Why PAP doesn’t do accountability, meritocracy

In Political governance, Public Administration, S'pore Inc on 26/09/2017 at 11:16 am

Meritocracy and accountability are two sides of the same coin as the US navy has recently shown (PM, this is accountability). (Btw, a long time ago, the British executed a white horse to encourage other senior naval officers to do their duty.)

Therev are many examples where despite all the talk of meritocray (Meritocracy? No leh Cosiness), by the PAP, failures are rewarded, showing there’s no accountabilty. Think NOL’s CEO who is now SPH’s CEO or Ong Yee Kung  or SMRT’s Desmond Kwek or paper General Ministers.

The reason is simple: they were doing what they were supposed to do. Juz like when algos fail, the algos are not faulted. They juz doing what they were designed to do: “only doing what it was told”.

This realisation came when I read this

If Facebook’s algorithms were executives, the public would be demanding their heads on a stick, such was the ugly incompetence on display this week.

First, the company admitted a “fail” when its advertising algorithm allowed for the targeting of anti-Semitic users.

Then on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg said he was handing over details of more than 3,000 advertisements bought by groups with links to the Kremlin, a move made possible by the advertising algorithms that have made Mr Zuckerberg a multi-billionaire.

Gross misconduct, you might say – but of course you can’t sack the algorithm. And besides, it was only doing what it was told.

Blame the PAP (or rather the leaders of the PAP). And blame the pioneer generation for allowing S’pore to become a de facto one-party state?

Looking at things this way, and maybe the poor among the pioneer generation deserve the “peanuts” the PAP are shelling out.

What do u think?

  1. Unless the algos have been created by multiple generations of self-aware & autonomous AI entities, they are still mandated, created, tested, approved, executed & maintained/overseen by people, including senior management & top executive sponsors.

    “Not my fault coz algos” smells like elites not being responsible coz the issues happen at much lower levels than them …. e.g. guards letting limping terrorist escape, nurses/doctors not following protocols leading to cross infections, technicians/engineers not diligent/smart enough to prevent train faults, aggressive selling of financial products by staff in order to keep their jobs to uninformed consumers, etc etc.

    Norway’s SWF has doubled it’s portfolio from USD500B in 2010 to USD1T in 2017 even though oil prices has been in the pits for last 2+ years. While GIC has only increased it’s portfolio size by barely 40% in the same period …… despite an increase of 86% in CPF balances in the same period…

    Principle of some animals more equal than other animals.

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