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WhyAsk comments on Happy Petrov Day - Less Wrong Discussion
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Note that Petrov suffered very few consequences after the initial backlash. His US counterpart Harold Hering was discharged from the Air Force, drove a truck for a while to make ends meet and watched his personal life crumble, for asking the question
I don't know if his stand forced any changes in the missile launch protocols, but I admire his courage to take his oath literally and seriously and his refusal to back down under pressure from his superiors more than Petrov's 5 min of agonizing over a decision to disobey a faulty computer algorithm he himself helped design.
Thanks for the Hering link.
I, too, got into a dispute with the USAF but did considerably better and there was a lot less at stake. True to form for whistleblowers, a Lt. Col. who tried to help me on a related issue got sent to Taiwan. The punishment is worse for higher-ups because they should have known better by then.
Decades later, in my response to questioning how to sue a government agency for negligence, a lawyer told me "No one can sue the King." Questioning a King's sanity, or competence, may be worse than suing.
Yes, this is called sovereign immunity.
As far as I know, you can sue a government agency, with some restrictions, but you can rarely sue the people who made the decisions in question while working for said agency. It's worse if the agency is a military branch and the normal civilian safeguards do not apply.