Comment by disambiguation
Comment by disambiguation 4 days ago
Everyone cares, but:
- everyone has a different idea of what that means.
- many problems can't be solved by one person.
- caring has an opportunity cost.
- caring introduces liability.
- we live in a society.
Caring is a luxury, most people are just trying to survive.
This list is quite well-put.
Also, for a large number of roles, people are judged by the net value that they've contributed (net of mistakes). In a pretty large subset of such roles, it's usually the case that small-ish mistakes result in small-ish penalties, or sizeable penalties that aren't apparent immediately – so in the short-term, the here and now, folks in these roles are incentivized to focus on the big picture, and to ignore what they might feel could cause small-ish mistakes.
Consider a person involved with the modification of city street infrastructure to better cater for bikes. It's pretty good by most people's standards to have made progress by building reasonably use-able bike pathways, stands, etc. in say, a 4 km radius in a year. If it just so happens that like three out of, say, sixty of such constructs are problematic (mistakes) but they aren't big-ish problems, then on the whole, this person would be, quite justly, credited for having contributed to at least fifty seven functioning constructs; all in all, pretty good work despite three problematic constructs.
Of course, not all types of work is like that. That is, not all work are that forgiving in the sense that most earnest mistakes turn out to be small ones relative to the overall value produced. E.g., trading: algorithmic or otherwise.
Now, just a note in closing, the distribution of the price of mistakes in a given role is a different matter, can be an art in that it involves qualitative judgement, may be largely sensitive to context, and may be quite opinionated depending on who is reached for comment.