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Comment by hh3k0 | Hacker News Reader

I do agree, in German we have an idiom "Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her" ("a fish rots from the head down") to describe precisely how bad management cause ripples all the way down. That being said, CEOs are still prime candidates for automatization. I mean, surely nobody wants to replace good CEOs with bad software but rather with equally or better performing software equivalents. Additionally, one day it might be easier to ensure an AI CEO makes better moral/environmental decisions than his human counterpart.

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I google'd around and I can't find anything conclusive about whether a fish literally rots from the head down.

I'd be curious if it's merely an expression or a true thing about fish.

  In reality, it is the guts of fish that rot and stink before the head.

Source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...

  The guts of fish will start to rot quickly and spread terrible bacteria and disease throughout the entire fish.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Survival/comments/mv04em/is_gutting...

Hope this helps. I'm not sure why you were downvoted for expressing curiosity about fish biology.

At a guess (a wild-ass one, I admit): Some of the softest, most porous tissue of a fish, with the highest surface-area-to-volume ratio, and most exposed to the environment with all its microbes -- as opposed to most of their flesh, that is contained within skin and scales -- are the gills. So it feels very plausible that the gills are the first bit of a dead fish that would start to rot.

Well, those or the guts, of course: Assuming fish have an intestinal microflora like land animals, their guts would have a head start on rotting (Heh!) over even the gills. But I guess that's where skin-and-scales-as-container comes in again, only the other way around: the possibly rotting guts are hidden away inside the critter, so not as immediately noticeable as any rot starting from the gills up at the head.

This is all my private speculation, though, and most probably influenced by (i.e, my self-rationalisation of) precisely the saying you're enquiring about.

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