

Study HN: The Blame Study Pre-Study (for sociological survey) - markbao
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dENmN3BmYUJtX0hiX1dvOW1YalZGekE6MA

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jacquesm
All these questions are technically unanswerable because information to answer
the questions is not given.

For example:

Q2, I feel that blame should be given to both parties, and possibly even the
driver, but all that depends on information that was not given.

The car company should test the stuff that it buys better, the company that
made the cruise control should test their stuff better to avoid errors, and it
should 'fail safe', in other words it should fail in a way that minimizes the
risk of accidents.

Also, an error is pretty ambiguous, clearly it is one that seems to have a
failure mode that is disastrous, but any driver should normally be able to
disengage the cruise control if it would malfunction, so maybe the driver
should carry some blame too.

Similar stuff applies to the other two examples.

For instance in #1 it might have been the producer of the cake (not
neccesarily the supermarket), it might have been the delay between the
purchase and the use, it might have been the person transporting the cake from
the baker to the supermarket and so on.

In Q3 the error was made by the employee, but it may have been due to bad
training, working too many hours or one of many other reasons that would
change the take on the situation.

To assign 'blame' with this little information and so many unanswered
questions is un-doable.

There is a reason why accident investigations take a while, all those
questions need to be answered. And the reason is not to assign 'blame', even
though in a litigious society that is how they are used, the reason is to make
sure that we learn from these errors and change our procedures to make sure
that it will not happen again.

~~~
skermes
I suspect that that's the point of the survey, though. Even though the
questions can't be answered definitively, and even though they may really be
the wrong questions to ask, we're faced with them on a daily basis.

Shakesville (<http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/>) has a regular series
where they point out how regularly various media outlets write stories about
domestic abuse where the story is framed so that the victims (overwhelmingly
women) are blamed for their assaults. This is an extreme case, but it's
illustrative of how society at large (and each of us at small) doesn't
approach blame in a reasoned and careful way that considers all the angles and
second- or third-order causes.

I doubt the point of the survey is to actually determine blame for specific
events, but to investigate how our faulty meat-brains tend to lay blame when
we have limited information.

~~~
raquo
Anyway it should have included an option "Can't confidently blame anyone",
otherwise it assumes that we have to blame someone.

~~~
jpwagner
that option is there: it's the "back" button.

~~~
raquo
Exactly, that's what I did, but my action was not recorded in survey results
which became more biased because of lack of options. It's like asking what my
favorite color is and only offering 3 options without the option "other".

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kirpekar
If your goal is to assign blame, it can never be done on such a naive scale.
The US has very well written liability laws, e.g. for Q2 every party involved
assumes some liability. For every car crash, the individual assume some
liability (that's why we all carry insurance), car companies assume some of
it, parts suppliers do (remember the Ford/Firestone issue where the explorers
were flipping over?), USDOT (e.g. CalTrans in California) does and the
regulators at NHTSA do.

There is a reason why legal and insurances industries are so advanced. Blame
is never black/white.

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gojomo
There should be a sliding scale of apportionment, and a statement of the
perspective doing the evaluation (and there is no 'global' perspective).

For Q1, it's fairly easy to say 100% store -- there's an implied warranty
their food is fit to eat, and the friend has no special insight or customary
duty to double-check (via lab equipment?) the healthfulness of already-
warranted food.

For Q2, it could approach more like 50/50 -- and depends on the perspective
involved. From the perspective of the driver or victim, it's easy to say 100%
car company -- again because the risk flowed through the car company, which
had the expertise and commercial duty to sell a safe product.

But between the car company and the original feature developers it depends on
their arrangement. If the developers are an outside firm that sold the system
as fit for a particular purpose, much or all of the blame then flows to them.
If the developers are the car company's in-house employees, the company
probably agreed to take on the blame along with the profits, as the company is
the coordinator and tester/seller of a multi-person process that failed.

For Q3, again it could vary and be a matter of perspective. From the
perspective of the customer, it's 100% the shop, which has taken on
responsibility for the benefits and costs generated by its employees in the
performance of their duties. (From the customer's perspective, the barista and
the shop are one and the same.) For the shop owner, responsibility may be
thought to lie with the barista, especially if the rate of mistakes goes
beyond typical/achievable levels. Still, as a practical matter of employee
morale and labor law, a policy where the barista pays the costs of occasional
errors is unlikely. The remedy for excessive errors is change of employees,
not compensation for individual mistakes.

