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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

At risk of sounding like a jerk, I agree and think this whole reaction is overblown.

A vacancy has been opened up. That will trigger numerous consequences across the system. Yes, every time you observe such consequences, you will be reminded of its cause -- the roommate's death. But it's unrealistic to expect every other subsystem not to do anything that reminds you of that death, which, as far as I can tell, is the extent of this email's "wrongdoing".

"Woe is me, how dare you, the housing system, refer to my roommate's death as just another vacancy." Come on, now.

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What’s overblown? Did you read the actual post?

It literally came down to, and I paraphrase, “and this experience taught me the lasting lesson that software will interact with human beings in a variety of contexts and situations that we may not anticipate. We should be thoughtful, to not hurt people who interact with our software in ways we didn’t bother thinking about”.

That’s not a bad idea.

Doing it so thoroughly that you purge any reminders of someone's death is a bad idea.

Even knowing this happened, I don't see how it should have been done differently. Eventually you have to do something about the vacancy. Communicating to the author about the vacancy will remind him of the death. It's unavoidable.

It's "overblown" to expect everyone not to communicate to you in any way that calls back to your roommate dying.

>Did you read the actual post?

Yes.

Edit: To put it another way, let's say this email was sent how the author would have preferred. Next semester, then what? They have to keep adding a blurb about sympathy for the roommate's death, every time the vacancy is mentioned? Eventually you have to accept that "no, the world isn't going to keep dancing around this".

> I don't see how it should have been done differently

The automated email should have been sent to the building coordinator who could have acted on the automated request to assign a new roommate or not as appropriate. At the very least, there is a vacancy halfway through the year for a reason. How many of the possible reasons might benefit from considerate handling? Sometimes impersonal centralisation works well, and sometimes not.

So all vacancy notifications should be sent to building coordinators who are responsible for personally notifying tenants? What if they forget or do it tactlessly?

The system worked as intended. Part of emotional maturity is learning to cope with "cosmic indifference." It's not a defect to engineer out of day-to-day life. Or if it is, it falls at the bottom of my list.

IMHO this request reflects a mind-boggling level of privilege.

> Part of emotional maturity is learning to cope with "cosmic indifference."

Well said.

If anything, the email should be simplified: "The system will be assigning you a new roommate within the week."

Not made to sound like a human wrote it. Not branched into some insincere if(prevUserHasDeceased){comfortCurrentUser()} template.

Just a matter of fact from an indifferent computer doing its job.

Not because the world doesn't need empathy, but to keep it in a mode in which we don't expect it. Just like you don't get mad at your dog when it waits for your deceased partner to get home, nor at their cellphone's low-battery chime for not knowing it won't be needing a recharge, nor at the stoplight for not knowing you're late to the wake.

> What if they forget or do it tactlessly?

Then they are incompetent at their job, and require either better tools/support or replacing with a competent professional.

The conclusion is good advice, but doesn’t match the criticism of the response in the story.

The mail is pretty factual, polite, doesn’t assume circumstances that could be ill fited. I saw it more as an exemple of a decent wording that anything else.

The intention isn't bad, for sure, but the impossibility to apply the advice (even the article itself partially mention this) make it a bad idea.

We simply can,t be responsible for all the empathy required.

Here's my takes on this:

> The System had sent an automated email now that some school administrator had signaled that my roommate would not be returning that semester.

That guy should have be aware of the implication of his actions and he should have been the one responsible to apply empathy in this case. It's not the responsibility of the software to be designed for empathy, all its does is execute preprogrammed actions to make life easier to the one responsible to do theses actions. If theses actions weren't the correct one based on a situation, then the one responsible to do them should do them, that's it.

It's not a bad idea to conjecture about, but it's not very useful as far as implementations go. Brainstorming possible ways in which users might be offended by software and trying to mitigate said hypotheticals is not very productive. Furthermore, there are consequences of trying to avoid offending people. If this automated email wasn't sent, this blog author would suddenly gotten a roommate with no warning. Would that have been a better situation?

A lot of these things cannot feasibly be thought of in advance, and the offense is often more due to ignorance of the automated nature of the system. E.g. at a coding summer camp people received passwords with two random words and two random numbers. Profanity was blacklisted as well as some number combinations (69, 88, maybe more). One class had someone take offense at the password "bloodyunhappy12" - thinking this was a derogatory reference to menstruation. Are we really going to try and think of every pair of words that might cause offense? Letting people pick their own passwords meant a lot of people had insecure passwords, so this random words + numbers was the best approach. Similarly an airline got in trouble for generating a confirmation code "H8GAYS": https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adriancarrasquillo/delt...

Why is this all or nothing? There's no reason for it to be completely automated, it could have delegated responsibility to the person most in the know of the situation. That way a member of staff could have talked to them instead of pre-made email.

This incurs extra labor cost - the whole point of automating a system is to avoid the manual labor. At this point you're no longer making your system tactful, you're just eliminating your system.

Furthermore, it just substitutes one failure mode for another. After a dozen instances of telling people they're getting a new roommate because the old roommate moved out due to normal reasons, how confident are you that this staff member is going to check whether the previous occupant died or otherwise left due to sensitive reasons? Chances are, this same blog post would be written except that instead of "I got this tone-deaf email telling me I'm getting a new roommate" it's "This tone-deaf staff member told me I'm getting a new roommate".

It wasn't me, it's the computer that did it, that excuse is as old as dirt.

There is that version of the Monty Python "Dead Bishops" skit, where the murderer says "It was me, but society is at fault." Consequently the Church Policeman asks all the other people present: "Excuse me, are you a member of society?" - "Yes." - "Come with me, then."

But the "it" here is "tell you the consequences of the vacancy". The "wrongdoing" is reminding the author of the roommate's death (which is out of the control of anyone who communicates to him about the vacancy). A human would do the exact same thing (to the extent of telling you about that), so nothing is being excused by virtue of the computer doing it.

The problem is with the wording. The "Friendly Campus System" "detected a vacancy". In the face of a sudden, unprepared death you offer condolences and give the bereaved person the customary 30 days. The email from the blogpost is completely inappropiate.

Mortality in college students is something around 15 in 100000, a campus of 10000 can expect a student death per year. It's surprising that there were no processes in place to act appropiately in that situation.

Isn’t that “solved” by the friend going to the administration and discussing the issue with a human to have the situation properly handled ?

I feel it’s like blaming your roomba for running over your graduation certificate when it could have recognized it and paid due respect. Automated systems are a thing now, and the mail was explicitely signed as coming from automation, with a neutral and polite enough language. We should accept it as it is IMHO.

No, we should not accept suboptimal outcomes from automation and we should insist on properly designed processes. Automation should serve the students and faculty, not university administration, who can say they've shaved so-and-so much off this cost center that is student housing. The most worrying thing is that the administration had student deaths before and still continues to give offense.

Offence can only be taken and is wholly subjective as this whole thread has proven. It is unfortunate that this caused her upset but it was neither the intent or at all cause of it. The cause of her upset is the fact that her friend had passed away. She could have been reminded of her bereavement from something entirely different.

I totally agree with you when it impacts people’s security, privacy, goods or money.

I am less intransigent when it comes to potentially hurt feelings.

The whole automated message is like it was taken straight out of Blade Runner or another dystopic story. I can already hear a nondescript computer generated female voice announcing the vacancy in an emotionless tone.

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