> Looking for heads to roll isn’t productive IMO, it’ll just end with scapegoats

Rolling heads are effective deterrents. People should be really afraid of such a bug hapening in their system.

Rolling heads lead to slopey shoulders. If the consequence of a mistake is so severe, people tend to shift blame rather than look for root cause.

Look at the safety culture amongst pilots vs doctors for an example.

Pilots are held directly and immediately accountable every moment when they’re in the air. If don’t fly safe, their heads will roll not due to any laws of man, except maybe one Sir Isaac Newton.

Perhaps if doctors were held so directly accountable, there would be fewer incidents of medical malpractice.

> Perhaps if doctors were held so directly accountable, there would be fewer incidents of medical malpractice.

What do you mean by "directly accountable"? Doctors do get sued for malpractice regularly and that sounds pretty direct. Also how do you define an "incident of malpractice"? Many lawsuits are entirely frivolous so the definition cannot be initiated lawsuits. Also the lawsuits can be very expensive and representationally damaging, so the definition can't even be lawsuits that ended in settlements (since that can make sense regardless of validity). So frankly the situation seems much more complicated to even measure than many let on.

Ignoring that those issues, if doctors were held to higher account for the mistakes they make, you probably would expect some drop in malpractice (however you measure it). However you should also expect fewer doctors to do risky procedures. The overall result would not necessarily clearly be a net win for society even if malpractice were to drop. Incentives are complicated.

What safety culture among doctors? More seriously when pilots mess up they’re not around to strenuously defend themselves while a doctor who never killed anyone never practiced.

That's my point: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/from-a-blame-culture-...

It's actually the opposite. Rare but harsh punishment doesn't deter crime a lot. However frequent but light punishments are very effective. After someone goes to prison for 10 years that person is already used to prison. You can no longer change the behaviour of such a person through further deterrents.

The whole article is about proverbial heads rolling over car theft. There turned out to be no theft and innocent heads rolled. Doing the same thing to some poor Hertz clerk isn't justice.