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Accountability Sinks — LessWrong

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Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary import papers. Because of this, they could not be forwarded on to the customer in Athens. But nobody was able to correct the error and send them back either. What could be done with them? It’s hard to think there wasn’t a better solution than the one that was carried out; faced with the paperwork issue, airport staff threw all 440 squirrels into an industrial shredder. [...] It turned out that the order to destroy the squirrels had come from the Dutch government’s Department of Agriculture, Environment Management and Fishing. However, KLM’s management, with the benefit of hindsight, said that ‘this order, in this form and without feasible alternatives,* was unethical’. The employees had acted ‘formally corr

x Accountability Sinks — LessWrong Social & Cultural Dynamics Coordination / Cooperation Incentives World Modeling Rationality Curated 2025 Top Fifty: 19 % 455 Accountability Sinks by Martin Sustrik 22nd Apr 2025 250bpm 18 min read 59 455 This is a cross-post from https://250bpm.substack.com/p/accountability-sinks Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary

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