Flipping the bozo bit on flips the learning off
Flipping the bozo bit on flips the learning off
“翻转小丑位”会阻断学习
Lorin Hochstein | Incidents, Resilience | May 9, 2026 | 3 Minutes Lorin Hochstein | 事件、韧性 | 2026年5月9日 | 3分钟
I’m too young to have seen Bozo the Clown myself, but I’m old enough to get the references. “Flipping the bozo bit” is an expression from the software world. Think about a time when you reached a point where you simply stopped respecting the opinion of a particular person, most likely a co-worker. From that point on, you disregarded what they said. This is what flipping the bozo bit is. This person isn’t worth listening to, they’re a bozo. 我虽然没看过《小丑博佐》（Bozo the Clown），但年纪也足够理解这个梗了。“翻转小丑位”（Flipping the bozo bit）是软件界的一个术语。回想一下，当你对某个人（通常是同事）的观点彻底失去尊重时，从那一刻起，你就会无视他们所说的一切。这就是所谓的“翻转小丑位”。这意味着此人不值得倾听，他们就是个“小丑”（bozo）。
There’s a related phenomenon, where we hear an anecdote about some bad outcome that happened to someone else, and our conclusion is that this outcome occurred because, well, that person is a bozo. I’m writing, of course, about incidents. You’ve seen this happen, right? An incident happens, the details of the incident get passed around, and somebody makes a comment like, “how could they have [not] done X?” The subtext is “what a bunch of bozos!” 还有一个相关的现象：当我们听到别人遭遇不幸的轶事时，我们的结论往往是——那是因为那个人是个“小丑”。我当然是在谈论“事故”。你一定见过这种情况，对吧？事故发生了，细节被传开，有人评论道：“他们怎么能（没）做X呢？”其潜台词就是：“真是一群小丑！”
This is on my mind because of the latest AI-related incident that befell PocketOS. You can read about it in the Twitter post written by the PocketOS founder, Jer Crane. The post is titled An AI Agent Just Destroyed Our Production Data. It Confessed in Writing. Unsurprisingly, this post got a lot of online attention. I saw a lot of “wow, was this guy ever a bozo” reactions to this story. I want to talk about why this reaction is counter-productive. 我之所以想到这一点，是因为最近发生在 PocketOS 身上的一起 AI 相关事故。你可以在 PocketOS 创始人 Jer Crane 的 Twitter 帖文中读到相关内容，标题是《一个 AI 智能体刚刚摧毁了我们的生产数据，它还留下了书面供词》。不出所料，这篇帖子在网上引起了广泛关注。我看到了很多诸如“哇，这家伙真是个小丑”之类的反应。我想谈谈为什么这种反应是适得其反的。
I also want to call out the technical term for this phenomenon, which is a cousin of flipping the bozo bit. It’s called distancing through differencing. The term “distancing through differencing” was introduced by the American resilience engineering researchers Richard Cook and David Woods in their 2006 paper: Distancing Through Differencing: An Obstacle to Organizational Learning Following Accidents. Technically, it’s a book chapter, from Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts. It’s very readable, and I recommend it. All of the quoted text below is from that paper. 我还想指出这个现象的专业术语，它是“翻转小丑位”的近亲，叫做“通过差异化进行疏远”（distancing through differencing）。这个术语由美国韧性工程研究人员 Richard Cook 和 David Woods 在他们 2006 年的论文《通过差异化进行疏远：事故后组织学习的障碍》中提出。严格来说，它是《韧性工程：概念与准则》一书中的一个章节。这本书非常易读，我推荐阅读。以下引用的所有文字均来自该论文。
By focusing on the differences, they see no lessons for their own operation and practices. When people hear about an incident and respond by concluding “an incident like that would never happen to us; that happened to those workers over there because they are clearly not as careful as we are,” that’s distancing through differencing in action. Overall they decided the incident “couldn’t happen here”. 通过关注差异，他们认为自己的运营和实践中没有任何经验教训可取。当人们听到一起事故并得出结论说“这种事绝不会发生在我们身上；那是因为那边的工作人员显然不如我们细心”时，这就是“通过差异化进行疏远”在起作用。总而言之，他们断定事故“不可能发生在这里”。
The Cook and Woods paper illustrates the phenomenon with a case study of a chemical fire that broke out at an American manufacturing plant. There had been a similar fire that had occurred previously at the same company, at an overseas plant. The American employees knew about the previous fire, but they had concluded that there was nothing to learn from that other fire, as that sort of accident couldn’t happen to them in the U.S. After all, those overseas workers were less skilled, less motivated, and less careful. In short, those overseas workers were perceived as different. Cook 和 Woods 的论文通过一个美国制造工厂发生的化学火灾案例研究来说明这一现象。此前，同一家公司的海外工厂也发生过类似的火灾。美国员工知道那次火灾，但他们认为那次火灾没什么可学的，因为那种事故不可能发生在美国。毕竟，那些海外员工技术较差、动力不足、也不够细心。简而言之，那些海外员工被视为“不同的人”。
Ironically, after the chemical fire at the American plant, other workers at that very same plant also exhibited distancing through differencing. Workers in the same plant, working in the same area in which the fire occurred but on a different shift, attributed the fire to lower skills of the workers on the other shift. Cook and Woods note that our tendency to focus on differences between us and them when the incident happens to them leads us to miss aspects of the system that we actually have in common with them. 讽刺的是，在美国工厂发生化学火灾后，同一工厂的其他员工也表现出了“通过差异化进行疏远”。在同一工厂、同一火灾区域工作但处于不同班次的员工，将火灾归咎于另一个班次员工的技术水平较低。Cook 和 Woods 指出，当事故发生在别人身上时，我们倾向于关注“我们”与“他们”之间的差异，这导致我们忽略了系统中我们与他们实际上共有的部分。
By focusing on the differences, we miss the opportunity to learn from their experiences, because it seduces us into believing there’s nothing for us to learn here. Do not discard other events because they appear on the surface to be dissimilar. At some level of analysis, all events are unique; while at other levels of analysis, they reveal common patterns. 通过关注差异，我们错失了从他们的经历中学习的机会，因为它诱导我们相信这里没什么可学的。不要因为表面上的不相似就抛弃其他事件。在某种分析层面上，所有事件都是独特的；而在其他分析层面上，它们却揭示了共同的模式。
Now let’s circle back to the PocketOS AI-related incident. If we come to the conclusion that PocketOS employees were simply using AI irresponsibly, and that we are more responsible than that, we learn nothing from the experience. I was heartened to see that Railway, the vendor used by PocketOS that exposed the delete API, has made changes to the overall system to improve safety; see their post: Your AI wants to nuke your database. Guardrails fix that. 现在回到 PocketOS 的 AI 相关事故。如果我们得出的结论仅仅是“PocketOS 员工使用 AI 不负责任，而我们比他们更负责”，那么我们从这次经历中什么也学不到。令我感到欣慰的是，PocketOS 所使用的、暴露了删除 API 的供应商 Railway 已经对整个系统进行了改进以提高安全性；请参阅他们的文章：《你的 AI 想要摧毁你的数据库，护栏机制可以解决这个问题》。
Stepping back, this isn’t the last AI-related incident we’re going to see in our industry, not by a long shot. The next time you read one of those, if your reaction is “they should have known not to do X”, then you’ve fallen into the distancing through differencing trap. (As an aside, “they should have known…” is an incoherent sentence. It’s one thing if somebody deliberately took on excessive risk. But it’s another thing if they unknowingly took on excessive risk. How can you blame a person for not knowing something?) 退一步讲，这绝不是我们行业中最后一次 AI 相关事故。下次当你读到此类新闻时，如果你的反应是“他们早该知道不该做 X”，那么你就掉进了“通过差异化进行疏远”的陷阱。（顺便说一句，“他们早该知道……”这句话本身就是不合逻辑的。如果某人故意承担过大的风险是一回事，但如果他们是在不知情的情况下承担了风险，那就是另一回事了。你怎么能责怪一个人不知道某件事呢？）
When this process of learning moved past the obstacle of distancing through differencing in this case, the organizational response changed. After all, there but for the grace of God go we all. 当学习过程克服了“通过差异化进行疏远”这一障碍时，组织的反应就会发生改变。毕竟，若非上帝眷顾，我们可能也会犯同样的错。