Comment by PaulRobinson
1 day ago
You're touching on points that Ayn Rand touched on in Atlas Shrugged, which as it happens uses the dynamics of the running of a railway as a metaphor for organisational incompetence and which opens on a scene of railway workers refusing to take initiative and following policy blindly.
Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result). Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a little weird.
I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy, people were taught a way of thinking about the World.
"We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's nothing anybody can do about that".
> I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe.
That's actually the nub of the topic. Humans can accumulate some expertise in this or that topic, to some limited extend. But they can't integrate all the cases that actual people are going to face in an anticipated manner.
There are different kind of attitude with expertise. Some people will grow humility as they realize how little they know and how tiny their individual contribution actually is in the grand scheme of cosmos. Other will grow a metastased ego and leverage on the little few things they believe firmly to grab as much political power as they can to enforce whatever fantasy come to their mind as they get out of touch from feedback from the rest of humanity (except the yes-man court).
If an expert have meaningful things to share, of course it should be considered. But not as an absolute authority. Experts can also be fake people, or bribed, or missing clues about the specific context, just as well as be perfectly on point with well framed context and best intention to the general public at heart. But taking blindly anything that an expert labeled person for unquestionable certitudes is a receipt for the kind of trouble exposed in this thread.
Your quote is missing a crucial bit. The full quote is «we're not registered to do so, so we are on the wrong tracks».
You were supposed to take the last exit, to be on the local road instead of the highway. No, we cannot let you off on the highway. We are not allowed to stop here. There are no stops. We wait for another exit. Sorry.
Was that the situation?
Tracks 3, 4 and 7 at the station in question are not adjacent to a platform. It sort of makes sense to route a train over these if there is no stop planned there (intentional or not).
Here's the map of the station:
https://www.bahnhof.de/troisdorf/karte
Of course it does. So it also makes sense that if you are operating that train, you make sure you don't end up on tracks 3, 4 or 7. You stop and verify that the signalling and routing is in place to let you stop at that station before it becomes too late and that option becomes impossible.
This is basic management, it's basic competence.
The train was misrouted because nobody cared about routing it properly: the driver, the conductor, the signallers, the routers, the management. Something weird happened and everyone shrugged and started to hum "Que sera, sera" to themselves, rather than committing to doing a job in the passengers' interests.