| You are correct in that you accurately describe the problem and human behavior. What Jeb taught me that day was that I should put a lot more effort into thinking about what is right and wrong and not assume that just because everyone around me is doing something - or it has always been done that way - that it is right in a moral, legal, or ethical sense. But if it is not illegal, immoral, or unethical in its implementation or in its consequences then why not try? All you risk is failure. So what? Many people's sense of ethics really boils down to their selfish interests. They don't blow the whistle until they are denied a raise but until then they don't mind lying to clients, for example. There are people who tell me that how I hire people is "wrong" because many of my job prospects put in a lot of work learning something that did not lead to a job. But, look guys, I'm a nerd and a maker. I love learning things for its own sake and making stuff of no use to anyone. I was just looking for fellow nerds and makers and I started out saying that as long as we were not doing anything illegal, immoral, or unethical let's just hunker down and do something hard and fun together. Some people thought that was BS and dropped out. So, "bye bye." The rest of my candidates just wanted to learn and yet many didn't cut it. So what? Trying to learn something and failing is no sin. And then they take grief from friends, and the general public: "You loser... you wasted your time and nothing came of it (i.e. no job)." That's another thing; we nerds take a lot of shit from idiots. I did not care then and I still do not care that much what people think of me. I care whether I am doing the right thing or the wrong thing. And I did not care about EVERYONE I did not hire. But I sure cared about those people who put in the effort whether I could hire them or not because they are MY people. |
I think maybe it's the tendency when bad things happen for people to go "why? who's fault was this?". And if they can find something that feels to them like it could have been avoided in hindsight, they're going to lash out.
Even in the nerd world, think of when a non-technical friend or relative goes and installs some random free program off the Internet that they thought would help them with their job. And as usual these things come loaded with miscellaneous adware and other garbage. They were just trying to take the initiative to solve a problem that they had on their own by downloading this tool, but it's very frustrating to have to go and clean up their mess when they did something that feels "obviously stupid" even though they didn't know better.
I guess I just feel that while we live in a world where anybody can go "I told you so" when you mess up, and then get a whole lot of other people to agree that your failures were more that a mere mistake but instead negligence, we're going to be stuck with this burden of process and approval committee any time someone shows initiative.