> A quick example: in many car accidents, you can easily point to the person who caused the accident
This is a bad example: traffic is a complex sistem with a century of ruleset evolution specifically intended to isolate personal responsibility and provide a simple interface for the users, that, when correctly used, guarantees a collision free ride for all participants.
The systemic failures of trafic are more related to the fallible nature of its actors. The safety guarantees work only when humans demonstrate almost super-human regard to the safety of others, are never inattentive, tired, in a hurry or influenced by substances or medical conditions etc.
We try to align personal incentives to systemic goals with hefty punishments, but there is a diminishing return on that, at some point you have to consider humans unreliable and design your system to be fault-tolerant. Indeed, most modern trafic systems are doing this today with things like impact absorbing railings, speed bumps, wide shoulders and curves etc.
It's a perfectly reasonable example. Most complex systems share those properties. It makes glaringly obvious that isolating blame/personal responsibility has limited effectiveness in preventing accidents. While we need a blame assignment system that's clear to reason about for financial reasons, for other systems where that need isn't so great, more effort ends up getting spent on figuring out how to prevent outages than assigning blame for them.
> I was stationary in a traffic jam when I was rear-ended by the car in back of me. Fortunately, I was not hurt at all.
I believe yholio's statement about "when correctly used" was meant to be "when correctly used by all participants"; i.e., no single participant can guarantee their own, or anyone else's, safety, no matter how careful they are.
On the other hand, the guarantee is, as yholio notes, of an almost entirely theoretical nature even given universal cooperation:
> The safety guarantees work only when humans demonstrate almost super-human regard to the safety of others, are never inattentive, tired, in a hurry or influenced by substances or medical conditions etc.
I think you missed the "when correctly used" part. Clearly, the person who hit you was not correctly using the system which places the whole responsibility of this situation onto them. When obeying all rules of the road, situations where rear-ending someone is probable should not arise.
The systemic failure here is expecting people not to phase out and pay less attention to the road when driving for hours at high speed on monotonous highways.
Well, traffic doesn’t exist in a vacuum. One could engineer a system where this is less likely to happen, by simply engineering a system where people are less likely to drive. Many European cities are systematically reducing incentives to drive at all, by improving alternative means like public transport and biking, removing parking, narrowing or eliminating car lanes, and cutting off through streets for cars.
This is a bad example: traffic is a complex sistem with a century of ruleset evolution specifically intended to isolate personal responsibility and provide a simple interface for the users, that, when correctly used, guarantees a collision free ride for all participants.
The systemic failures of trafic are more related to the fallible nature of its actors. The safety guarantees work only when humans demonstrate almost super-human regard to the safety of others, are never inattentive, tired, in a hurry or influenced by substances or medical conditions etc.
We try to align personal incentives to systemic goals with hefty punishments, but there is a diminishing return on that, at some point you have to consider humans unreliable and design your system to be fault-tolerant. Indeed, most modern trafic systems are doing this today with things like impact absorbing railings, speed bumps, wide shoulders and curves etc.