Issue Complaint: Issue #377 Should Have a Retraining Option

[Polis Diamonil]

If the military actually mistook a civilian airliner for a bomber, it's counterproductive to punish them for admitting to the error by taking away the funds they would need to retrain and re-equip to prevent such errors in the future. Beyond the bad morale implications of punishing integrity like that, reducing the military in response to the error also risks making the error more likely to recur in the future by under-equipping them. Major organizations in the real world understand that they have to minimize punishments of people cooperating with procedure in the aftermath of devastating errors.

There should be an option that increases integrity while funding retraining and new sensor equipment for the military, similar to how in Issue #654 it's possible to react by increasing funding for (oversight and bureaucratic administration of) foreign aid in response to corruption issues arising in foreign aid programs.

I wrote up this dispatch about the event and how I imagine Polis Diamonil handling it: https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=1307881

[Candlewhisper Archive]

I love that you're writing stuff based off issues!

I'd agree that the issue construction here is a bit dubious, with one option to reduce your military surrounded by three corrupt options of various sorts. If it were being drafted now I'd suggest dropping that to one corrupt option, and adding one option with a mea culpa and a promise to invest more in better training, as you say, though such an option would have to be balanced with some sort of downside. Probably I'd have suggested framing the whole issue more around the idea of what compensation the relatives need, and having that option be a callous one.

However, deep surgery of that sort on old issues isn't undertaken lightly, and actually the issue has a reasonably low dismissal rate and a good spread of people picking different options. It doesn't reach the threshold for a rewrite, even if the current team would now edit this one differently. Back in those days, however, there wasn't such a clear directive as to how issues should look and behave, so it worked for the requirements of the time it was published. As such, it'll likely remain as it is.

[Trotterdam]

actually the issue has a reasonably low dismissal rate and a good spread of people picking different options

I'm not sure that's actually a good thing in this case. If several options have nearly-equal selection rates due to being so similar that people choose between them nearly at random, then that's not a sign of a properly-functioning issue.

I'll quote my own previous thoughts on this issue:

How about #377? There's three options for shameless lying to deny responsibility, and the fourth cuts the military. There needs to be a non-evil pro-military option, such as spending on training or better sensor equipment to prevent such mistakes, or at least a differently-flavored evil option (no lying), such as a super-authoritarian one where you require civilian planes to file extremely detailed flight plans in advance and/or fly only along certain pre-approved routes.

Your suggestion of compensating the relatives is also a valid option, but actually strikes me as mildly corrupt too itself because it's paying off the victims to stop making a fuss without actually doing anything to prevent such a tragedy from recurring.

[Candlewhisper Archive]

Yep, I agree. If this one were still in the edit, I'd propose those changes.

However, the threshold for modifying published issues is slightly different. We're generally not looking to just push quality (as that'd be a disrespect to the original editor and author). Instead we only make changes to fix errors, deal with stuff that doesn't fly well with modern sensibilities (gypsies in a field, transgender recognition demanded, etc.), or which no longer makes sense (mobile maladies), or where there's new policies to consider, or stuff like that.

Rewriting this issue just to make it subjectively better story construction isn't something we need to do, I think. There's no rule against it, but I'd rather spend my time adding new issues rather than redoing the work of past editors. I mean, there may be authorial intent here. You could argue that the depiction of the issue as having 75% of choices offering you different lies to cover up with is intended as satire, and intentional. It's not our chosen role as editors to go back and second guess those things for long-established issues. The draft at the time, and the edit at the time, that's when we address what options the issue should have. Post-publication, the threshold for change is different.

Re: the metrics used for assessing issue quality, its hard for us to judge why there is an even spread of issue option picks, but the general approach has been that we prefer issues that have at least two options that have near equal numbers of picks, and low dismissal rates.
This issue has a fairly even split between options 1 and 4, with 2 just a short way behind, and 3 lagging by some way.

[Polis Diamonil]

Thank you for the replies and consideration of my complaint. I worked the issue into the narrative of Polis Diamonil quite satisfactorily (despite dismissing it), and despite my complaint I'm pleased that it happened when it did.