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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15047 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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I don't think this requires psychological self-awareness. It only requires self-interest. It doesn't take someone particularly self-aware to notice that, when someone fails spectacularly and then tries to hide it or ignore it or otherwise try to minimize it, this lowers their esteem in the eyes of people who aren't already predisposed to liking them. Or the opposite, that someone who takes full ownership of their failures, in a way that credibly signals that they're not doing so for the purpose of image, tends to have their esteem raised in the eyes of people who don't particularly like them but are open to the possibility of liking them.

I work in a very regulated industry that places a massive emphasis on responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes. It has been a horrendous struggle to get people to not run screaming any time there's a problem and a fact finding analysis.

I can only imagine it's a hundred times worse for something like politics rather than engineering.

I work in a very regulated industry that places a massive emphasis on responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes. It has been a horrendous struggle to get people to not run screaming any time there's a problem and a fact finding analysis.

Of course. You're asking them to not be defensive, to show their belly. And instinctively they know that's asking to get stabbed. And no matter how much talk there is about responsibility and owning and learning from mistakes (or "blameless postmortems" or whatever the buzzword is for this)... sometimes someone's going to get stabbed in the belly.

sometimes someone's going to get stabbed in the belly.

There may have been a very significant disconnect between senior management and the ICs over "proportion of these investigations that do in fact result in someone being stabbed in the belly, or indeed whether the purpose actually is fact-finding and improvement or just an excuse to stab someone in the belly..."

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