Great post on "accountability sinks", features in institutions that make people unaccountable, and how they're both good and bad. I can only capture a small part of this but here are a few quotes.

A credit company used to issue plastic cards to its clients, allowing them to make purchases. Each card had the client’s name printed on it. [...] The card design only allowed for 24 characters, but some applicants had names longer than that. [...]

[...] since only a tiny percentage of people have names that long, rather than redesigning the card, those applications would simply be rejected.

You may be in a perfectly good standing, but you'll never get a credit. And you are not even told why. There's nobody accountable and there's nobody to complain to. A technical dysfunction got papered over with process. [...]

the popular discontent in the West today is fueled by exactly this: A growing rage at being trapped in systems that treat people not as humans, but as cogs in a machine. Processes, not people, make the decisions. And if the process fails you, there's no one to turn to, no one to explain and no one to take responsibility. [...]

But let's not get carried away. [...] limiting the accountability [is] often exactly the thing you want. Take the institution of academic tenure. By making a scientist essentially unfireable, it grants them the freedom to pursue any line of research, no matter how risky or unconventional. They don’t need to justify their work to college administrators, deliver tangible results on a schedule, or apologize for failure. [...]

On October 1st, 2017, a hospital emergency department in Las Vegas faced a crisis: A mass shooting at a concert sent hundreds of people with gunshot wounds flooding into the ER at once. The staff managed to handle the emergency in a great way, violating all the established rules and processes along the way [...] As one of the commenters noted: "Amazing! The guy broke every possible rule. If he wasn't a fucking hero, he would be fired on the spot."