The first step in problem solving is to look in the mirror. It's not surprising that in an engineering community, the instinct is to blame outsiders - lawyers, bureaucrats, managers, finance, etc. - because those priorities are more likely to conflict with engineering, because it is harder to understand such different perspectives, and because it is easier to believe caricatures of people we don't know personally.

Those people have valuable input on issues the engineer may not understand and have little experience with. And engineers are just as likely to take the easy way out, like the caricature in the parent comment:

For example, for the manufacturer's engineering team it's much easier, faster and cheaper to slap an alarm on everything than to learn attention management and to think through and create an attention management system that is effective and reliable (and it had better be reliable - imagine if it omits the wrong alarms!). I think anyone with experience can imagine the decision to not delay the project and increase costs for that involved subproject - one that involves every component team, which is a priority for almost none of them, and which many engineers, such as the mechanical engineer working on the robotic arm, won't even understand the need for.

> And China's society is run by engineers, so it will win out over ours.

History has not been kind to engineers who do non-engineering, such as US President Herbert Hoover who built dams and but also had significant responsibility for the Great Depression. It's not that engineers can't acquire other skills and do well in those fields, but that other skills are needed - they aren't engineering. Those who accept as truth their natural egocentric bias and their professional community's bias toward engineering are unlikely to learn those skills.

Your own answer circles right back to the problem I'm talking about:

> and it had better be reliable - imagine if it omits the wrong alarms!

This is entirely based on the premise that an error due to omitting the wrong alarm is worse than an error based on including too many alarms. That right there is lawyerthink. Also, these priorities don't conflict as you say, they just take different sides of a tradeoff. Managers and finance people are balancing a tradeoff of delivery speed, cost, and quality to maximize business value. And the bureaucrats and lawyers are choosing more expensive and less reliable systems because they better manage the emotions of panicky anxious people looking for a scapegoat in a crisis. This has a cost.

Besides having bad luck in timing to be president when the stock market crashed, and therefore scapegoated for it, Herbert Hoover was well regarded in everything he did before and after his term, including many non engineering related things. So I think he is a particularly poor example of this. Public blame for things like that tends to be exactly as rational as thinking a hangover has nothing to do with last night.