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> Blame it on faulty software and faultier human interpretation

So you mean blame it on no one but a man's life gets destroyed.

And you wonder why they get away with murder...




Something bad happens, and the first thing on your mind is, "We have to blame this on somebody!"

And you wonder why America is mocked as such a litigious country...


Im always surprised by peoples aversion for trying to put blame on someone or some thing. Finding where the fault was is part of the process to make sure an error doesn't happen again.

I think there's confusion with the "blame game". As in, once you can blame someone, the problem is over and solved but that's just the start to solving the problem. I always want to know who did something wrong and how it happened so we could work to prevent it from happening again in the future.


Because as people state in this other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4176658) quite clearly:

"It's not about pointing the finger or otherwise apportioning blame. It's about learning from mistakes and preventing them from happening again."

Just assigning blame is a cop-out that doesn't do anything other than make people better by finding a scapegoat and punishing that scapegoat as a result.


Actually, I really don't care about blaming a person or a thing. What I am most concerned about is that the person who was most affected by the issue (the people who were incorrectly arrested) are made whole, as best as they can be.

This would include, to my mind, monetary compensation as well as having the offenders cover the cost of mental rehabilitation.

It's a traumatic experience and we should not be so heartless.


It is a common coping mechanism to find arbitrary things to blame in tragedies where there isn't one. It's part of our rational mind to find meaning and patterns in the natural world. We do this to understand. It's often wrong -- our eyes turn clouds into animals and mere static into design. This is not endemic to America.


What you're talking about is "lets jail someone for no reason other than this computer said so and oops we weren't supposed to jail him. SO SORRY"

I am more concerned with the person who had his life destroyed, not so much the system. The system is guaranteed to muck up, by definition.




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