Look, you're not able to say how you would get subpar organizations to solve internal system problems. I see what's happening here. You're restricting all your technology examples and use cases to those where organizations need to be able to use technology to interact with other organizations in a trustworthy manner. There needs to be a counterparty that is important and who will give feedback that something is failing. Cryptography enables that. E-mail security mechanisms enable that. The problems the UK Postal Office experienced and that many other subpar organizations experience are not those problems. Why you are talking about oranges when the discussion was about apples is beyond me.
None of your solution philosophy would have prevented what the UK Postal Office experienced. Their issues had nothing to do with interacting with the public. Their use case was an internal black box where things went to hell and they refused to see that it went to hell because it looked like it was working.
You have no idea that we're talking about different things. You can just refuse to implement smtp authentication, DKIM, and SPF and not email the rest of the world. It is possible when you don't care about communicating with the rest of the world and you only use it for something it wasn't meant to do. And then weird phenomena emerge from that. Or you are emailing the rest of the world but you have no clue that you're having one-sided conversations because you don't care about replies. There are so many ways your assumptions can fall apart but it doesn't matter because they're not even trying to use the darn thing for e-mail.
You can design perfect technology in your perfect world but you can't force people to use it the way you're planning. In all your examples, you have the assumption that people will use technology for what you're designing it to do. Those assumptions mean nothing when they use your technology for something you didn't expect and it seems to work for them anyway. And there's no counterpart that they actually care about that tells them otherwise. You can try to explain to them that it's not working. You can even show evidence that their outputs aren't matching what they claim they want. But they won't listen because to them, it looks like it is working.
You need to stop bringing up examples and use cases that have nothing to do with the problems that the UK Postal Office was actually experiencing, and that all subpar organizations experience. Their problems are not the problems you are trying to solve in your logic. And even good organizations experience the same problems too, just to a lesser degree.
> The entire field of research you purport to not exist and not matter is what drives this cabal forward. They remove various footguns every day and take the reins out of incompetent operators hands further with every release.
I never said it didn't exist. I am saying it's not related. Again, the entire field of research that you champion solves a problem that is completely different from the problem that the UK Postal Office experienced. If you understand what happened with the UK Postal Office completely and then offer viable explanations of how your ideas would have prevented their problems and achieved their organizational goals, I will say I'm wrong. Hey, I'm not so arrogant to say it's impossible. But I will say that everything you've said so far is so unrelated to what their problems actually were at a root cause level. To say otherwise is a lie.
To be fair, I used to think like you. It was because I believed that we could create technological solutions to human problems that I didn't understand why organizations didn't just do technology properly. After diving into the research literature, I have realized that's naive. I no longer think like you. It is more complicated than what code alone can resolve. If you can't provide a solid analysis of how your ideas would have prevented the UK Post Office's problems, we really need to agree to disagree.
None of your solution philosophy would have prevented what the UK Postal Office experienced. Their issues had nothing to do with interacting with the public. Their use case was an internal black box where things went to hell and they refused to see that it went to hell because it looked like it was working.
You have no idea that we're talking about different things. You can just refuse to implement smtp authentication, DKIM, and SPF and not email the rest of the world. It is possible when you don't care about communicating with the rest of the world and you only use it for something it wasn't meant to do. And then weird phenomena emerge from that. Or you are emailing the rest of the world but you have no clue that you're having one-sided conversations because you don't care about replies. There are so many ways your assumptions can fall apart but it doesn't matter because they're not even trying to use the darn thing for e-mail.
You can design perfect technology in your perfect world but you can't force people to use it the way you're planning. In all your examples, you have the assumption that people will use technology for what you're designing it to do. Those assumptions mean nothing when they use your technology for something you didn't expect and it seems to work for them anyway. And there's no counterpart that they actually care about that tells them otherwise. You can try to explain to them that it's not working. You can even show evidence that their outputs aren't matching what they claim they want. But they won't listen because to them, it looks like it is working.
You need to stop bringing up examples and use cases that have nothing to do with the problems that the UK Postal Office was actually experiencing, and that all subpar organizations experience. Their problems are not the problems you are trying to solve in your logic. And even good organizations experience the same problems too, just to a lesser degree.
> The entire field of research you purport to not exist and not matter is what drives this cabal forward. They remove various footguns every day and take the reins out of incompetent operators hands further with every release.
I never said it didn't exist. I am saying it's not related. Again, the entire field of research that you champion solves a problem that is completely different from the problem that the UK Postal Office experienced. If you understand what happened with the UK Postal Office completely and then offer viable explanations of how your ideas would have prevented their problems and achieved their organizational goals, I will say I'm wrong. Hey, I'm not so arrogant to say it's impossible. But I will say that everything you've said so far is so unrelated to what their problems actually were at a root cause level. To say otherwise is a lie.
To be fair, I used to think like you. It was because I believed that we could create technological solutions to human problems that I didn't understand why organizations didn't just do technology properly. After diving into the research literature, I have realized that's naive. I no longer think like you. It is more complicated than what code alone can resolve. If you can't provide a solid analysis of how your ideas would have prevented the UK Post Office's problems, we really need to agree to disagree.