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Nige Cook's avatar

The answer is in Dr Irving Janis's book, Victims of Groupthink. It's the "when in a hole, keep digging for good teamwork morale"-hoax, which was behind the eugenics holocaust, the Vietnam war failure, the Challenger shuttle explosion. The brittleness of rubber O-rings on the boosters had been witnessed to cause fuel leaks on previous launches, but in the interests of teamwork the lowly engineer who exposed the problem prior to the explosion was silenced until after the disaster, so they could still launch in freezing cold weather and not wait till summer. All big bureaucracies and corporations go this way in the end. We live in a world of accountable individuals vs. unaccountable big brother teams.

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