Comment by andrewflnr
10 hours ago
> At the time of posting, I didn't know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.
I'm not saying it needs to be a public burning, but I sure hope someone figures out who dropped the critical metadata bit so they can avoid telling that party critical things in the future.
Eh. I'd rather we set up a system where we don't have to rely on people being 100 % perfect for it to work. I'd be much more interested in what went on simultaneously that caused the meta data to get dropped, rather than who happened to be the one to do it this one time.
Sometimes the "system" consists of identifying and removing or bypassing unreliable components.
If you could tell ahead of time which components would be unreliable, that would be a great idea. For the most part, we only discover the component was unreliable after it's caused trouble. Removing the component at that time gets you at best a very short-lived improvement to the system because it'll happen again and again with other components.
If the component removed is a human, the situation is worse. Then you're creating an incentive to hide mistakes and assign blame to others. This makes it even harder to improve the system properly, because then the information you need to improve the system no longer gets to you undistorted.
That's why we have to design systems that don't assume components are perfectly reliable, and ensure any human components that we're not out to get them, we're out to create an environment where they will find it hard to make mistakes.
As a general rule, systems that scapegoat people never fix the underlying root cause.