Ok, well maybe we're at cross purposes. You did use the word plausible originally, and again in reply. It depends whether you bring any context to a given judgment or rely on intuition on statistical distributions. I think that when appraising the plausibility of bad faith you should take past behaviour into account.
I can totally see a situation where a well meaning PR person says "what can we do to slow down this story?" and some engineer says "we have this mechanism but it wasnt designed for this purpose..."
Compare with yesterday's fun and games when the same metanarrative was reported. "We could shift more units if we had phone numbers"."we do but they were given to us for an expressly different purpose" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017
When you're in this position, ethics is a competence. They may be great at shipping code but past experience suggests that there are deeply inadequate decision making processes.
I can totally see a situation where a well meaning PR person says "what can we do to slow down this story?" and some engineer says "we have this mechanism but it wasnt designed for this purpose..."
Compare with yesterday's fun and games when the same metanarrative was reported. "We could shift more units if we had phone numbers"."we do but they were given to us for an expressly different purpose" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017
When you're in this position, ethics is a competence. They may be great at shipping code but past experience suggests that there are deeply inadequate decision making processes.
Apologies if this misses your point again.