Re:Stupidity versus Malice The often neglected stupidity pro...
by teeja on Thursday October 01, 2009 @06:36PM
(#856000)
Agreed ... too often the stupidity is coming from the organization rather than its employees. Earlier today I read about a VA data HD with 10 million records being sent for repair unencrypted.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/probe-targets-archi...
As with the UK ($2 billion) 'mistake' sent unencrypted and unregistered, the institution is dumb, not its 'component parts'.
Throughout my programming career, I've noticed a strong correlation of bugs with code that was given less attention (it was deemed to be an easier problem to solve, or compartmentalized and solved later).
I don't think it's fair to claim people were stupid just because a detail was overlooked. Perhaps they could have allocated their attention differently, but without knowing all of the trade offs it's hard to say they made a bad choice.
I think that people have a finite amount of "attention" that they can devote to things during a day. Furthermore spending attention on a task seems to consume energy. It's reasonable to think that occasionally some items get less attention than they should.