A single fabricated story that slips thorough can be a people are flawed problem. 60 stories from a fraudster, discovered by a colleague who investigated on his own money, got no support from superiors and had to fear for his job. That, is an organizational problem.
> What do you suggest they should do to prevent this happening in future?
First step would be to admit that they have an institutional problem.
Blaming a single individual and the "frailness of the world" is not a step in the right direction to prevent this from happening in the future.
Of course it's a systemic problem. But individuals are components of that system. If you don't punish people who engage in fraud, you remove a valuable disincentive against fraud. So while the system as a whole needs to be reformed, making individuals take personal responsibility for wrongdoing is part of that.
There are analogies that make this seem bad (fake construction worker) and analogies that make this seem good (ethical security researcher).
We need to go past the analogy and make a deeper assessment of the factors that matter. For example, what does the bad actor stand to gain? How much harm can they cause? How often is this happening?
For example, if the fake construction worker scheme was used to rob people and it was happening regularly, it might be worth doing something about it.
And "doing something about it" doesn't necessarily mean throwing away trust. There are a bunch of other interventions when you look at the problem holistically, e.g. can we reduce the benefit, reduce the prevalence, reduce the net harm?
Are holding people to (moral, ethical) account and looking at problems from a systems perspective mutually exclusive?
These are systems problems, I fully agree, but they aren't only systems problems. The systems in question are people. They have minds, personalities, and agency. Eliding this - sorry for saying so - makes phrases like "whatever process created the flawed product [...]" sound absurd, borderline callous.
I hate to resort to what by now is a web forum trope, but would you look the MAX victims' families in the eye and say, word for word, what you wrote above: "No, 'they' shouldn't" be held to account? Come on dude.
However, they don't have to fail at the same time or in a single step. This type of problem can creep in slowly over years as the "normalization of deviance"[1].
Richard Cook presented[2] a very useful model for how this type of problem creeps into complex system. The pressure from economic and workload concerns never goes away, so unless there is a proactive, explicit counter force, way to push back against that force, the system will inevitably be pushed toward failure. Therefor it's important to stop problems early when they are small. The magnitude of the counter force increases rapidly as behavior becomes increasingly deviant.
There will always be people who either fall through the cracks or just simply people who are bad at managing their resources. I don't know if there is any real solution to fix that.
These options aren't mutually exclusive. Yes, there are bad operators out there. But there are also cases, I believe, like I outlined.
The danger of ignoring it is that if we blame really bad outcomes (like the banking crisis) on a malicious plot by a bad player, it's too easy to dismiss as a one-off event when the problem may be systemic.
The article I linked touches on that much more elaborately than I possibly could, so forgive me the large quote:
> But a saddening thing is that if it were not those particular identifiable individuals who were culpable (and they certainly should be held to account) then it would have been other individuals doing the same things. And this is because of legal and corporate contexts that facilitated this wrongdoing.
> This is not to say that the guilty people can themselves blame the system - the culpable individuals could and should have done different things, at each and every step. Indeed, exceptional individuals could have stopped the nonsense and the cruelty.
> But these were not exceptional individuals - they were individuals doing what they (wrongly) believed to be their job or performing what they (wrongly) believed to be their function or protecting what they (wrongly) saw to be legitimate interests.
Those people are culpable for their actions, but they did so in a system that made doing the wrong thing easy, and such shortcomings will lead to another case like this.
To be honest, I don’t think a clean slate would solve the problem. Around the world, police lie. Salesmen lie. Politicians lie. Developers lie. Watchdogs lie. Generals lie. Priests lie. And innocent people get hurt.
You are right that you can’t eliminate it from the system with reform. But I don’t think a “clean slate” will do any better either. The goal is marginal improvements, better checks and balances, etc. If you can’t stop a man from lying, the next best thing is to be sure you can catch him.
Making cynical blanket statements about large groups of people doesn't do anything to address any kind of issue, and instead normalizes negative behaviors both within that group.
Within the group, the more people believe that it's the norm, the less social impetus there is to address individual bad actors.
Outside that group, people are less likely to treat people fairly if they are perceived to be part of a group of bad actors. How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors?
Finally, pointing to a single case of someone who was arrested for corruption among literal thousands of bureaucrats does not make a compelling case.
I think the problem is that humans are going to be human. We hold our bureaucrats to a high standard, so if the group contains a few bad eggs it spoils the reputation of the whole group.
I think this is not just about the people in these organizations who are creating the harm, but more specifically how these organizations are propped up by the people (constituents) that support them.
In my view, when a organization has failed because of the people that run them are running them for the wrong reasons, then they only are able to do so by the people that support them. This systemic corruption is only a reflection of the society we create every day by or choices and actions. It will only stop when people change their life styles to be more supportive of others, and less about self-gratification.
I think you’re probably right, but even these people seem to be driven by efficiency or complacency. I’m not sure how else we end up with so many of these cases of negligence or misconduct and it never seems to be the system itself correcting these injustices, it’s always media attention, lawyer or organizations. I do understand there is probably a large confirmation bias on my part, but the lack of transparency in these organizations leave external sources as the only information available.
If the system for reporting and handling these cases on an individual basis actually worked then there wouldn't be a problem. The entire point of discussing this is to make those systems work better. Presenting counter arguments is fine, but trying to prevent the discussion from happening does suggest that you benefit from the status quo.
It has to start with admitting the systems are imperfect and unchecked misconduct is possible even if it's not actually happening.
The insistence that our systems infallible is not at all helpful because anyone can see that's not true.
Once we get to admitting unchecked misconduct is possible in the current systems, we can make some progress to reducing those possibilities. Right now we're resisting that path, and that's just not sustainable.
> What do you suggest they should do to prevent this happening in future?
First step would be to admit that they have an institutional problem. Blaming a single individual and the "frailness of the world" is not a step in the right direction to prevent this from happening in the future.
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