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The problems that accountability can't fix

Accountability is a mechanism that achieves better outcomes by aligning incentives, in particular, negative ones. Specifically: if you do a bad thing, or fail to do a good thing, under your sphere …

As I’ve written about previously, I’m a believer in the resilience engineering model of complex systems failures, where incidents arise due to unexpected interactions between components. In particular, it criticizes how he sacrificed safety for his business goals, ran an organization that lacked that the expertise required to engineer experimental submersibles, promoted a toxic workplace culture that suppressed signs of trouble instead of addressing them, and centralized all authority in himself. Just as giving a software engineer a pager does not bestow up them the skills that they need to effectively do on-call operations work, having the CEO of OceanGate also be the pilot of the experimental vehicle did not lead to him being able to exercise better judgment about safety.

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