Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis
EDIT July 21: Latest version on Substack
Here’s a dynamic I’ve seen at least a dozen times:
Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline.
Bob: Did you know, *actually* article writers don’t write their own headlines?
…
But what I care about is the misleading headline, not your org chart.
Another example I’ve encountered recently is (anonymizing) when a friend complained about a prosaic safety problem at a major AI company that went unfixed for multiple months. Someone else with background information “usefully” chimed in with a long explanation of organizational restrictions and why the team responsible for fixing the problem had limitations on resources like senior employees and compute, and actually not fixing the problem was the correct priority for them etc etc etc.
But what I (and my friend) cared about was the prosaic safety problem not being fixed! And what this says about the company’s ability to proactively respond to and fix future problems. We’re complaining about your company overall. Your internal team management was never a serious concern for us to begin with!
Kelsey Piper wrote about the (horrifying) case where Hantavirus carriers in the recent outbreak on a cruise ship were released and sent back to their home countries on (often) public airplanes. No systematic quarantine seemed in place, and only some of the exposed people were even instructed to self-quarantine.
Now in light of new information we think it’s very unlikely that this’d end up being a pandemic (the virus isn’t contagious enough at human-to-human transmission). But sure seems like pure luck rather than careful risk-benefit analysis; we only learned about the low contagiousness from negative tests after the cruise ship passengers were sent home.
Seems pretty incompetent for humanity to manage a potential future pandemic this way!
Tweeters disagreed. They argued that everything’s fine because in fact the WHO as an advisory body can’t enforce legal quarantines on sovereign states.
Huh? Why is that relevant here? If this hantavirus outbreak was in fact as contagious as COVID (while maintaining the ~30% fatality rate common for past infections), Nature’s not going to be like “oops my bad. I was planning to kill 2 billion of you but I misunderstood your world’s by-laws for which entities are responsible for enforcing quarantines. I’ll just let y’all have a pass on this otherwise fatal pandemic and take my business elsewhere until you sort it out.”
In each of these examples, people’s reactions were something like explanation-as-exoneration: treating the descriptive fact of why something happened as if it answered the normative question of whether it should have.
This is a cognitive mistake or logical fallacy that is so wrong I’m not even sure how to address it. Like in the examples above, people weren’t even originally blaming the group that someone else rushed to defend! But even granting that they were, how does shifting the blame address the underlying problem?
The reasoning has to be something like “these people are (implicitly) blaming some group G for an alleged problem P. If I can demonstrate that these people are wrong to blame group G, then I’ve demonstrated that they’re Wrong. As Wrongness is a transitive property, therefore we can be sure that problem P isn’t real (???) and we no longer need to be worried about P”
Maybe I’m strawmanning, but I really don’t understand the logic here!
In some of those cases, like the second example about prosaic AI safety, clearly there’s a specific party feeling accused and defensive. So self-serving bias is at play. But most of the times I’ve encountered this fallacy in the wild it’s from seemingly disinterested third parties! So I really don’t know what makes people react in this way.
Now of course sometimes it does make sense to point out a different person or institution is at fault. For example, if Alice saw a bad headline and wrongly blames Carol, the innocent columnist, and plans to angrily email Carol about it, you can gently point out it’s not Carol’s fault but her editor Eddie. Alice can angrily email Eddie instead, problem solved! [1]
However, often these explanations are delivered in a way that doesn’t suggest a different person to blame, or that you’re wrong for wanting a solution to begin with, somehow?
Another good adjacent reason stems from “ought implies can.” If it turns out a problem somebody complains about is impossible to solve (or practically infeasible, or too expensive, etc), it (sometimes) helps to inform them of this so they can set realistic expectations and/or complain about more tractable problems.
This is both true for physical impossibilities and answers of the form “if everybody would just.”
But saying that one person or institution that you might think is at fault is not at fault isn’t exactly a proof that solving a problem is impossible! I don’t really see how it’s even evidence, most of the time.
Overall I’m pretty confused by this pattern of thinking. On the other hand we might have discovered a novel fallacy, so that’s fun!
- ^
Though in my experience if you email the writer about a bad headline usually they can get it resolved anyway.
A sort of opposite conversational thing I see which I hate is something like:
Bob : I am really sorry, I made a big mistake and (something has gone wrong).
Alice : How did this go wrong?
Bob : We had that event that day and we were all distracted talking to the visitors and eating the cake. I wasn’t used to the new UI yet, and it looks like I must have muddled some of the inputs.
Alice : Well, that is no excuse.
Bob : I never said it was. You asked for an explanation. I owned this mistake in my first line of this dialogue.
The issue here is that Bob is trying to provide a real explanation, of the kind that would be useful in providing a plan to avoid similar issues in the future. But, Alice is instead trying to give him a dresssing down for his mistakes. Possibly both conversations should happen, but not at the same time and both parties should know which one they are in.
(Although I still think asking for an explanation, and then complaining about excuses is a jerk play that is surprisingly common.)
With advanced apologies for not having personally fixed every bad thing in the world ever due to insufficient resources...
My first hypothesis for the existence of each person like Alice I meet is that they were misparented such as to believe that adopting the role of a foolish and unwise judge who can’t eventually explain themselves is worthy of admiration and pursuit.
The last time I ran across a person like that and had time to debug in detail, he had a mantra stuck in his head (plausibly accidentally installed, but endorsed as a basic moral rule that he would hold others to) that “no one cares about your excuses”. He really liked getting emotionally submissive apologies with nearly zero content related to the repair of substantive processes.
When I double clicked it turned out it was related to trauma he acquired when he was roughly 9 years old from being late to an event, with his mom freaking out and shouting at him that “no one cares about anyone’s excuses”. And it seemed like maybe an extended case of ask vs guess culture, but more like “promises vs prediction” culture? Or something?
The trauma from being yelled at as a child doesn’t seem like a super rare occurrence from what I can tell?
Contrast object: My mom was scrupulously careful to repeat the manta “an adult is someone who takes responsibility for their own actions” over and over again, and also to apply the rule “never punish your children in anger or retribution” enough to mostly follow it (and to usually apologize later when she violated it).
If this hypothesis is correct, then a group of interested people could probably track down “each person like Alice and this friend of mine” via some kind of psychometrics-from-a-distance and re-educate each one via some kind of one-week, or one-day, or one-hour, or one 10-minute-video-watching emotional-and-intellectual intervention.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked best if they were marketed to and made to pay a nominal amount (so they felt more agency, and granted the repair more emotional weight)? But also I could imagine that the intervention might be more costly than they are willing to pay, but that it would help lots of third parties and be worthy of subsidy if it actually worked! At scale, with expertise, it might be possible to offer for free, or when someone like an employer or loved one was willing to pay for the intervention.
(Thinking in terms of who benefits, who pays costs, and how to track such things down makes it more clear how repair of people’s emotional defects is probably a public good, and connects back to the very very very general insight that public goods are under-provisioned in general at almost every scale of civilization’s organization for lack of clean ways to measure the benefits and collect fair payment from all helped in general. For myself, I take some solace in noticing when “the challenge of figuring out what is Actually Fair” is a barrier, because calculating fair shares of costs and profits in non-linear systems is NP-hard, and might require the ability to measure counterfactual timelines, and so is intractable in general. When something is pragmatically impossible for anyone to do, it means that maybe no one is acting in bad faith on purpose. It might just be that coordination is hard n’stuff!)
It would take a bit of elbow grease (and some moral caution) to figure out an OK way to detect who to target with the interventions.
Also, I suspect that diagnosis would be complicated, and repair plans might need to be matched to specific diagnoses?
And I’m not sure where the budget would come from, and I know of quite a few even larger dumpster fires, and so I haven’t personally started working on this dumpster fire?
I apologize for being weak and small in this way (again, as an echo of my initial apology).
(I grant that there are other hypotheses than “repairable misparenting” but I think after detecting and repairing the first ~200 people a coherent team of seven very bright people tasked with fulltime work “exploring the problem, and understanding the problem, and cutting unit costs on solutions to the problem by orders of magnitude over and over at the beginning” would have bucketed the causes (and found some other causes that also might be potentially reparable) and so on. In some sense, the core of my response is to point out that the collective “budgeting” is the hard thing here, more than the emotional diagnosis itself.)
Do you know of any Generically Open Suggestion Boxes where proposals to fix the problem could be directed?
A: “This is a bad problem! We should solve this problem by giving Group X more power to fix it!”
B: “Actually, it sure looks like this problem is plausibly caused by Group X, and certainly they’re exercising all the power they currently have to make it worse. I’m not sure what you hope to accomplish by giving them more power.”
A: “Bad problems don’t stop being bad just because someone is bad at fault analysis!”
B: “No, they don’t, but listening to your solutions to those bad problems can stop being a good idea because you’re bad at fault analysis.”
As I read the OP, I thought to myself: If I were to steelman the people the post is complaining about, I would guess that they are interpreting the complaint about the problem as an implied proposal for how to address the problem, and they are reacting to the perceived-implied-proposal.
It seems like you’re thinking along similar lines, but are about 3 assumptions further down that road:
Not only are you guessing that they might have thought this, you’re pretty sure this is what they were thinking
Not only are you sure they thought this, you’re sure they were justified in thinking this
Not only were they justified, but all of this is so totally obvious that you’re not even going to bother articulating it, and instead treat it as an unspoken presumption of your snarky comeback
It seems reasonable to me that some people are confused by your comment.
In the specific examples above, note that the As in question weren’t even primarily interested in fault analysis at the level of granularity that the Bs wanted to drag the problem into. The Bs also distract you from the problem being real.
“This problem is real” is not itself a useful insight. It is useful to the extent that it might lead to the problem being fixed. And fixing problems is much, much, much harder than identifying them.
Perhaps you have noticed that Bay Area rents are really high. This is, indeed, a problem. But noticing that this is a problem is not a serious contribution to the conversation. If you have successfully identified a real problem, and then proposed a solution that will make it worse, you are not helping on net.
This goes double if someone points out that your solution will make it worse, and you say that you “aren’t even primarily interested in fault analysis at [that] level of granularity” and that them pointing that out will “distract you from the problem being real.”
Assume for the sake of the argument that everybody knows that Bay Area rents are too high. Are you really saying that three examples I cited above are exactly the same? That “everybody” knows when specific headlines are misleading, that it’s a problem when you don’t quarantine potential carriers at a beginning of an outbreak, and that AI companies should fix safety problems in a timely manner?
Moreover, are you really saying that this generalizes further such that you can never identify a problem without proposing an end-to-end solution? Eg investigative journalism on corruption needs to propose incentive-compatible ways to reduce corruption, scientists identifying issues need to identify solutions in the same paper, AI risk isn’t a problem until people come up with end-to-end solutions, etc, etc?
Again in the examples above solutions at that level of granularity weren’t yet proposed!
I think you keep responding to a different essay than the one I wrote; your hypothetical and your wider claim about problem-identification both fail to engage with my actual examples.
Not all of them, but at least one. Let’s take the quarantine one first because that’s the one where I think you do well, and then look at the headlines one next. (The AI one doesn’t have enough detail for me to be clear on what’s going on there).
--------------------------------------------------------
I think you’re pretty much on the money for the quarantine one, because:
You are pointing to a relatively-large problem that many people are genuinely unaware of. (Before reading your post I had...uh...some vague idea that some people on a cruise ship had some virus).
You aren’t proposing any working solution—but you’re clear that you don’t have a proposed solution, and also aren’t proposing anything actively harmful.
I do think you may be missing some important points in your quarantine commentary. Like, yes. There are some potential major beneficial effects of these potential carriers being quarantined. By. Uh. Some international organization that can unilaterally detain citizens of multiple different sovereign nations overseas without trial and prevent them from returning home. That seems to me...potentially fraught.
But (as you say), you aren’t proposing solutions at that level of granularity, and you’re being up-front about that. You’re pointing to a situation that looks bad and saying “is there anything we can do about this?” Maybe, on reflection, the answer to this will end up being “it’s going to be a very big diplomatic effort to get even small steps on this problem, and it doesn’t seem likely to succeed.” But that’s not your fault, and everything you have said on this is reasonable.
--------------------------------------------------------
On the other hand, the headlines point I think is a much less encouraging one for your view.
Lots of headlines are misleading. What can we do about this? Should we go harass journalists about it? Or perhaps we should go harass editors about it? Those are both proposed solutions at a fair level of granularity. You...seem to me to rather be suggesting both of them. And both of them are (at least in my opinion) bad ideas.
The reason why headlines are misleading is because these businesses need to attract readers in order to continue to exist, and readers demand exaggerated headlines. Talking about which particular employees of a newspaper you should personally harass in order to improve the accuracy of the headlines is like talking about which particular employees of Walmart you should personally harass in order to make them stop selling Twinkies and start selling healthier food.
Here, I think that:
You are pointing to a relatively-small problem that everyone reading your post is already aware of.
You are proposing a solution that seems to me to be actively bad.
and so I think that your overall net score here does not come out positive.
--------------------------------------------------------
Not quite. I’m saying that the value of your contribution has two elements:
Pointing to a problem. You gain points here by pointing out real, large problems that your readers are not already familiar with.
Suggesting a solution. You gain points here by suggesting reasonable solutions, and lose points here by suggesting bad solutions.
If Alice points out a substantial new problem, without particularly proposing a detailed solution beyond ‘can we do something about this’, and people are responding by nitpicking issues like that, I agree that’s bad.
But I think it’s a vastly more common situation for Alice to point out a problem that everyone is already aware of and propose an actively bad solution. And I think that the correct response to that looks almost identical to the nitpicking that annoys you.
“The reason why I am selling fake cancer cures is that I need to sell them to continue to exist, and my customer base demands fake cancer cures.”
Customers don’t either demand fake cancer cures or misleading headlines.
“Customers have a demand, and because of their demand they voluntarily buy X” is not equivalent to “customers demand X” if the customers are being defrauded.
That’s simply false, except if it’s already widely known anyway.
Often yes, sometimes no. But even if fixing it is harder, recognizing the problem is a necessary condition for fix. So if fixing a problem is important, identifying the problem is *at least as important.*
Also a lot of the time the general shape of the problem is known but not specific instantiations, and the instantiations are decision-relevant. Eg it’s widely known that scientific research often doesn’t replicate. But it’s still useful to learn if specific load-bearing papers don’t replicate, and/or if some fields are more prone to research fraud than others.
Similarly, we know at a very high-level of abstraction that often news articles have misleading headlines. But it’s still relevant to know how misleading which headlines are in which ways, and also if an otherwise-respected publication does this much more than normal, this may be decision-relevant for subscription decisions, whether you as an amateur freelance writer want to pitch there, etc.
And “everybody already knows” that companies sometimes sacrifice safety for profits or other priorities. But the details matter!
When I see this dynamic, it seems to typically be that Alice is implicitly saying that the thing is easy to fix and that there is some deep incompetence from the thing being broken. When I am Bob I’m trying to explain why the thing being fixed is actually really hard and it’s downstream with a bunch of complexity Alice probably wasn’t thinking about. I think this is actually extremely relevant data when the difficulty of fixing the thing is important!
If Alice just wants emotional support and to complain about things being sad, without any orientation towards fixing it or the difficulty of the problem, then I agree with this post.
I’m most sympathetic to this when it looks like the explanation is at the level of analysis which explains that fixing the problem is impossible, or practically impossible, or the provided cost-benefits analysis is sufficient to demonstrate why fixing it as unrealistic. The best common example is when it’s an economic issue, when one interlocutor is more economically literate than the other, and both are talking in approximately good faith.
Alice: I can’t believe the price of groceries are up again! I bet it’s because of the greedy CEOs in charge of Berkley Bowl!
Bob: That sucks. But I think it’s implausible that changes in the price of groceries are substantially tied to the greed of CEOs, because we should expect CEO greed to be a constant. You can’t use a constant to explain a sudden change!
Alice: Oh I get it now. But do you have an actual explanation for why the prices are up?
Bob A: No, sorry. But in my experience price changes aren’t something we can do much about, and aren’t something that’s responsive to pushback.
Bob B: Yes, I think it’s because of [specific explanation involving the Iran war and fuel prices]
__
In contrast, I’m less sympathetic to these explanations when, if you follow the logic, it doesn’t actually say someone isn’t locally responsible. Or when “this is hard” explanations only say why it’s hard for a specific mechanism rather than a general class of solutions.
I’m also more sympathetic to this when Bob’s actually right, though of course that’s challenging as a norm.
My read of such cases is that the implicit reasoning seems more like the first part only, ie, “these people are (implicitly) blaming some group G for an alleged problem P. I want to demonstrate that these people are wrong to blame group G”
where the reason for them wanting to demonstrate that you are wrong is something like, they know an interesting fact that demonstrates this, which they think you ought to know, or maybe just want the social status boost from showing you/the world they know said interesting fact
What makes you feel that there is usually an implicit “and therefore we no longer need to be worried about P”? I would assume that in the majority of cases if you followed up their statement by asking “Does this mean that you think P is fine actually?”, they wouldn’t say “yes”, they would say “no, I’m just saying that P isn’t G’s fault”
(edit: looking specifically at the linked WHO-related tweet, something a little different seems to be going on here, where the implicit reasoning seems like “these people are (implicitly) proposing we ought to do X to fix an alleged problem P, but P isn’t actually a problem and X would be really bad, so I’m going to push back”—which seems different. not defending the guy’s (poor) logic on the specifics here, just talking about the form of the argument)
The original assumption that some group G is being implicitly blamed may seem weird, but at least on social media, it seems like a lot of complaining about things happens with the primary goal of blaming someone, so I think it’s not crazy that some people would assume this.
I agree though a) often “blaming someone” (or at least a group/institution) is on the route to trying to get if fixed, especially for quite narrow asks like “your headline sucks” and b) if your problem is with slacktivism writ large I don’t think telling people they misidentified the subgroup within an institution that gets something wrong is likely to be persuasive that people should stop doing slacktivism.
Concretely, if I complain about a headline in the New York Times and tag them on Twitter, the predictable effects include a) decreasing the NYT’s status a little among my readers, b) if enough people raise a fuss/the right people see the complaints, the specific headline might get fixed, and c) optimistically, if even more people raise a fuss and the right people see such complaints with enough regularity, the NYT might change their headlines policy going forwards.
Maybe you think this is useless. But a) I think you’re empirically wrong about headlines at least sometimes, and b) I don’t think “the writers aren’t responsible for headlines” is a satisfying explanation for why it’s useless!
Similarly, writing about why a pandemic action is bad is one of the ways a journalist/quasi-public figure like Kelsey has to effect change. Maybe it’s worse than (eg) a white paper with step-by-step analysis of how each specific institution, and each team within an organization, could act differently, but I’m not sure that’s true[1]. Besides, the latter is a much higher bar!
From the outside, it’s easier to see how something is a problem than the specific steps necessary to fix it!
though on reflection, I do think the second example feels something like “to fix P, we would have to do something different, therefore P is intractable”, which does seem to me like a more common fallacy and probably most appealing to people who feel that P isn’t a big deal anyway.
the third example also has a similar vibe (“to fix P, we would have to do something different (specifically, X, which would be bad) (and P isn’t a big deal anyway)”).
Before reading between the lines, this isn’t a fallacy:
Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline.
Bob: Did you know, actually article writers don’t write their own headlines?
Alice shared her opinion of a headline. Bob asked Alice a question. There’s not an argument, let alone a fallacious argument.
When reading between the lines, Bob’s argument is probably not:
Article writers don’t write their own headlines
???
The headline on this article is accurate and not misleading or horrifying.
A more charitable reading is more likely.
Who is to blame?
Alice: This article has a horrifying headline.
Bob: Article writers don’t write their own headlines. I blame the editor.
Bob is following on from problem to blame.
Defensive reading
Alice: The headline on this article is inaccurate and mislead me.
Bob: Article writers don’t write their own headlines. They are often inaccurate. Because I was aware of this, the inaccurate headline on this article didn’t mislead me.
Bob is following on from problem to solution.
Did you know?
Alice: Fun fact: this article has a Satanic headline.
Bob: Fun fact: article writers don’t write their own headlines
Bob is sharing something relevant to what Alice just said.
Why is Alice cross?
Sounds like Alice was looking for validation and didn’t get it.
An additional concern: “What should I infer from this?”
If the article writer is also the headline writer, and I notice that the headline is misleading about the contents of the article, I should trust the article less. To avoid Gell-Mann amnesia, I should update strongly on general competence or good faith errors that I can recognize, to compensate for the specific failures or malpractices of expertise which I can’t.
When Alice says that the headline is misleading, it may be reasonable to infer that she is thinking of this in whole or in part. Bob may be responding to the inferred claim that the body of work (article plus headline) is less trustworthy. And the separation of the body of work into two parts with different authors is evidence against the claim that misalignment between the two parts reflects poorly on both. (It does reflect poorly on the competence or honest intentions of the editor who wrote the headline, which may imply other issues with the publication as a whole, from which one can infer somewhat lower trust in the article, but this may well be a smaller effect.)
This can be taken further and even weaponized by those actually at fault. Disempower your service employees so much that they can’t accomplish anything coupled with having no ability to escalate issues and suddenly there is no recourse to fix problems and your only option is to harass a powerless call center employee until you wasted enough of your time to justify giving up on the endeavor.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have the ability to issue a refund for these tickets that were canceled”
“Well that’s unacceptable and makes me very angry.”
“Sir, please don’t yell at me. It’s not up to me.”
There’s a related concept of blame laundering: by making our party dependent on a third party for reliability, we can then wash our hands clean of any blame when things go wrong.
If you host your website on-prem then it’s always your fault that websites down and your customers can’t track the foobars. But if you host on AWS, and AWS goes down, well then obviously it’s not your fault—it’s AWS’s fault!
Of course this is nonsense. Your customers contracted with you, not AWS. They don’t care about your infra, all they care about is tracking foobars, and if it’s down, it’s your fault, whether it’s down because of a fire in us-east-1 or you tripped on the power cable for your workstation. You contracted with AWS, and can and should complain to them, but that doesn’t in any way exonerate you for your duty towards your customers.
Yes but to add an epicycle: if AWS is down, my customers might have so many other problems to deal with that they don’t notice that I specifically am down, and they wouldn’t have any use for me if I wasn’t.
In defense there, that’s often taken as implicit and or likely. It’s a common mistake to think that authors write their own headlines and for people with complaints about headlines to blame the author for it. Chiming in with “Authors don’t make their own headlines” doesn’t fix the issue of bad headlines, but it does correct the (likely) mistake that Alice has in her head about who or what to blame.
Although in that case I suppose you could get really annoying and go “erm actually, it’s the financial incentives that really determines how headlines turn out because good headline writers fail and stop writing headlines”. And understanding that allows us to look at the actual questions.
Is there an actual issue now that we understand the real cause.
Is there an actual fix?
If it’s “authors keep making bad headlines” that seems more fixable than “financial incentives reward bad headlines and good headlines literally die off”.
Yeah in Bob’s defense I’ve done the same in the past (gently informed someone that the writer wasn’t responsible for the headlines under the illusion that I was helping). Though overall I’m not sure this story checks out.
I think there are incentives pushing both towards misleading headlines and non-misleading (or less misleading) headlines. Incentives for the latter include people cancelling their subscriptions, people getting bit by misleading headlines one too many times and stop paying attention to certain sources known for the misleading headlines, journalists or other staff quitting because they’re embarrassed to be associated with the terrible headlines, internal complaints that don’t rise to quitting, etc. Part of the value of complaining about misleading headlines is to (slightly) increase the cost of said misleading headlines[1].
Each individual complaint doesn’t do much, but people complaining about the headlines aren’t independent of the incentives the companies face.
I don’t think the headline equilibrium is anywhere near maximum slop (you can imagine a result where each headline is RL’d to maximize click-through rates and is completely independent of the article in question), so I want to caution against a sort of weak nihilism that looks something like “What Can I Do, It’s Just the Incentives.”
I’m not sure about the empirical picture here, but my general impression is that at least in the English-speaking ~educated internet, headlines in the last ten years have on average gotten better rather than worse at not being misleading.
Though if the business model is truly clickbait, there is of course some backfire risk.
I’ve found myself giving explanations (not as exonerations) when I suspect the other person is looking for a solution to their problem but does not know the levers to pull.
Yeah I agree there are times where unprompted fault-analysis is useful! YMMV etc.
I’ve encountered this kind of response before and have been similarly frustrated, and I think you’re describing a real thing, however: in my own experience, sometimes these sorts of seemingly nonsequitur counterpoints are not meant to be counterpoints against my original normative point. I only realize this if I ask what they meant by it. Surprisingly often, I learn that the person who made that comment just sort of wanted to add some adjacent context and decided to drop it in without explaining their intent. Then I had reasonably but wrongly assumed it was meant to be a counterpoint to what I said, because it vaguely resembled disagreement.
Even though I try to remember to clarify their intent first, I tend to still think it’s poor communication on their part. When I add in adjacent context, I usually preface it with something like “This isn’t to say your point is invalid, but it’s worth knowing XYZ”. Actually, this entire comment is sort of in that format...
Curated. Classic issue that comes up all the time, yet I’ve never seen it called out so clearly and well. Thanks for writing it!
I suspect the reasoning is something like: “No one actually cares about the problem P per se, only as a tool to attack someone. By explaining why the group G should not be blamed for P, we have addressed the true point.”
Frankly, some people are like this. I have a few examples in mind, all of them political, when people stopped caring about problem P after it was shown that it was caused by someone other than their hated outgroup G.
I’m most sympathetic to (both sides of this) if the problem is clearly symbolic in nature, and the symbolism is much more relevant for one alleged group of perpetrators than another. For example if I learned an American politician pissed on the US flag I’d consider that quite damning, but it’s not very relevant if instead it was some random teenagers.
I avoided political examples in the post, but I also think this fallacy is especially prominent in political discussions.
I think what’s often going on here is that saying “Actually, X happened because of Y” is a kind of status attack, trying to say that unlike the replier, the OP doesn’t even know about Y, so they hardly know what they are talking about. So it’s deployed by people who are trying to discredit the OP and/or their argument, or lift themselves and/or their own argument above them.
Thinking more, I think it’s also often generated out of cynicism, when people have basically given up on the idea that a problem could be solved, and they are explaining to you some premise they have about why that is, but they don’t really want to explain the whole thing in one big wall of text.
Yeah, I think the generous way to interpret the objector in this dialogue is as saying “I think you are underestimating how hard this problem is to fix”.
It’s not just that B is responsible instead of A, but that B has different constraints than A. Maybe you don’t see any constraints on A that would make the problem hard to solve. Yes—that is because the problem’s constraints are on B instead!
I think “the fact that you’re even complaining about X generically rather than explicitly X modulo B’s constraints this means you’ve thought about it less than I have” is an unfortunately common condescension.
Australia and NZ quarantined their shipboard citizens before allowing them home. I am similarly horrified to hear that this practice wasn’t universal.
I read the twitter thread you linked, and I think you have a strange reading of it. Here’s how I read it.
Anthony argued. 1) that everything is fine and seems to be going well. 2) - that the policies of the WHO and individual governments worked well to contain the virus.
Kelsey challenged 2, by arguing that whilst things are fine (1), this is not due to the policies of the WHO and individual governments, which were severely lacking (2).
From there the discussion shifts entirely to discussion of 2: what an adequate policy looks like. It’s interesting to note that Anthony effectively cedes the point that yes, the current policies would have been inadequate had the virus been more contagious, and shifts to the more comfortable motte of “This is an inevitable consequence of how diplomacy works, and any other system would have such large downsides so this is the best option”
Anthony’s response reads like “if you think the current system is inadequate, what do you propose as an alternative? The obvious solution is to give the WHO more powers, but I think that that idea is bad.”
Kelsey allows herself to be moved to the newly reframed argument (about the feasibility of implementing better actions to handle the pandemic) by suggesting that there are other courses of action than just giving the WHO unchecked power.
The two people probably don’t realise that they aren’t really arguing the same points that they were originally. The argument has drifted from “this is ok/not ok” to “there’s no way to improve the system/we must find ways to improve the system”
I also encounter this quite often and find it a bit irritating. What I found to work quite well is to clearly distinguish between descriptive and normative statements. I will for example ask the other person “Are you making a normative or descriptive statement?” After some forth and back they usually agree they were making a descriptive statement. Then I say “I was making a normative statement, do you disagree with it?”. Often they don’t disagree.
I suspect the confusion occurs because the other person parses the initial claim as a descriptive statement that fails to capture the complexity of the problem.
I think the underlying issue here is a perspective mismatch. The person raising the complaint is operating at a higher level of abstraction, while the seemingly-helpful commenter isn’t really thinking about or engaging with the problem itself — they’re responding from the level of concrete operational facts they happen to know, rather than from the level of the problem itself.
But of course, any given problem can be read from multiple perspectives or dimensions. Even if the original complainer didn’t intend the operational-level reading, the responder will interpret the complaint through their own experience and vantage point and answer accordingly. And most people don’t actually care about the larger problem — they answer based on lived experience and the information they have, not by genuinely engaging with the problem itself. Most people won’t reply at the higher level, because doing so is more costly: it requires more accumulation, has higher entry barriers, and isn’t very useful to them personally.
So in a sense, the complainer should arguably be clearer about their audience and what kind of answer (at what level or dimension) they actually want. There’s a structural mismatch between the kind of response the complainer wants and the audience they’re broadcasting to.
I’m also genuinely uncertain about something more basic: how is the question “should X have happened” supposed to be answered, in cases like these? I worry it can collapse into a kind of emotional venting without any real traction — or that the only productive move is to slide from “why did X happen” to “how can X be solved.” From this angle, the responder’s move from the normative question back down to the descriptive level isn’t necessarily a fallacy; it might be the only level at which the conversation can actually go somewhere.
I also partly agree with the identity-signaling reading — knowing the inside story is itself a form of social currency, and explaining it can be its own reward.
One last thought I haven’t fully worked out: solving a problem requires some accountable subject — someone who actually moves to fix it. But who? Most people won’t answer this. The people who do respond tend to lean toward seemingly-constructive, operational replies, because most people avoid the harder question entirely. So the visible distribution of responses is itself a kind of survivorship bias — we’re not seeing the people who could engage at the higher level but chose to stay silent.
Now on Substack: https://linch.substack.com/p/bad-problems
Here is something we need to keep in mind: not all powerful entities will always act in a way that actually resolves problems. Just because they are massive organizations (like the IT companies or the WHO used as examples) doesn’t mean they all think, ‘We must serve the public good of humanity.’
Outwardly, of course, that is what they profess. However, an organization is a collective of various stakeholders, and those who actually hold significant stakes might only be interested in downplaying the issue. In such cases, making excuses just for the sake of making excuses is, from their perspective, essentially ‘an explanation that solves the problem.’
I’m not sure if what I just said commits the very error you pointed out in your text. If it does, that would be quite interesting.
In each of these situations, Alice is agitating about some ongoing problem and Bob is supplying some (incomplete) explanatory context for the existence/persistence of that problem. This isn’t a fallacy and, in most of these cases, it’s a perfectly constructive approach to what might ostensibly amount to pointless whinging.
I can’t think of a single term for this, but it can be articulated as is-ought laundering through accountability sinks. The interlocutor describes what the structure is that diffuses local fault and treats that description as if it settles whether the outcome ought to happen.
This is a thing my brain does sometimes. It’s very counterproductive when it happens.
In my case, I believe it was caused by childhood violence. When I was ~six plus or minus a few years, I lived in an environment where being blamed for ~anything could result in being beaten bloody, so my hindbrain learned to drop everything and deflect blame, if blame is pointed at me.
I’m not in an environment like that anymore. Yet I can’t unlearn the response. It sucks. The part of me that can see “drop everything, deflect blame, escape as soon as blame is shifted” as hugely counterproductive… has no power during the times when it would matter.
I don’t know exactly how someone can end up reflexively deflecting blame that’s not even aimed at them personally, but the examples you used in the article were so… familiar, that I put a fair amount of credence on it being the same underlying dynamic. If true, these people aren’t really thinking per se, but if they were it’s more “it’s not X’s fault” means “therefore don’t hurt X”, not “therefore your problem is illusory”.
I know you didn’t ask for solutions, but I would highly recommend this sequence: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip it might have some good pointers on how to change. I thought of it because it analyzed people changing similarly deeply ingrained patterns, albeit not ones related to violence afaik.
I think that sometimes, a problem is the optimal solution. A lot of rules are trade-offs between things, and it doesn’t help anyone to complain about the negatives of the trade-off which was made, as “fixing” it merely pushes the problem elsewhere. (Or alternatively, it requires a higher granularity of laws and regulations)
I could complain about criminals getting away with their crimes, but fixing that would require lowering the threshold of evidence, which would mean that more innocent people were unfairly punished. And if this ‘solution’ is implemented, then we’d hear complains about that.
Better solutions exist, but they require context-dependent judgement. A lot of the laws and regulations we follow are too general. In most contexts, it’s probably good that the WHO can’t enforce quarantines on sovereign states, and this just happened to be an exception.
I don’t know what to call this problem, bias variance tradeoff maybe?
You’re far too willing to concede to their reformulation of the problem!
You can imagine a version of the world where literally we exhausted every other avenue (or every other avenue that isn’t even more tyrannical) and the only option left is either what actually happened or give the WHO unchecked authority to enforce quarantines over sovereign states. But there are a number of actions that are improvements without needing to give WHO more authority in that way:
The WHO can advise sovereign states to enforce quarantines.
This is already what public health departments usually do, including within a country. They usually advise local governments rather than have operational or legislative control of the state use of force
They can offer to broker multilateral agreements so that well-resourced states can have quarantine ships on site, and offer to take in everyone.
Instead of looking at the WHO, we can ask why individual states are not doing quarantines
The WHO or another third party can offer individuals money to self-quarantine
We can set up an international apparatus (can be an international body, nonprofit, or for-profit company) to manage these quarantines
etc, etc
In general, there’s massive slippage between “this specific solution that you never proposed has sufficiently, undesirable consequences, therefore the best realistic world is the status quo”
This is something I’ve encountered often with this fallacy in particular. Otherwise rational, well-meaning, disinterested, etc, people often miss that Bob’s making a complete reformulation of a problem from complaining about a bigger issue to a narrower fault analysis reframing. For example, in an earlier draft of this post, where I said
Claude’s review thought the AI safety example was kinda reasonable prioritization of the team (“You can still rebut with “rational prioritization that produces this outcome is itself the problem,” but the response isn’t a non sequitur the way the headline or hantavirus replies are.”). But they ignored/missed that I never brought up the specific team. Without privileged information, I don’t know the underlying dynamic here. It could be that the team should have more headcount or compute. It could be that a different team should handle it. It could be a different answer altogether. The complaint is about the company not the team[1].
But it’s very easy/tempting for the mistaken levels of the fault analysis framing to suck up oxygen.
Now if the defense was that the company made the right choice (eg “in an ideal world we’d want to go carefully and address all safety issues like that. But due to competitive pressures, and also because this specific prosaic safety issue can’t realistically pose an x-risk, our company is being very reasonable in not devoting more resources to solving this problem over other safety issues and racing”), that’d be a much more valid defense. I still think it’s wrong, but at least it’d be valid!
Sorry for the slow response. In order to prevent evil, we form giant entities and grant them the power to regulate society. These entities then turn evil, and fail to regulate themselves. Since they’re huge and powerful, we cannot stop them, either. More of the problem (more regulation, more people, more power to some agency) will necessarily fail at making things better.
I’m conceding because the status quo is terrible, and because I don’t think it can be made not-terrible. I give up on fixing it, and propose a re-design which prioritizes local (or at least local-first) solutions.
I do not think that this problem is in the domain of the WHO. In software engineering, each module does one job, and it has one responsibility. It’s considered bad design to have “god-classes” which are tied to too many things. We could keep working with spaghetti code, and trying to improve it, but I think it’s better to realize that the entire approach is bad in a way which is mathematically impossible to solve for good.
Individuals should keep themselves and others safe. Failing that, the local population should help eachother out. Failing that, the local power should do something, failing that, the state itself should be ordering a quarantine. If the WHO needs to step in, and use force at that, several things have already gone entirely wrong: If invidiuals don’t keep themselves safe, that’s a failure of education, or too much regulation preventing local solutions (similar to how it’s illegal to feed the homeless in many places). If the local population fails at helping one another out, that’s a lack of community and perhaps also a result of too many rules and a tendency to rely on authorities for problems that one could solve themselves. Etc.
In your next example, I think the problem might be cross-module failures. If a problem is a responsibility of more than one person, it often goes unfixed. Perhaps a single person does not have the authority to fix it (that is, they’d have to step outside of their usual scope of work and take responsibility for the consequences), or a single person cannot fix it without the help of others, leading to coordination issues.
This problem is less common when people have an investment in the thing at hand, and when they dare to actually act. But the modern world punishes agency, you’re rarely rewarded for competence, and you’re easily punished for not delegating the task to an authority (e.g. in Switzerland and a bunch of other countries, if you’re renting, you’re not allowed to install a dishwasher by yourself. You need to call a “professional”). These asymmetrical incentives force people to be passive, incompetent, reliant on authorities, and ignorant of the world around them. The solution is to allow people local freedom to fix local problems, and rewarding them if they succeed.
I’d like to see a world where anyone can do anything they want, as long as they’re the most competent person available for fixing that problem at that time, and in which they’re given freedom according to their level of competence. The company is like a program coded by somebody incompetent, nested inside a larger structure (society) which also has poorly thought out incentives (that is, it punishes good design principles)
I think it’s neither supported that this specific problem can’t be solved without a radical restructuring of society, nor particularly relevant to either my meta-level or object-level points. Bowing out for now.
This pattern appears in mainstream responses to left-economic critique.
The critiques point at concrete problems: real wage stagnation and extreme capital concentration distorting political institutions. The standard responses are: “capital concentration is necessary for economic development,” “self-interest aggregates information better than bureaucratic central planning,” “look at the Soviet Union.”
Im not saying marxism or its implementations can be accepted without question, but defensive neoliberal rhetoric cannot be accepted either. “The theorist’s framework was flawed” or “the implementations failed” isn’t an answer to “is wage stagnation real” or “is capital concentration distorting political institutions.”
sounds like projection and not what anyone actually claimed in any of the examples?
I think that it is the real issue. About the price and subjectivity.
All cases are estimated subjectively. Yes, some portion of estimation can be rationalised. But rationalisation requires energy. And experience dictates/chooses between price and results. It can wait, it is not so important, it is a weak disturbance. For them. For you all these cases are crucial, and you are ready to spend energy to resolve it, but again, it is your subjective view.
Could you suggest anything else that we can align our vision only through a dialogue (mutual reasoning)?
It is the dark side of thinking/reasoning, I think.
Are you investigating why giving an explanation instead of solving actual issue is a common answer? That is because if you see a seemingly irrational outcome, it is wise to ask ‘why did we end up here?‘.
IF you assume the other actors are rational, then the cause cannot be in individuals not wanting to solve the issue, it must be an inherent to the issue itself. This is common in prisoner-dilemma type problems, in which rational actors are unable to individually solve the issue in isolation but need a ‘group-based incentive’ to break the pattern.
In your examples, there aren’t any words that persuade me that these examples weren’t cases of “defense of the powerless”. I have to assume there is some means by which you decide that’s not the intent, and it’s instead represents “problem solved”. What could that be? Some words you didn’t mention? A tone of voice? If it’s true, you should be able to describe it.
If you can’t you might wonder if your interpretation of the discussion is fully accurate. I can imagine the type of conversation where I might end up responding to someone’s in that way, and it would generally start the “problem declarer” in the discussion somewhat emotionally railing against the powerless. I might enter this, trying to describe the dynamics that could seem necessary to work toward a solution. Sometimes this is far more complex than a single level of misdirection.
In such a discussion, I often can end up feeling trapped, like my interlocutor has become confused at my intent, and thinks I’m defending the problem rather than trying to funnel that energy productively.
Obviously you already mentioned this dynamic as a possibility, but I think it’s useful to think, how do we know which side of it were on in a discussion?
I’m also somewhat suspicious that this ever is a true logical fallacy. Where I can think of it being used against me in a conversation, I think the root is more like the fault analyzer, stops short of directing this toward solutions because they feel powerless. For example:
Me: This code “fix” is just an if statement that makes the code more complex.
Dev: Yeah, I did that because the code is totally unmaintainable, I don’t understand it, and I’m afraid to change anything substantial.
Me: But this problem will just get worse, lets take the time to understand the code, work it toward something maintainable.
Dev: But we have this timeline set and it doesn’t include time for refactoring.
Me: Let’s change that timeline then, because this will get worse. It’s obvious this code has been touched in this way dozens of times like this, each time making this worse.
Dev: Oh, you’re so idealistic!
What’s really going on here is that Dev feels powerless to pushback on the timelines, and thus feels powerless not to take the short-term shortcut.
I think this pattern sometimes arises because people have different priorities. Some just want to share interesting and related info, or perhaps start a discussion on actually useful changes adressing what went wrong. But then this often sounds like shifting the blame or dismissing the problem.
When doing this I try to be careful so I’m not misinterpreted, adding something in the beginning like “Yeah, that’s terrible and something needs to be done about it. Hmm, maybe [speculation about how the system works in order to find solutions].”
This fallacy could be called… understating the inevitable problem? Like saying that global warming isn’t an issue because people naturally don’t coordinate enough to prevent it, or factory farming isn’t a problem because the incentives make it inevitable?
I think more often when people say things like that, they’re trying to get you to stop assigning blame to a specific entity, for the problem is caused by Moloch.
With enough strong leadership and insightful regulation, a lot of issues could be solved. Is it fair to blame an entity that fails to slay the beast?
I think what you’re taking to be an attempt to excuse a problem is instead an explanation of why your apparent surprise is unwarranted. Nothing in the examples you give suggests denial of the problem, but the way you frame the complaints not only states the problem but attributes fault and presumes some “obvious” way things should have happened that would have avoided it. The pushback seems to mainly be on these latter elements.
Not too sure if I misunderstood the initial premise of the post, but the examples given seem not to be “similar” enough for me to follow the reasoning about the cause(s) for the dialog going poorly to be the same.
The one commonality I can immediately make out is that the initial proposition seems too unspecific for the interlocutor to know what the intention of the speaker actually is (other than to answer with, “you’re exactly right, so now what?”).
At the very least, if I add an implied question of, “assuming you agree with P, what do you suggest we do about it?”—I then imagine that a reasonably deep thinking person (B) will reply back that P is too abstract (“that headline” for instance doesn’t specify WHICH headline in the form as it is given, neither does it specify any other context parameters, such as what kind of publication it is, and why the people behind it may be doing exactly what their intention is with the headline; it may not align with the preferences of A, but why does that make the headline “wrong” in any way...?)
Every choice in life (headlines, fixing security/safety problems in software, tracing exposed individuals) is a trade-off, and I don’t think that there ever is a “fixed” correct choice that would apply across all possible combinations of variables in a scenario—hence why smart people can disagree in the first place...
This sounds related to assuming everything must be a dog-whistle for some other less “acceptable” idea and then rebutting the idea you must secretly be advocating. In your example, presumably that every instance of pointing out a public health mistake is advocating against the concept of public health broadly or the value of specific public health institutions.
“No systematic quarantine seemed in place, and only some of the exposed people were even instructed to self-quarantine. Now in light of new information we think it’s very unlikely that this’d end up being a pandemic”
What’s the new information here? It sounds like the information was new to you, which led you to form the impression that this decision was horrifyingly reckless. But upon gaining some more decision about the disease, presumably the same information that the (health expert) decisionmakers already had, you decided it wasn’t reckless?
I have no dog in this fight. Maybe it was reckless. The informed version of you seems to agree with the decision that the health authorities made.
The new information is the next sentence after your quote :)
playing Russian roulette may or may not be a good decision ex post, but it’s certainly a poor decision ex ante.
There ought to be a term for this and Claude recommends ”The Exculpation Fallacy”
Other candidates:
Culprit displacement as problem dissolution
Its a layer separation problem.
You are noticing participants within a localized system responding to issues from within that same system. It’s similar to asking people to judge themselves correctly. Many people fail to accurately map their own shortcomings because they are doing it from within the constraints of the same system.
To an outside observer the logic may not make sense. What can sometimes seem obvious from outside doesnt necessarily transfer to participants within the system.
You are taking explanations to why the system is behaving the way it does and are trying to reconcile it into “So what does this have to do with poor implementation policy?”
And you are logically right to notice it.
But most systems, institutional or live systems have certain constraints around being able to objectively view itself in a meta cognitive-like capacity.
Institutions diffuse responsibility through hierarchical structuring. No one participant/employee is fully accountable for systemic failures.
You’re examples were employees responding to their own layer of accountability within that hierarchy.
There may also be many other reasons to do this. Perhaps Alice is trying to decide whether Alice is a trustworthy journalist, and thus how much credibility to assign to things Alice writes, both that column and in the future. Knowing that Alice didn’t write the headline should mean that the badness of the headline should not factor into your opinion of Alice, but also that whatever warm glow of credibility that you have based on Alice being a good journalist should not extend to future headlines on Alice’s columns.
One of the systemic issues is that we do not innately understand the ontology of prevention.
There is no benchmark for “infections prevented” like there is no benchmark for “buildings uncollapsed by earthquakes”, “windows unbroken by hurricanes”, or with AI “inaccurate claims unconfabulated”.
Our neurological architecture struggles to model second-order effects, and the trust+time+attention+energy+memory it requires to listen, evaluate, and act on someone else’s ideas about the future is usually a cost we do not pay when we cannot see the idea for ourselves.
Perhaps this could be considered a specific case of ignoratio elenchi?
I think this is technically true but iiuc pretty much every informal fallacy is a species of ignoratio elenchi in Aristotle’s broad sense; it’s a bit like spotting a new furry animal and correctly identifying it as a type of vertebrate.
I’ll also throw in AccountabilitySinks as prior art.
I agree it’s related!
Technically, this datum is compatible with this model. I’m not saying it’s likely that hantavirus would have been more contagious if the WHO had the authority to enforce quarantine, but,,
Google (and various other software companies) has a practice called a blameless postmortem. When something has gone badly wrong, everyone involved and some associated senior tech people sit down, do a review, and write an incident report, answering the following questions:
1) what happened?
2) how did it happen?
3) why did it (manage to) happen?
4) what do we have to do to make sure it never happens again?
5) what do we have to do to minimize the chance of other, similar things ever happening?
They make a bunch of recommendations based on 4) and 5), and people are appointed responsible for making sure that these recommendation actually get done in a timely fashion. (Please note that the questions “Whose fault was this?” and “Who should we fire?” are very deliberately not on the list, and short of criminal malfeasance, are off the table.)
From that mindset, every one of your explanations-as-exonerations can also be looked at as an answer to the question “what do we need to change to make sure this never happens again?”
I really don’t think they are, sorry. You can read the Kelsey thread for yourself and decide.
Cease, Linch, to chide the follies of mankind,
Whose erring will, though seeming free, was wrought
In that first Forge whence reason, weak and warped,
Issued half-finished. Blame not Adam’s sons —
Arraign the Hand that shaped them so!
Out-of-band theory: this is chat assistant driven societal change.
Insofar as this is a recent development, it could be explained by people often reaching for models to Explain Things—models which are prone to explaining away issues systemically/by-third-angle, as for various legal reasons they cannot outright blame specific humans/issues often—gradually adjusting human behaviors to match.
I’m pretty sure i’ve encountered the first example pre-ChatGPT (it’s not like an insanely common pattern but I see it every couple of months). The other two examples are definitely post-LLM chatbot popularity though I’m not sure about other examples.
My memory isn’t amazing so I can’t really say how regular it was on the internet between say 2012 and 2022. Intuitively I’d be quite surprised if there’s a delve-level jump between before and after LLM chatbots. But I dunno if my pattern recognition skills are good enough to detect say a 2x jump.
n.b. models clearly only do this because humans make them do it because 21st century communication norms are like this because internet dynamics have essentially flipped the equation of the value of fault assignment such that exposure to the knowledge required to blame almost always never equates to leverage over the causes which makes it counterproductive to fault anything and more locally effective to try to explain away everything and reduce your attention to the matter but this is really really bad for anything ever actually getting better
Possible account: Not a fallacy; it’s the only conversational move available when the frame is “who’s at fault” and the missing frame is “what mechanism would attach this problem to an owner”. (Adjacent to the AccountabilitySinks vocabulary mentioned upthread)
Each example you give is a variant of what I’d call owner-without-authority: a named owner exists (or could be named) but lacks the matching authority, deadline, budget, and consequence to actually repair.
Individual fault analysis is correct in that no specific actor failed in their role, and the problem persists for the same reason. “Writers don’t write headlines” is true, the bad-headline problem persists, and both have the same cause: the production process splits writing and headlining without a quality gate on the composite output.
When discourse only has role-fault vocabulary, the conversation has nowhere to go after “no one specific is at fault”. It needs mechanism design vocabulary to advance.
More on this: https://kunnas.com/articles/bad-equilibria-are-not-one-thing
Please don’t comment on my blog posts with AI outputs without flagging, thanks.
Agreed with this framing.
I was trying to find what viewpoint produced this article, since basically all the examples provided seemed like things that I-as-Alice desire to be told so I can better calibrate the plausibility of upstream intervention and correspondent necessity of downstream intervention. Viewing the contradictions as social attacks meant to act as applause lights for Alice’s criticism while actually being semantic stop signs (rather than intentional participation in an adversarial inference algorithm meant to optimize result-accuracy) seems like a good candidate for predicting the article’s perspective as how things would look from that viewpoint.