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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I want naming and shaming. If you fail this badly, there need to be very serious consequences for you personally. Fines, public humiliation, prison sentence, corporal punishment... Otherwise why would anyone bother doing things correctly in future?

What if a selection of Crowdstrike executives, coders and management had to have 'moron' tattooed on their foreheads?

Ask Congress to draft a letter of marque against CrowdStrike.

Put it in the queue. I'm still waiting the Wuhan lab staff to get drawn and quartered. Or at the least get 10 years hard labor.

As it happens, I'm fairly convinced now that covid was in fact zoonotic in origin and the Wuhan lab didn't leak. But still, it's insane to rely on labs not leaking contagious pathogens.

Could you share the readings that led you to believe that? I tend to hold the Jon Stewart "chocolatey outbreak in Hershey PA" view of things.

Basically the rootclaim/Peter Miller debate (as summarised by Scott) convinced me. In particular it appears that the pattern of very early cases strongly suggest that the very first emergence of the virus was at the wet market.

Containing viruses is hard. I'd consider a lab leak to be within the normal range of human screw ups. In light of that fact, everybody up and down the chain of command who thought it was a good idea to do gain-of-function research on coronaviruses should be tried on 10 million counts of manslaughter.

I know I'm not getting everyone up to Gorbatchev, they are the real culprits but it's not reasonable to expect. But give me a Dyatlov at least.

I'll settle for putting Fauci in a box for however long he has left to live. Let us maintain the illusion that there are any consequences whatsoever to mass death.

What did Fauci do that was "mass death"? Did he sign off on US funding for the Chinese GoF research?

Yes. Also conspired with other "researchers" to cover it up, also lied under oath to congress about it.

Why the scare quotes around "researchers"? Are you talking about political hangers-on who were trying to squash the story because Beijing money or in case it gave racists ammo or whatever, or are you talking about GoF researchers themselves? (I wouldn't scare-quote in the latter case; GoF is mad science, but science nonetheless.)

Fauci aporoved bat coronavirus research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So yes, that's specifically what he did. Fauci has denied that what they were doing matches the academic definition of gain of function; but he quibbled really hard trying to justify that.

I haven't researched this deeply, but I believe this is the case having heard some of Fauci's testimony regarding EcoHealth Alliance and his actions pre-pandemic.

That's not all, he's also behind the Lancet letter trying to actively prevent people from discussing the biolab origin theory. There's emails of him specifically making it happen.

That's enough for me, whatever he decides to call it he was ashamed enough of it to try and hide it by suppressing genuine scientific inquiry into something that was actively killing people.

What if a selection of Crowdstrike executives, coders and management had to have 'moron' tattooed on their foreheads?

That would be neither useful, nor justified. First, plenty of those people you named are almost certainly guilty of nothing except choosing to do as they were told instead of losing their livelihood. That doesn't deserve punishment. Second, for those who are truly guilty of negligence, losing their job is enough negative consequence as long as it isn't some bullshit "he got fired but he got paid handsomely for it" as is often the case for executives. We shouldn't reward incompetence (cue @faceh justifiably tapping the sign), but neither do we need to take extreme measures to punish it. Just regular punishment is enough, if we actually do it. Third, your solution would ultimately just cause people to work hard at covering up their sins and make things worse overall. You would have to be pretty stupid to do an honest post mortem if it meant someone was going to get a caning or a "moron" tattoo as a result.

This is how we get hundred billion dollar black holes, massive financial crises, wars that go nowhere based on pure fantasy and defiance of reality, 20 years of barking up the wrong tree on Alzheimers research due to fraud...

I believe in regular punishment for regular incompetence but this was above and beyond anything normal. Just doing as you're told isn't good enough for critical infrastructure like this. Any normal person tests updates before releasing them. And in the case of egregious failures where the whole organization has gone badly off the rails, why should anyone trust that they'd do a proper post-mortem? Any investigation should be run by outsiders, that's the most basic step.

Furthermore, punishment enhances public trust that everyone is in it together. The leadership class enjoys prestige and great wealth, they should also accept great penalties if they make massive negligent errors.

This is how we get hundred billion dollar black holes, massive financial crises, wars that go nowhere based on pure fantasy and defiance of reality, 20 years of barking up the wrong tree on Alzheimers research due to fraud...

Where did you read that take? It's not clear to me whether you mean Marc Tessier-Lavigne or Sylvain Lesne, but in both cases it's a huge overstatement. Both were peripheral to the main story of beta-amyloid plaques which originated before either author, had strong evidence in favor of it, and (I would argue) have strong evidence in favor of the plaque hypothesis being false at this point. But the enormous research and clinical efforts on beta-amyloid plaques would have happened even in the absence of either fraud.

I'll note that of the people in the field I've spoken with, most still believe in the plaque hypothesis and think we just aren't treating patients early enough or some other excuse.

This is how we get hundred billion dollar black holes, massive financial crises, wars that go nowhere based on pure fantasy and defiance of reality, 20 years of barking up the wrong tree on Alzheimers research due to fraud...

No, we get that by rewarding incompetence (there's that sign tap again...). We don't need to overcorrect to fix that, we just need to actually punish those people instead of promoting them or whatever.

I believe in regular punishment for regular incompetence but this was above and beyond anything normal. Just doing as you're told isn't good enough for critical infrastructure like this.

This isn't critical infrastructure, come on. It's freaking antivirus. It's not the only one, nor is it ubiquitous. It's just another software product.

Any normal person tests updates before releasing them.

I'm willing to bet you that the technical people did want to test updates. Maybe their direct managers did too, although that I'm less certain about. But at the end of the day, when your boss says "do this or else", very few people are willing to take the "or else" option. That's not unreasonable of them.

And in the case of egregious failures where the whole organization has gone badly off the rails, why should anyone trust that they'd do a proper post-mortem?

Because they did.

Furthermore, punishment enhances public trust that everyone is in it together.

We're gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't think it helps.

No, we get that by rewarding incompetence (there's that sign tap again...). We don't need to overcorrect to fix that, we just need to actually punish those people instead of promoting them or whatever.

@RandomRanger's point is that if you are rewarded for recklessness (or punished for prudence) a lot of the time and only punished for recklessness when something goes wrong, the punishment when something goes wrong needs to be large to outweigh the benefit and thus provide a net disincentive.

This isn't critical infrastructure, come on. It's freaking antivirus. It's not the only one, nor is it ubiquitous. It's just another software product.

I hear that it's basically required in a bunch of fields for regulatory compliance purposes; is that not so? Also, uh, I can't get any hard numbers but I'm guessing a bunch of people died due to hospitals getting hit. When you're playing the government-contracts game, there are responsibilities attached to that.

I'm willing to bet you that the technical people did want to test updates. Maybe their direct managers did too, although that I'm less certain about. But at the end of the day, when your boss says "do this or else", very few people are willing to take the "or else" option. That's not unreasonable of them.

Usually when "do this" has massive negative externalities, you want a) to have the boss get in trouble for saying that, b) to have the civil/criminal penalty for "do this" be larger than the corporate penalty for "or else". Basic game theory; you want "do this" to never be picked, so you need to make sure those picking never have an incentive to pick it regardless of what other shenanigans are going on.

if you are rewarded for recklessness (or punished for prudence) a lot of the time and only punished for recklessness when something goes wrong, the punishment when something goes wrong needs to be large to outweigh the benefit and thus provide a net disincentive.

Losing your job is already a pretty big disincentive (assuming no golden parachute shenanigans). I don't think it needs to be bigger than that necessarily. On top of that, there's every reason to believe that the company is going to struggle financially as customers bail - this is further disincentive at the company level, and will affect the decision making at the individual level.

I hear that it's basically required in a bunch of fields for regulatory compliance purposes; is that not so? Also, uh, I can't get any hard numbers but I'm guessing a bunch of people died due to hospitals getting hit. When you're playing the government-contracts game, there are responsibilities attached to that.

Crowdstrike is not required, security measures are required. It's up to the regulated organization to choose how to implement that requirement. I don't think that they become critical infrastructure just because critical infrastructure orgs choose to make use of them.

Also, uh, I can't get any hard numbers but I'm guessing a bunch of people died due to hospitals getting hit.

Government happens on such a large scale that anything nontrivial which is less than perfect will lead to people dying. Never mind hospitals, you can calculate statistical loss of lives just based on the economic impact. And then you can follow up by calculating statistical loss of lives based on something that has only economic impact. If we don't allow for mistakes resulting in deaths, we can't have government at all.

Our personal intuitions don't scale up here. You on your own can only cause deaths by being malicious or by being so careless that you could reasonably be expected to not be so. But if something is large scale enough, even ordinary human imperfection is enough to cause deaths. A standard which says that you should never cause deaths there is unworkable; causing deaths is inevitable.

Usually when "do this" has massive negative externalities, you want a) to have the boss get in trouble for saying that, b) to have the civil/criminal penalty for "do this" be larger than the corporate penalty for "or else".

This doesn't work when the chance of the negative externality happening is small. Past a certain point, increasing the punishment won't cause any more deterrence.

Man, I was going to post it under the OP but didn't want to be too irritating.

But yeah. Some accountability to filter out the incompetence WOULD BE A NICE CHANGE OF PACE.

For what it's worth, I kind of love it when you tap the sign. It's a well written post and I enjoy reading it every so often.

Well that warms my soul a bit. I sometimes think about doing an expanded writeup on the topic, but there's no need since Nicholas Taleb literally wrote the book on it.

Since I do promote this idea as pretty much the "grand unified theory of institutional decay and dysfunction" I'm glad it hits the mark. I really don't want officials and CEOs committing Seppuku over their failures (well, maybe in rare cases), but I also can't help but think sometimes that my dream job would be The Assassin from Serenity.

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