Yours is the correct viewpoint: it is incompatible with human cognition.
If an alert system is not perceived as highly reliable in directing positive action, then the humans involved will inevitably disable the alert system, either by pulling out a screwdriver or rewriting their mental rubrics to ignore the messages as noise.
Knight Capital is just the finance version of Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon -- the means to mitigate or prevent disaster were on hand, but the people in charge just dithered by the kill switch because they were confused. Well, if the people in charge are confused, that is a reason to start the emergency procedures.
in the ancestral comment here, it wasn't even an alert system! It was just "your job is to sit there all day and watch every single transaction and flag the aberrant one"!!
"Whoa this transaction is way bigger than normal. So is this one. And this one."
People ignore repetitive things, but they usually notice when it changes. They can tell you that it's shaped different or explain how it sounds different from normal.
If this system made dissimilar transactions look very similar to the monitor, then it is to blame, not the idea of having a monitor at all.
If an alert system is not perceived as highly reliable in directing positive action, then the humans involved will inevitably disable the alert system, either by pulling out a screwdriver or rewriting their mental rubrics to ignore the messages as noise.
Knight Capital is just the finance version of Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon -- the means to mitigate or prevent disaster were on hand, but the people in charge just dithered by the kill switch because they were confused. Well, if the people in charge are confused, that is a reason to start the emergency procedures.