Bad Problems Don't Stop Being Bad Because Somebody's Wrong About Fault Analysis
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!
I often see seemingly reasonable and disinterested third parties get tricked by this, so to spell it out: Reformulating a complaint about a company to a question of whether the sub-team tasked to work on the problem is being reasonable is a distraction. Without access to privileged information, I don’t know the exact 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.
Any attempt to answer the high-level question of whether the company’s actions were reasonable has to be at the level of abstraction of the company. Eg, maybe you think the safety problem isn’t actually a big problem, so it’s wrong for your company to prioritize solving it. Or maybe you think that the safety issue is a real problem, but the company’s “hands are tied” because of incentives/competitive pressures. Those are valid defenses! I still disagree with them, but at least they’re valid!
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 hantavirus 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.
I think there's a few concepts at play here: descriptive vs normative claims, the 'question under discussion' and the cooperative principle of communication.
The cooperative principle of communication describes the rules or 'Maxims' which govern good-faith attempts at communicating. Among those are the maxim of manner, or clarity, and the maxim of relation, or relevance. Good-faith utterances should be clear and relevant to the question under discussion.
The problem here is, most casual speech is indirect and allusive, and tweets are a bizarre form of utterance directed at nobody in particular but at anyone who wants to reply to them. I think the exchanges you describe happen because the question under discussion isn't clear, and more specifically, it's not clear whether it's a question about a descriptive claim (i.e. a statement about the way the world is or is not), or a normative claim (a statement about the way the world should or should not be, or how someone should or should not act).
If Alice states "this headline is incorrect", that's superficially a descriptive claim, but we might infer that she's actually making a normative claim: headlines should accurately reflect the content of their articles.
Bob's reply is also a descriptive claim: "headlines and articles are written by different people". Bob has assumed the question under discussion is, 'why are newspaper headlines inaccurate'. Is Bob violating the maxim of relation here, or has Alice been insufficiently clear?
The real-world example you share from Twitter, I struggled to analyse a bit, because the article is behind a paywall and the full context of the tweets are behind a login-wall. But from what I can tell, I actually don't think this is a great example of the issue you highlight with your Alice and Bob example.
The question under discussion in Piper's article is a normative claim: whether or not the hantavirus patients _should_ have been quarantined. LaMesa assumes that Piper is advocating that the WHO should have this power, and then is making a counter-claim. You could argue he's setting up a strawman here and then arguing against that, I can't tell because I don't know what Piper actually said or what exactly LaMesa was responding to, but he is broadly acknowledging the question under discussion posed by Piper.
LaMesa's making some other leaps of logic here — the fact the WHO can't currently dictate quarantine policies and allowing them to do so would require changing international treaties is an appeal to the status quo, which is a subset of reasoning from an is (descriptive) to an ought (normative). It's also a big leap of logic to say that the WHO being able to quarantine people would validate "the worst conspiracy theories of Covid skeptics".
I think the problem is that your initial statements are underspecified. You might say, for example, "Hauntavirus carriers should not have been flown back to their home countries." But the use of the passive voice (or the generic reference to "humanity") leaves your statement underspecified. Who shouldn't have allowed these hauntavirus carriers to fly home? Until you fill that in, you haven't made a coherent statement. So people trying to engage with your statement make an assumption about who you meant (WHO), and then rebut that. Maybe you meant someone else - the Dutch government (as it was a dutch cruise ship) or the cruise ship company, the government of the Canary Islands (where the passengers disembarked), the airlines themselves or the governments of the countries where the airlines are based, or the the governments of the carriers respective home countries. There are many possibilities of who you might think ought to have done something different, each of which might lead to different replies, and you didn't specify which you meant. You left your statement ambiguous. If you specify who you think ought to have done something differently, I expect you will get better responses.