Where a naive question costs status, a danger many can see goes unreported; the failure is the culture's, not one person's.

The claim

When a group makes asking a naive question costly, a danger many people can see goes unreported, and the failure belongs to the group's culture rather than to the person who caused the harm. The case offered is a bank brought down by one trader's unauthorised positions: colleagues recognised the risk, but a question that might look silly carried a social cost, so nobody asked. Removing the trader or adding a supervisor would have ended that instance; it would not have changed the conditions that let it run.