live in a Commonwealth country, and as I understand (IANAL), common law, or judge made law, plays a larger role in the justice system here than in the US, where the letter of the law seem to matter more. I used to think the US system superior (less arbitrary), but now I'm not sure. Case law seems to provide a great deal of context that no statute could ever hope to codify in writing. It also carries the weight of history, and therefore is harder to abruptly change (for better or for worse).
3) Are human beings actually accountability sinks? This is only possible if they are causal originators, or in Aristotlean terms, "prime movers", or have pure agency, or are causa sui. But the question is, once we subtract environment (e.g. good parenting / bad parenting) and genetics (e.g. empathy, propensity toward anger), how much agency is actually left? Is it correct for our legal and ethical systems to terminate the chain of causality at the nearest human being?
[+] [-] FabHK|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 1dom|10 months ago|reply
As a Brit though, I was completely blindsided by the inclusion of Dom Cummings. I'd forgotten he existed. Seeing his and Boris' attitude to PPE provision discussed in a positive light without any mention of the associated scandal[1] made me a bit uncomfortable. Without getting too political, they claimed to have solved a problem, but whether or not it was a justifiable, sensible or legitimate solution is probably going to be debated for decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_regarding_COVID-...
[+] [-] Tepix|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gsf_emergency|10 months ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694
https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/unaccountability-machine
(A very short overview of Dan Davies' book, quoted in TFA, that came up with the term)
EDIT: complementing book mentioned in that thread
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41892299
[+] [-] bgnn|10 months ago|reply
Greaber, if I remember right, argues that modern bureaucracy started with efficient means of communication. He squares the Deutsche Post as the milestone, as they made the whole population available to be controlled. Now the state could send them letters, count them, enlist them in the military etc.. It's a brilliant observation: communication technology is the main tool of the bureaucracy. The tangent he takes fron there is even more brilliant: we have been heavily focusing and improving the communication tech (telephone, fax, tv, radio, internet, social media) but not necessarily the tech to reduce thr burden of work for the masses (robots!). If you would ask someone 100 years ago how the future would look like, people would almost invariably say they would need to work less in the future, abd at some point they invariably expected to have robots do all the work. Yet, all we got is smartphones that watch every movement of us, makes us available to the employer anywhere and anytime, hence more means to control us by state or, exceedingly, private bureaucracies. There's a reason why AI boom is happening, as this is the next tech on the bureaucracy tree.
This being said, none of these tech are bad by themselves. It is the shape they took and the way they are used in contemporary society. To tie with the OP: we have communication tools available to us that is billions of times more efficient and effective yet the customer service, or any interaction with any big corporation (as a customer or employee) or state got so much worse and impersonal. Impersonal as in, individual cases do not exist anymore, only policies. One could have expected to escalate a claim back in late 19th century by just writing letters and eventually get to someone, or even just show up at the offices of a company and get their problem resolved (this is still the case in developing countries). Can we expect this now?
[+] [-] scotty79|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DangerousPie|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MzxgckZtNqX5i|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ninalanyon|10 months ago|reply