Comment by JohnFen
1 year ago
Very well said. It's not just scientists, I've seen the same thing happen across the board -- including here on HN.
Yes, incentives exist that can make doing the wrong thing easy and even personally advantageous. That doesn't excuse or forgive doing the wrong thing -- that thing is still wrong and people doing it are responsible for their own behavior regardless of "incentives".
Blame the system not the person => person skates => bad but not catastrophic.
Blame the person not the system => system skates => catastrophic.
If you want to punish wrongdoers on your own time, great, we have no quarrel. Ideally we would blame both, but 80% of the time when someone is advocating blaming the person I find that they have a conflict of interest and secretly want to preserve the system. "Small town morality" sounds good but does not scale and this combination of facts is easily exploited to divert attention away from important system maintenance. There was a time when I felt obliged to extend the benefit of the doubt on this matter but after having said benefit exploited very intentionally on two different occasions I now consider it a bad policy, so: first we worry about fixing the system. That is not negotiable.
I think the article is about a different scenario:
Blame the system => person skates and the system doesn’t change
That is, blaming the system often isn’t about changing it.
You need the power to actually fix things and a plan to fix them.