But that one's much more universally true. I think it's much harder to write an article called "Come On, Obviously You Shouldn't Always Look Before You Leap."
Basically I think people typically phase out proverbs that don't hold up to scrutiny. Or at least pad it with specific context.
I thought the meaning was more something like “the system took these side effects into account and still considered that what it was doing was net positive in expectation, so the side effects are as much part of the system's purpose as the ‘positive’ outcomes”.
I think this is neither part of the way the phrase is commonly used, nor a fair application of the word "purpose". I think "purpose" specifically means "something that they wanted, rather than a side effect which is only grudgingly tolerated". As I said in the post, the claim "The purpose of the bus system is to emit carbon dioxide" is clearly wrong by any normal interpretation of the word "purpose".
Your claim "If a system exists, someone must have decided it was worth tolerating its side effects", is obvious and non-explosive and nobody would care about it. I wouldn't object if somebody said it, but nobody *would* say it. Rephrasing it as "the purpose of a system is what it does" adds nothing except the ability for people to misinterpret or motte-and-bailey it.
Oh, I completely agree that this phrase is basically just rhetoric. But I thought (perhaps wrongly) that what it was gesturing at was something like “these side effects are something that the system trades off for the ‘positive’ effects; the role of the system (what it does/its purpose) is to perform this very exchange.”
Systems have side effects that are tolerable to the system. They could even be a bonus that further entrenches the system.
Memetic natural selection applies to systems. That doesn't mean systems get continually better; not by a long shot. But they adjust to their environment, including what a community wants and is willing to put up with.
The purpose of a system that has egregious side-effects is very likely not aligned with my values. It might not be malicious, but it does not care about what I care about, and it is worth at least looking under the hood to see if what it cares about and what I care about are zero-sum.
This is an extremely charitable interpretation, know. But I think it is the grain of (or at least validity) attempting to be imparted by people who catch and spread this particular meme.
A system doesn't have conscious intentions, but it can be mapped as if it does, and pursues consistent goals. It doesn't take a single evil person for a system to consistently mimic evil intentions. (Cf. Moloch)
“ The purpose of a system that has egregious side-effects is very likely not aligned with my values. It might not be malicious, but it does not care about what I care about, and it is worth at least looking under the hood to see if what it cares about and what I care about are zero-sum.”
"What you think are bad outcomes /seem to go against the purported goals of a system are actually necessary side effects for the system to achieve its goal/remain in place ?"
Then wouldn't a better phrase be "The purpose of a system is first and foremost to perpetuate itself" ?
This is literally just begging the question for "systems are intended for self-perpetuation"; you added that idea de novo into the paraphrase, and then coopted the paraphrase to focus on it.
@ersatz said "The role of the system is to perform this exchange" of, eg, turning fossil fuel into carbon emissions and mass transport of persons via buses, with 'carbon emissions' an accepted negative outcome that is balanced by the positive outcome 'mass transport of persons'. I can't think of a more probably explanation here than 'centering perpetuation is about your own prior bias'. Even if we assume 'bad outcomes are [unalterably] necessary side effects', that still has nothing to do with perpetuation; achieving the intended positive effects would remain the basis for continuing the system.
I’m with you. I think it’s a catchy phrase trying to express something like: “even if there are apparent tensions, the systems we observe in the world are at equilibria: if there is something the system does which seems at cross purposes with its manifest intentions, then this is still part of the maintenance of its balance.”
No, I think as used it is intended to be understood that "no matter what the official reason for this system, in practice what it does is its real function" about such things as systemic racism or discriminatory policing and alleged bias in the justice system.
See this page from the NAACP which tries very hard to tie in "modern day policing" in the USA with 18th century slave patrols:
"The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the "Slave Patrol." The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.
...By the 1900s, local municipalities began to establish police departments to enforce local laws in the East and Midwest, including Jim Crow laws. Local municipalities leaned on police to enforce and exert excessive brutality on African Americans who violated any Jim Crow law. Jim Crow Laws continued through the end of the 1960s."
Even restricting a discussion of policing and the police to "modem-day policing", this elides a *ton* of historical development that had little or nothing to do with slave patrols:
"The county sheriff, who was an elected official, was responsible for enforcing laws, collecting taxes, supervising elections, and handling the legal business of the county government. Sheriffs would investigate crimes and make arrests after citizens filed complaints or provided information about a crime but did not carry out patrols or otherwise take preventive action. Villages and cities typically hired constables and marshals, who were empowered to make arrests and serve warrants. Many municipalities also formed a night watch, a group of citizen volunteers who would patrol the streets at night looking for crime and fires. Typically, constables and marshals were the main law enforcement officials available during the day while the night watch would serve during the night. Eventually, municipalities formed day watch groups. Rioting was handled by local militias.
In the 1700s, the Province of Carolina (later North- and South Carolina) established slave patrols in order to prevent slave rebellions and enslaved people from escaping. By 1785 the Charleston Guard and Watch had "a distinct chain of command, uniforms, sole responsibility for policing, salary, authorized use of force, and a focus on preventing crime."
In 1751 moves towards a municipal police service in Philadelphia were made when the city's night watchmen and constables began receiving wages and a Board of Wardens was created to oversee the night watch.
...Modern policing influenced by the British model of policing established in 1829 based on the Peelian principles began emerging in the United States in the mid-19th century, replacing previous law enforcement systems based primarily on night watch organizations. Cities began establishing organized, publicly funded, full-time professional police services. In Boston, a day police consisting of six officers under the command of the city marshal was established in 1838 to supplement the city's night watch. This paved the way for the establishment of the Boston Police Department in 1854. In New York City, law enforcement up to the 1840s was handled by a night watch as well as 100 city marshals, 51 municipal police officers, and 31 constables. In 1845, the New York City Police Department was established. In Philadelphia, the first police officers to patrol the city in daytime were employed in 1833 as a supplement to the night watch system, leading to the establishment of the Philadelphia Police Department in 1854.
In the American Old West, law enforcement was carried out by local sheriffs, rangers, constables, and federal marshals. There were also town marshals responsible for serving civil and criminal warrants, maintaining the jails, and carrying out arrests for petty crime."
But this edited version of history, where a localised force at a particular time is taken to represent the origin of all modern-day policing in the USA, has been very successful and I do see it going around on social media. So people are convinced, or convincing themselves, that the purpose of the USA criminal justice system is to oppress, repress, and persecute, to the point of literally murdering, the black population.
"'If a system exists, someone must have decided it was worth tolerating its side effects", is obvious and non-explosive and nobody would care about it."
Nah, it's coming up on 5 years since George Floyd and almost nobody in The Establishment has admitted that the Floyd Effect during the reign of Black Lives Matter got a huge number of Black Lives Murdered due to increased black-on-black shootings and increased black traffic fatalities.
Elites instead keep attributing the spike in homicides and car crash deaths to covid rather than to Black Lives Matter.
Even when Scott admitted that Black Lives Matter got a huge number of Black Lives Murdered, he didn't admit that the Floyd Effect, like the Ferguson Effect before it, got a big increase in Black Lives Splattered on the asphalt.
Personally, I don't believe that the Purpose of the Black Lives Matter system was to end more black lives, even though that's what happened. I just think that the people in charge in the early 2020s were dimwits who were overwhelmed by racist hate.
Sailer is not saying anything about Obama, only that Obama didn't know that Harvey Weinstein was a pervert, otherwise he wouldn't have let his daughter intern at Weinstein an co.
I don't think continuing to bring up this point or make bad puns on Black Lives Matter does anything but reflect poorly on you and invite inflammatory responses.
My objection is that bringing up race and policing in response to this post could be trying to raise an interesting point or could be trolling.
Doing it with a post that contains the phrase "Black Lives Splattered" leans far in the direction of heat vs light and is below the level of discourse I expect to from this comment section. The appropriate action was probably just to report rather than reply, though.
Figuring out what to do about people who occasionally produce light but gratuitously generate heat is a tricky question of moderation IMO, and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer. Scott definitely errs in favor of a light touch here, so I'm not sure reporting is the right move. Might just be my tastes though, since I usually shy away from both reporting and replying to the same comment.
Like I said before, it's because people *want very much* to judge systems based on their *intentions* rather than their consequences. Black Lives Matter is aligned with the side of "good" and "antiracism" in people's minds so the consequences of BLM must be good on principle.
The purpose of an arguement is what it does, therefore the purpose of "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to be misinterpreted or motte-and-bailey-ed
But sometimes the side-effects are identified as a problem and the owners of the system agree that it's a problem and that they want to fix it. However, for whatever reason that doesn't happen. At that point, can't one say that this is the purpose of the system?
I think a reasonable analogy is drug side-effects: some are inevitable and they're generally bad, occasionally they're so bad you should just stop taking the drug, but usually you're stuck with them until someone comes up with a better formulation or an entirely new medicine.
It would be bizarre to claim that your hair falling out and your immune system becoming compromised is an intended effect of cancer chemotherapy, it's just difficult to prevent while achieving your actual goal of curing cancer.
It is possible that the "side effect" of the system (e.g. police brutality to criminal justice) is secretly desirable (I can't deny that plenty of people seem to think treating suspects harshly is instrumentally useful to the goal of preventing and punishing crime), but it's also possible that it's undesirable byproduct of the goals and constraints the system faces (e.g. the kind of people willing to work as police officers). I think it's important to actually work out why the bad thing is happening!
> It would be bizarre to claim that your hair falling out and your immune system becoming compromised is an intended effect of cancer chemotherapy, it's just difficult to prevent while achieving your actual goal of curing cancer.
That really depends on the level of your analysis. The way to prevent that while curing cancer is of course to use a different type of treatment, with surgery being the least prone to undesirable side effects. Surgery uses a cancer attack model of "if the cancer is outside me, instead of inside me, I will no longer have a problem with it", which is perfect as long as you get the whole thing.
Chemotherapy uses a very different model. The conceptual model for chemotherapy is "we flood your system with drugs that will kill any cell that divides, be it friend or foe". If you understand that, it very much does look like your hair falling out and your immune system weakening are intended effects of the treatment. Those are both things that chemotherapy is supposed to do; that's how chemotherapy works.
Put another way, if I say that I took the shortest path into the house only for the sake of convenience, and the fact that there's now a hole in the wall is an unfortunate side effect of the fact that the door wasn't on my path, I don't think many people would accept that.
More to the point would be if they agree that it does the thing, but don't want to fix it. In that case one could justly call is part of the purpose of the system If they want to fix it, but just can't figure out how then it's not part of the purpose, but rather a trade-off.
I generally read the comments that use the phrase as claiming that the "side-effects" are intentionally not being fixed. Sometimes I feel this is a valid complaint.
>Your claim "If a system exists, someone must have decided it was worth tolerating its side effects", is obvious and non-explosive and nobody would care about it.
I for one have found it useful to assume that most systems, that were designed at all, and that we have to be aware of enough to think about as such, were designed by people with no understanding of system design, and almost no anticipation of actual consequences or mechanisms. Too many systems look like this for me to think it's intentional, e.g. they de facto ban what they claim to promote, or arrange incentives to guarantee eventual failure in the face of normal everyday challenges.
I think you need a conceptual distinction here from legal theory: purpose vs. intent.
Annoyingly, "purpose" in the sense used above is what legal theorists call "intent" so we will need to rephrase below.
"Intent" in legal theory is what the legislators actually wanted to do. So, if they passed a bill to fund a hospital then maybe they wanted to make the community healthier. But, maybe they just wanted to pander to voters or secure campaign contributions from hospital lobbyists, or create jobs for their cronies as hospital administrators, etc. Legal interpreters have moved away from intent over the years because it's often unknowable (given that it requires an inquiry into mental state) and also quite messy.
"Purpose" in legal theory is why a hypothetical, reasonable and public-minded legislator would have passed a given law. It's not a factual inquiry into underlying motives. So, if the legislature funded a hospital then you ask why a "good" legislator would have done that and that leads you to an answer like "to make the community healthier" and away from all the messy bits of intent.
A less pithy way to restate the saying then is "What a system does is a better indication of intent (what "they" wanted) than purpose (why a reasonable, public-minded individual would have done this) is"
> A less pithy way to restate the saying then is "What a system does is a better indication of intent (what "they" wanted) than purpose (why a reasonable, public-minded individual would have done this) is"
Well said. I really like this clarification, because it gets more to the point someone is trying to make when they invoke the phrase. Because sometimes there really *are* malicious (or at least zero-sum) goals involved, and those goals are pursued under the guise/fig leaf justification of the stated nice goal (that never actually gets done).
The phrase implies that the ones who set up a system *actively wanted* the bad outcome that the system ends up doing. Sometimes this is a baseless accusation, and the bad outcome is happening for intractable unavoidable reasons - and sometimes it's completely accurate.
Is this a development in the last 20 years, and if so is it limited to academic theorists? When I went to law school legislative intent was a heavily discussed topic of statutory interpretation, and I never heard "purpose" in the way you're using it here. I was generally disdainful of probing legislative intent, because as you note it is messy, it's a polite fiction to impute such intent in most cases, and a court has limited means to discern it. So over the intervening years both SCOTUS and my own state courts have moved gradually away from it in favor of textualism. Now textualism may include a holistic reading of the text and looking at how the parts work together as a system, indeed Scalia himself would say it ought to. But that's as far as it goes, the statute or statutory scheme isn't seen as a system that has a purpose in that fashion. If that view of analysis is popular anywhere, I haven't seen it in my state court's opinions and I surely wouldn't include it in a brief. It seems like an attempt to re-habilitate legislative intent in a way that appeals to center-left wonks and work around any precedents concerning the weight to assign legislative intent.
Courts routinely analyze statutes as having specific purposes; that's a necessary part of determining whether they serve a "compelling state interest" or any other level of state interest.
Strict scrutiny and the like are not part of a statutory interpretation method. He was proposing this in the context of looking at legislative intent, versus a hypothetical “reasonable legislator”, the theory he’s talking about is for resolving ambiguity in statutory construction.
It's been around for a long time. It's Justice Breyer's favorite method (though he's always been open to multiple methods) and the definition I'm giving above is basically just a paraphrase of what he says in his recent book on this, where he also argues that this is a method dating back all the way to the founding (it's outside my own expertise to comment on how true that is). Here's Breyer:
"When faced with interpreting a phrase, judges will therefore ask themselves what a hypothetical but reasonable legislator would have thought about the matter ... At the time of the founding of the Republic, many judges referred to this way to determine the scope of an ambiguous statutory phrase as an "idealized legislative reading":
Why is this fiction helpful? For one thing, using it increases the likelihood that the statute will work better in light of Congress’s basic purposes. If those purposes include efforts, for example, to provide medical care for those who are ill or education for those who are disabled, the fiction will at least sometimes help the statute’s beneficiaries obtain the benefits Congress may well have intended. One statute, for example, allows a parent with a disabled child the right to obtain a court order that will give the child a better public education. The statute gives that parent the right to recover court-related “costs.” Do those costs include the costs of hiring an educational expert who testifies in favor of the child? As I shall discuss, an “idealized” legislative reading will help the statute’s beneficiaries receive benefits that Congress likely intended. “The legislator voting for the bill that allowed the parents of a disabled child to recover “costs,” for example, can argue to those who thought that the word should cover the costs of experts that the legislator agreed and intended that but the courts did not properly interpret the word “costs.” Insofar as judges interpreting uncertainties use the “reasonable legislator” fiction, the statute is more likely to achieve the basic purposes the members of Congress intended. It is more likely that those judges will interpret the word “costs” to include expert fees, thereby helping parents who win their legal cases recover the costs of bringing the cases (including the experts’ fees). The members can then take credit with the voters for what they have done; or, if the statute has not worked well, the voters will know whom to blame. The members of Congress cannot shift the blame for the statute’s failure to mechanical interpretations that judges have given to the written words.
Of course, those opposed to these methods of interpretation argue that the use of this fiction allows judges greater ability to replace their own view of what constitutes a desirable statute for the statute that Congress actually enacted, i.e., the judges just believe it is “better” to allow the parents to recover the experts’ costs.4But is that so? The judge normally uses the fiction when the language of the statute, together with other commonly used tools of interpretation, yields no definite result. Thus, the judge’s choice is between ignoring the fiction and thereby achieving (in respect to the will of Congress) a random result, or using the fiction and thereby achieving (in respect to the will of Congress) a reasonable result more consistent with Congress’s basic purposes. It is not surprising that many judges have used the fiction for decades, perhaps centuries
Critics also maintain that what a “reasonable” or “idealized” member of Congress would wish to achieve with a particular bill or statutory phrase is often too difficult for judges to discern. That observation may more often prove true of Supreme Court cases where, typically, lower court judges have reached different conclusions as to the application of the same statutory phrase. But where that is so, the judge need not use the fiction. That is not a reason to forgo its use in the many cases where a “reasonable” interpretation is easy, not difficult, to determine. When my wife says, “There isn’t any butter,” I have no trouble understanding she means “in the refrigerator,” not “in the city.”
Finally, some critics agree with a key premise of the “reasonable legislator” fiction—namely, that statutory enactments can reflect the differing intentions of multiple legislators and are often deliberately vague or ambiguous as a result of those differing intentions. Yet these critics maintain that the best way to resolve questions of vagueness or ambiguity is to ask how a hypothetical ordinary reader would interpret a statute rather than how a hypothetical legislator intended the statute to be interpreted. They therefore turn to tools like dictionaries or canons of interpretation (general rules for interpreting statutory language) to approximate the understandings of ordinary readers. But ordinary readers don’t always adopt interpretations that align with dictionary definitions “n fact, empirical evidence suggests that ordinary readers often interpret statutory meaning in light of statutory purpose. Three legal scholars, Kevin Tobia, Brian Slocum, and Victoria Nourse “surveyed a random sample of ordinary people, asking them to interpret a hypothetical statute prohibiting vehicles in the park. They found that, in interpreting the words of the hypothetical statute, people often rejected literal dictionary definitions in favor of readings that comported with the statute’s context and likely purpose. Asking about the purposes of a “reasonable legislator” can therefore be a useful tool in determining how a reasonable reader would understand a particular statute. Not to mention the various other benefits that come with the “reasonable legislator” tool, including its usefulness in helping statutes achieve their purposes and in helping voters hold Congress accountable.”
[End of Breyer Quote]
To your point about what'd you include in a brief or an opinion, I can't speak to your state specifically, but I think "purpose" argument often crop up, just not in a self-conscious way. That is, it's not so common to write explicitly about the hypothetical reasonable legislator but arguments about what a statute is apparently trying to do are pretty common.
Textualists are often smuggling some purpose into their professed textualism -- use of the absurdity canon/doctrine being the most obvious case.
I think you might be underestimating how much average people are willing to accept systems that are clearly dysfunctional based on the idea that the person who built them had "good intentions".
Just look at Trump! The whole tariffs fiasco is tolerated not only because people have a literal messianic faith in Trump, but also because they justify it by saying that even if the tariffs crash worldwide commerce and impoverish everyone, "his heart is in the right place".
That probably won’t survive a recession, still I can see why people in the American rust belt prefer his actions to elites exporting the manufacturing base of the country, calling the victims of that action deplorable, and demanding continuous struggle sessions until morale improves.
Consider the Establishment's endorsement of the Black Lives Matter worldview upon George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020. That led to a huge increase in black on black homicides by May 31, 2020 (e.g., Chicago's all time record most murderous day was Sunday May 31, 2020), and a large increase in black traffic fatalities by the first couple of weeks of June 2020 as cops retreated to the donut shop and blacks ran amok.
Did the liberal elite really want more blacks to die in the name of Black Lives Matter?
Probably not. Instead, they massively screwed up due to their being ignorant, stupid, and hate-filled.
If the urban elite had wanted to get more blacks killed in shootings and car crashes, they might have taken credit for it, but instead they have assiduously denied the obvious explanation and blamed covid instead.
Yeah, sometimes there are just deleterious side-effects to well-intended policies, but if you dismiss "the purpose of a system is what it does" then you (A) wind up having to take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do and (B) wind up blind to mutualistic synergies between parasitic organisations even if 'well intended'.
e.g, does anyone think the main purpose of California's homeless-assistance bureaucracy is *not* to exacerbate homelessness?
"but if you dismiss "the purpose of a system is what it does" then you (A) wind up having to take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do"
Or you can assume that powerful people are often idiots whose brains are hamstrung by racist ideas. For example, all historical evidence suggests that blacks need strong policing, but that idea was vastly out of fashion in 2020, which led to tens of thousands of additional blacks dying by murder and car crash over the next few years.
What fraction of The Establishment who endorsed BLM in 2020 wanted to vastly increase the homicide and motor vehicle accident death rate among young black men?
Doesn't Occam's Razor suggest they were, instead, true believers who were too stupid, ignorant, and hate-filled to understand how the world worked?
Steve, for the third time, I am not disagreeing with your specific example of the BLM-homicide correlation, but this is not the example I brought up or the only problem to consider.
I'm honestly baffled as to why, when granted a general claim which is so easy to dispute (people don't make grand-scale choices whose side effects are often difficult to predict without accounting for those side effects and pricing them in,) you jump to countering with a negation that's *specific* to bigotry.
People are often just not great at predicting and pricing in all the effects of their decisions. There are all sorts of biases which can contribute to this.
I know this is your famous hobby horse subject, but this is a frankly weird and disconcerting level of subject myopia.
“ For example, all historical evidence suggests that blacks need strong policing, but that idea was vastly out of fashion in 2020, which led to tens of thousands of additional blacks dying by murder and car crash over the next few years.”
Not sure this is even true. Something happened from the 1960s.
At some point, if you try the same thing over and over and keep expecting different results, I have to question your good intentions. People who actually want to fix a problem will vary their approach until they see improvement.
They may not be able to vary their approach due to political or social considerations. Just look at the ongoing arguments about involuntary commitment despite having decades of failure of community mental health care in the bluest of blue areas to ponder.
> They may not be able to vary their approach due to political or social considerations
How is this distinguishable from "I am a coward unwilling to push back against my peers' groupthink and unwilling to cross the political aisle to join a party with different policies"? At minimum, they could stop working for the democrats and exacerbating the issue they're pretending to fix.
Here we are in 2025, and yet practically nobody is aware yet after almost half of a decade that the Floyd Effect, like the previous Ferguson Effect, increased both the black-on-black homicide rate and the black traffic fatality rate. Was this really the incredibly sinister intention of the Black Lives Matter movement, or was it just an idiotic screw-up?
Neither. Black Lives Matter was founded by three Marxists who used it push their revolutionary dogma and to enrich themselves. The effects on black people were irrelevant.
Ok we get it, more black lives were lost because of riots/BLM/whatever happenned than lives lost due to bad policing. Checkmate, BLM.
It's the at least the third comment I read from you and it is basically the same as the previous ones. How many times are you going to ramble about your Floyd effect ? Do you have an agenda ?
It seems so since you stated your point in one of your comments : "blacks need strong policing" (and we can only assume that the corollary is police brutality towards black people is not a big deal since it's less lives lost)
Let me ask you then, didn't America made too much of a big deal about 9/11 ? After all way more people die in car accidents each year, correct ?
Can you accept that when people say that "Black Lives Matter", it doesn't mean "All black lives must be protected at all costs" but "Too many black people are dying in the hands of police and it doesn't need be this way" ?
The point of that example is that many people believe the purpose of government attempts to solve homelessness is (at least in part) to provide jobs (some would say sinecures) for college educated social workers. They also want to help the homeless, but the purpose is the funneling of money to the ingroup.
The reason for the amount of homelessness in California is a moderate climate and relatively generous support...and because the Supreme Court decided that cities couldn't limit their "general assistance" to residents.
I think that last is a crucial piece. Prior to that decision there wasn't a homeless problem. After it (within the year) there was an increased problem.
>does anyone think the main purpose of California's homeless-assistance bureaucracy is *not* to exacerbate homelessness?
No, it's actually orthogonal to the question of the number of homeless; it's to obtain funding and resources for the various agencies/organizations involved, do ideologically-aligned things, and feel good and virtuous about themselves.
It's more a case of "the purpose of a system isn't always what people officialy say it is", which might be unsurprising but nevertheless true. TPOASIWID is intended to puncture a century's worth of accumulating virtue-signalling cruft in western governments.
> Also: I don’t think the main purpose of California’s homeless-assistance bureaucracy is to exacerbate homelessness
That is effectively what it does, and anyone working within the system who doesn't recognise this is either an idiot or lying. That is what TPOASIWID exists to underline.
It depends on what your model is of who is actually making the decision to fund California's homeless-assistance bureaucracy. The answer to that question changes based on whether you consider said decider "the state legislature and governor", "the state legislature and governor plus various movers and shakers including Democratic Party officials", "the median Democratic Party primary voter", "the median voter", or "the voters collectively".
I think they're all responsible to varying degrees, but in particular I would blame anyone actually working for the bureaucracy. And Newsom, of course.
It seems to me like having to "take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do" is only a problem if you also think you have to judge the resulting outcomes on intent rather than the outcome. Like if someone comes to me a starts pouring bleach all over my yard because they're "trying to help the grass grow", I can take them 100% at their word and still demand that they stop because regardless of their intentions they are not actually helping the grass grow. And the "purpose" of their actions is not necessarily to kill the grass even if that's what happens.
How much I believe them might play a factor in how much retribution/justice I seek for the damages they caused, but it has no bearing on the evaluation of "did the thing they do actually accomplish the stated goal".
> It seems to me like having to "take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do" is only a problem if you also think you have to judge the resulting outcomes on intent rather than the outcome
I think the purpose of TPOASIWID is precisely to encourage judgement based on outcome rather than intent- we're going to blame you for bad outcomes regardless of alleged good intentions.
And again, I can think of policy positions taken by the left that can only really be explained by some combination of cowardice and greed, I'm not even willing to give the benefit of the doubt as to intention.
It might encourage judgement based on the outcome, but IMO it does so by assigning intent to the outcome rather than separating intent from the outcome. It's "bumper sticker politics" of the sort that's design to make "us" feel noble and true and smart and "them" dumb and evil and ignorant. It's a phrase that gets us into arguments over what we intend and "who is more noble than whom" and distracts from the question of "is the system doing what we want?"
It says that you can't have intended good things with a system and reasonably have not intended the consequences or felt that maybe some of those consequences would be smaller than they are. TPOASIWID is pretty explicit that the outcome is what was intended. It's an expression that immediately puts the implementors of a given system on the defensive because it implicitly attacks them.
If I have legitimate concerns about how much recycling actually just winds up sending products to the landfill with more steps, I'm not going to get very far talking to recycling proponents by asserting that the purpose of the recycling programs they have advocated for is to send otherwise recyclable materials to the landfill via a longer more wasteful route. Whether that's actually what happens or not, they're going to immediately be on the defensive because I'm accusing them of lying about their goals.
Or in other words, if I started saying that "The purpose of saying 'TPOASIWID' is to distract from the real issues at hand and allow bad systems to perpetuate while we have side debates that don't address the issue", you're unlikely to
I don't think people take kindly to "you're not malevolent, just incompetent to a degree that is functionally indistinguishable from malevolence", so for political purposes I kinda think this is splitting hairs.
>Did the liberal elite really want more blacks to die in the name of Black Lives Matter?
Maybe not actively, but the fact they tolerated it and did not react with immediate horror indicates that there was something more important to them than the absolute number of black deaths. This isn't quite "TPOASIWID" but it's close.
Isn't there something -in between- 1) tolerating/approving of the spontaneous summary unjudicial murder of random miscreants by knee of cop, and 2) entire withdrawal of policing of black communities? It's almost like - no, it exactly IS - that the police engaged in 2) to try to fool the world into accepting that 1) was the only alternative.
No other profession gets away with just not doing their job because they felt people were rude to them. And then people with a straight face blame the people criticizing the cops for them not doing their job.
Even that (much weaker) claim seems literally wrong to me, and provides greater faith in the competency of individuals and systems. I don't think you seriously believe that "the system that produced cobra bounties *must* have taken cobra farms seriously as a risk but decided after careful consideration the net benefits of having bounties on cobras was higher than the expected harm of having cobra farms specifically created to farm those bounties." To me it seems plausible, even probable, that they didn't seriously consider the ramifications of cobra farms at all.
A general symptom of conspiracy theorizing is to assume that your opponents are incredibly intelligent and thus whatever they do is the result of brilliant foresight rather than ineptitude.
In contrast, Gregory Cochran tends to assume that "There is no Inner Party." There's no 200 IQ O'Brien or Mustapha Mond who has it all figured out how the world works.
Perhaps mistake theory should more properly be called "stupidity theory". Bad things happen, because people are stupid, duh.
And conflict/conspiracy theory should more properly be called "competence theory". People are smart and good at coordination... so when something bad happens, it obviously was a part of the plan.
Howabout Coordination-is-hard (Prisoners dilemmas suck, and apply even to smart people) theory. Bad things happen because a whole bunch of pretty smart people have failed to coordinate.
Seems to me that in real life often people can talk to each other, so if they find themselves in a Prisoners Dilemma situation, they can discuss possible solutions. At that moment the discussion will probably fail because most of them will misunderstand the nature of the situation (i.e. stupidity), or some of them will undermine the debate on purpose.
This has a name, it's Hanlon's Razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" but humans in general don't like accepting things sometimes happen for no good reason.
The steelman of the phrase, which *might* be what Stafford Beer had in mind when he coined the phrase, is that in large complex organisations it's very hard for individual workers to see a link between what they do and the stated purpose of the organisation - people just get on and do what they're told, and orient themselves more towards "doing what they're already doing, just more effectively" than towards "fulfilling the stated purpose of the organisation".
"High school students are easily engaged to elect class presidents, even though they have little idea what if any policies a class president might influence. Instead such elections are usually described as “popularity contests.” That is, theses elections are about which school social factions are to have higher social status. If a jock wins, jocks have higher status. If your girlfriend’s brother wins, you have higher status, etc. "
Second paragraph and already he's lost me. Granted, it's been a while since I, personally was in high school. But the idea that high school students take student elections seriously, and that the results have any sort of broad influence on social status just seems bizarre to me. My prior is "student elections are mostly ignored by most of the student body, and the only people who have strong feelings about the results are those with a strong pre-existing interest in politics or politics-adjacent careers." Either Hanson is very out of touch or I am.
I don't think the quote says that feelings are "strong", instead just that students do elect class presidents and they do so on the basis of popularity rather than policies.
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
One of the Twitter posts above gets close to it by including the follow-up sentence, "There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it consistently fails to do." A purpose is formulated for a system, that system acts on how it understands that purpose, there will be discrepancies and eventually the system converges on a compromise purpose, which can be close to or quite far from the initial formulation. It's a tool for analyzing complex systems and feedback, and yes, it's being misused on Twitter.
Anyway, read Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machines on systems, Stafford Beer, and how a subsystem of the Schipol Airport eventually centered on the system purpose of throwing squirrels into an industrial shredder. It's a very good book.
This makes much more sense. Restated as something like:
'If someone is observing a system that has existed in some context for a non-trivial time (ruling out things which have not been subject to some feedback loops), and they don't have some other credible & explicit intention for it communicated to them (ruling out things like a toy car that was left in the woods), then they will be informed of its purpose by what that system consistently does.'
What is word for when a system gets repurposed for "what it does" but leaves the old purpose on the tin.
To take an example, Biden continued Trump's policy of using title 42 health authority for Covid to block people from Mexico.
Now, while this was a covid era measure, obviously the new purpose was to use it to reduce immigration.
Or to take environmental review,.While the purpose was to prevent developers from building a massively polluting X in the 1980's, the new purpose is to block almost all building in places like San Francisco.
I think this is a big blind spot in the post. Because there are a lot of systems that were built for one purpose, over time get used primarily for something else, but still defended/justified using the original purpose.
I agree with this statement. Furthermore, if the revised purpose a system acts on is unpopular, it will use its original purpose as a shield to hide its true intentions. Since many people outside the system will be fooled by people within the system lying, reform is difficult.
One of these examples appears to be alluding to a specific controversial British Justice bill. I've no idea what that might be. Can someone enlighten me?
That's not a bill. It's sentencing guidance from an independent body. There was actually a huge protest movement in 2022 for a policing bill (search "kill the bill" protests) but that bill passed.
Sure but still not a bill. Scott had the narrative completely wrong. It was a spat between the executive and judiciary, and not an example of the government wanting to do something but changing their mind after protests.
I did briefly wonder whether that was what was being mentioned, as it was the only recent justice controversy on my mind.
I have no interest in pursuing such a debate online, but I do have a factual/technical correction to make: the controversial thing here was never a bill. Rather, it was a proposed guideline from the Sentencing Council (an unelected judicial body) which all parties opposed from the moment news focused on it, and the only bill ever proposed was the one that killed it.
's just the usual pareidolia/animism/witch did it stuff. someone gets police brutalitied -> they'll figure the purpose of cops is brutality.
it's also very easy to reframe into less-nonsensical forms. purpose of military isn't to *win wars*, it's to commit mass murder-suicide so that the survivors kill rape loot and occupy everything fightable fuckable transportable and fixed in place.
Come on, obviously "The Purpose of a System is What it Does" is meant to draw your attention to the incentives in cases where something different is happening than is supposed to be happening.
My government purposefully raised housing prices for the benefit of people who own assets. They talk about "trying" to make things more affordable, but somehow they only succeeded in raising the cost by 500% in nominal terms. What a curious result.
You could say "Actions Speak Louder Than Words," but that is more suited to individuals, as opposed to cases where people are unwittingly part of a system that is barrelling toward a different end than they think it is. Even if one person isn't the King of the System, enough influential people share the incentives that ultimately make it do what it does.
Why are we sitting here talking about all the cases where it doesn't apply. If someone uses it when it doesn't apply, reprimand them.
"Easy Come, Easy Go... but, what do you mean, I've had lots of things come easily that didn't go easily."
Yeah, "POSIWID" is kinda edgelord in this context. If you want to say "The current ruling class is running organizations that are deceptive and exploitative, and the only viable response is open violent revolt" then you should probably say that. I'm more sympathetic to that point of view than the generalization that "POSIWID" represents. "POSIWID" is false, and if it is true in some context, it is important to clarify what context that is.
If you are just trying to use it as a dog-whistle, please choose a different dog whistle that won't piss off systems theorists and epistemologists. I hear Mario's brother from the Ninetendo IP is strangely popular right now.
Phrases and idioms often are not true literally. They are a short handle to something those who are in the know can understand. For example, when someone says it's raining cats and dogs, they mean that it's raining heavily. They are not being a vague-posting edgelord even if you personally didn't know that phrase and hence could not correctly decode the message.
Everything that takes status from the oh so Ernest empathy signalers will read as "annoying edgelord exaggeration" to you.
You don't object to rhetorical generalization or the formalization of a catchy rule which might not always hold, everyone does that. Such grammatical and rhetorical structures go back to the ancient Greeks.
You object to the ideological, identity, age, and social category of "edgelords" ie. RW Men outside State and State attached organs, attacking the status and nobility of state and state attached organs.
Your annoyance is not a reason to stop using useful linguistic shorthands and evocative phrases to communicate complex ideas.
Because your annoyance isn't that a rhetorical style is non-descriptive or ineffective, but because it is descriptive and effectively employed by your ideological enemies.
"RW Men outside State and State attached organs, attacking the status and nobility of state and state attached organs." -- I don't know what an RW is, but attacking the status and nobility of state and state attached organs is one reason I expect to always love anarchists.
But I do object to rhetorical generalizations. I study computer science and wish to study memetic systems and their influence on society. I care about language and it's use, both out of an affection for language as an art, and because language shapes narrative and behaviour, which in turn shapes the world.
I do not think it is ok for our society to continue the way it has. I also do not think all institutions of the state are harmful and should be destroyed. The truth, unfortunately, is more complicated. That does not mean the truth is some middle ground or compromise. It means that I think both you and the people you see as your enemies, and certainly myself, are all stupid, and ill equipped to predict and control reality. But we still must all do our best.
In the follow up post I tried to find acronyms that could work in place of "POSIWID" without it's problems.
- *PELCSH*: "Persistent Effects are Likely Caused by Systems in Homeostasis" -- This is for situations where you want to analyze a system.
- *PAINO*: "Purposes Are Interventions Not Outcomes" -- This is for avoiding "no true scotsman" in arguments.
- *SASTAFAO*: "Systems Accomplish Some Things And Fail At Others" -- This is for catharsis when things are less good than you want them to be.
It seems like you are trying to use "POSIWID" to mean, "I'm very angry at the current powers organizing our society and wish to see them destroyed". I agree with the statement "I'm very angry at the current powers organizing our society and wish to see society improved by creating some organizations, changing some organizations, and disbanding some organizations", which I suspect will not sound extreme enough for you. I think all of my replacement acronyms will sound to you like a call for inaction. I do not believe they should. Rather, this is the wrong thing to be saying. The slogan should not be "the purpose of a system is what it does", but rather, "Complex organizations are orchestrated by an competent ruling class and are successfully extorting value from the rest of society", or "It is too late for inaction".
“My government purposefully raised housing prices for the benefit of people who own assets. They talk about "trying" to make things more affordable, but somehow they only succeeded in raising the cost by 500% in nominal terms. What a curious result.l
I think you’re way too cynical about that. Many people and politicians are math inept and don’t believe in economics. See the Left’s own love of protectionism and tariffs and price controls despite ample evidence to the contrary. I think it’s highly possible the lack of housing supply is an unfortunate side effect of misplaced incentives - regulation, heritage preservation, environmental review etc….
EDIT: See also the groundswell of anti-gentrification action 5-10 years ago which was broadly popular with both poor and wealthy leftist urban enclaves. Not economically literate in the least.
I am Canadian and I suspect you are American. I would not say this about the American government. But of Canada's, I am quite confident in this opinion.
It is also just an illustration, so if you still disagree with me and wish to press the point, perhaps we could talk about it somewhere else rather than make a mess in the Astral Codex comments. You could click through to my profile and comment on my main essay about the subject.
I think you can still stretch it to apply when innumeracy and economic ignorance seem like they can be to blame.
People's numeracy and willingness to defer to experts seem to totally flip sometimes depending on how invested they are in getting actual results vs looking virtuous among their tribe. It's like when you ask people to put their money where their mouth is and make a bet, suddenly they gain 15 IQ points.
You see people committing absolutely gratuitous logical errors when they prefer to defer to their ideology instead of actually solving a problem when it comes to politics, and then they'll go and optimise their factorio factories or calculate exactly how many lands they should have in their magic deck and you'll be like "ok, you are smart enough to not be dumb about all that other stuff, you just weren't trying because (unbeknownst to you, even) solving the actual problem wasn't your priority".
people don't believe in economics because actually existing economics, as practiced in i.e. university economics departments, is an ideological project to transfer money to the upper class
Could you be specific? (This should also be said to the GP.)
I've encountered several theories of economics, and some of them definitely were designed to transfer money from the less powerful to the more powerful. Others didn't appear to have that as an intentional effect, but looked like they might to it anyway. Only a few seemed as if their goal was to transfer money from the powerful to the less powerful (And I often thought those could be gamed.)
So which specific theory of economics do you refer to that wouldn't have that effect, at least not intentionally.
I think you're right—but at the same time, it doesn't invalidate the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does.
Using your example, perhaps politicians genuinely wanted to make housing more affordable at first. But when their efforts failed, reversing course became politically impossible because the unintended consequences benefited powerful interest groups that would destroy them if they dared to do so.
And so, "the purpose of a system is what it does", even if no one consciously designed it that way.
Go to any local zoning or building approval meeting. There will be someone there demanding a project be disallowed on the grounds that it will lower property values because it will increase supply.
I've heard that housing is "unprofitable" for local governments: on average, residents pay less in property taxes than it costs the local government to provide them with services, with one of the most expensive being public education for children. Local governments make up for the shortfall with the revenue from commercial and industrial development.
The effect of this on the willingness of local governments (and the people who vote for those governments) to add more residents by allowing the construction of new housing, without any offsetting increase in revenue from other "ratables", is left as an exercise for the reader.
Well the inefficiency of government services is also something that would need o be delved into. It’s not like American return on public school investment dollars is particularly good, for example.
I don’t think this sentiment was ever accepted as the actual reason for constraining supply. Remember also those anti gentrification forces that wanted to preserve neighborhoods for their original inhabitants because they were afraid prices would go up. Two diametrically opposed ideas; I think people just don’t like it when their built environment changes.
It will never be stated as the reason, because it's just greed. That doesn't mean it isn't the reason. (And you see anti-gentrification efforts in communities with a high degree of renters, typically)
> See the Left’s own love of protectionism and tariffs and price controls despite ample evidence to the contrary
Well now that you’ve finally exited that cave you were living in for a few decades it’s worth looking up what ideological faction in the US is pro protectionism and pro tariffs.
Yes, it's about noticing causal disentanglement between speech and action. If Sam Altman wants to continue rapidly accelerating AI, each time a negative consequence of this goes public, he'll say "whoops, our bad guys, sorry, won't happen again", and will continue on about the same path, or perhaps budge the needle slightly without seriously compromising his real goals. POSIWID's wisdom is this, "If he's said something like that repeatedly, and nothing seems to be changing on a mechanistic level, consider that there's a different incentive being prioritised."
I can definitely see TPoaSiWiD as an analytical framing that is useful in certain contexts but is not literally true. I'm seen some of the same lines of argument that Scott seems to be reacting to, and I'm inclined to think that those arguments represent an abuse of the concept to situations where it's more misleading than revealing.
I have similar feelings about the concept of "Death of the Author" from literary criticism, where the completed text of the work is analyzed in isolation and the author's intent (either explicitly stated outside the work itself or inferred from the context of the author's life, views, and other works) is no more germane to the analysis than any particular reader's headcanon. It can definitely be useful to analyze a text seperately from its context, as the essay in which Roland Barthes coined the phrase (written in 1967) was a reaction against then-fashionable schools of criticism that (he argued) neglected texts and focused too much on trying to infer authors' intentions. It can also be valid to have your own headcanons and to enjoy a work based on an understanding that is independent of or contrary to what the author had in mind. C.f. Tolkien's bit about the distinction between allegory and applicability.
But in online discussions, you'll occasionally encounter people who have latched on to "Death of the Author" as an absolute and universal principle and will try to use it to shut down anyone who's trying to talk about authorial intent and the context in which the work was written.
A cancer hospital's purpose is to cure as many patients as possible subject to technological and financial (and so on) constraints. You wouldn't use the saying for one that had a survival rate in line with what you would expect given the constraints it was operating under.
But you might use it for a "cancer hospital" that routinely gave patients saline solution instead of chemo, or one that made most of its money selling opioid prescriptions to people who weren't sick.
I've spent a fair amount of time reading about abuses in the justice system, and I think there are a good many people who like the idea of suspects and prisoners being treated badly.
While it's extreme, for the reasons you say, to claim that the purpose of a system is what it does, it's fair to say that what is a bad side effect to some people is at least a desired effect to others.
I think POSIWID is best applied to bureaucracies or large structures where the reason bad outcomes occur is not because of difficult battles with reality (like government or hospitals or the Ukrainian military), but because of the way incentives are set up in the system.
If someone said, “the purpose of the Civil Service is to drive through new, innovative ways of delivering rapid change!”, that would clearly be absurd. That may be their goal, or how they see themselves; but the purpose of the system is not defined by either of those things. If it was, they wouldn’t incentivise caution and slowness. Whether that’s good or not, the purpose of the Civil Service is best approximated by what it does!
Could we say that the goal of the system is what the people in charge of the system are trying to do but the purpose of the system is a sort-of weighted-average of what every actor/subsystem within the system is trying to do?
So for example British Leyland [car manufacturer that went bankrupt owing to a combination of trade union overreach and the practice of making really cool interesting cars (eg. the Mini Cooper) that cost more to manufacture than they could be sold for] had the (top-down directed) *goal* of manufacturing and selling cars, but the (bottom-up aggregated) *purpose* of all its subsystems was to A) make cars in exchange for as much salary as possible (irrespective of whether this helps fulfil the goal) and B) to design as cool/interesting cars as possible (irrespective of how much they could be sold for)?
This seems to give a clear distinction between goal, purpose, and actions/outcomes (these last being, obvs., to die gloriously before the combined fusillade of Ford, Volkswagen, et. al.)
"Goal" is the mission statement, "purpose" is the sum total of value derived from continued operation. These overlap at least to some degree, but pretty much never entirely. Of course, the fact of this discrepancy existing is often used in bad faith, so the main thrust of your criticism is fair, but these tactics are effective precisely because those baileys do have corresponding mottes.
"Goals" exist in the minds of individuals. People who set up an institution did so because they hoped it would have some kind of effect in the world. Those hopes constitute the (initial) goal of the system. Moreover, the people who are presently in the institution, including the leaders, have goals of their own. They may be selfish goals about how they can further their own ends through the institution, or idealistic goals about what the institution ought to accomplish (like driving through new, innovative ways of delivering rapid change).
The "purpose" of an institution is more about its actual pattern of behaviour. One way to think about this is, it's the implicit justification for the continued existence of the institution. This may or may not correspond to the reason it was initially set up, or to what its leaders try to achieve. It's about the way it fits into the rest of the world and the function it fulfils. That's why we can analyse it in terms of its institutional structure: what are the incentives for how individuals behave? What behaviours are rewarded? What actions are penalised? If a bureaucracy doesn’t incentivise speed or experimentation, then regardless of mission statements, its actual purpose is better understood in terms of producing stability and durability than in terms of agile reform.
So in the case of the Ukrainian military: I assume that the incentives and institutional structure are set up to maximise their effectiveness in war. So the stalemate is a consequence of hard constraints, and the presence of a powerful adversary. But it's possible for a military to actually be set up in a bad way that doesn't achieve this end; its purpose might practically be to confer status on certain elites for instance.
The argument is kind of, "the purpose of a system is what it is"; and then in some cases, there's an extremely strong correlation between what it is (incentives, institutional structure, constraints) and what it does (the outcomes attained as a result of the actions of individuals within it). That's where POSIWID is a useful pushback against the notion that its purpose is its goal, i.e., can be found in the "intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it" (Wikipedia).
Your examples are cases in which that correlation is less weak, because even an optimally designed system will struggle to achieve the outcome it wants. In those cases, yes, people who say "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients" are simply wrong. Such people are often being too conspiratorial and/or misunderstanding the reality of how difficult curing cancer is.
I'm just noting that not all cases are like this! Sometimes systems produce bad outcomes not because the task is hard, but because the system is "designed" (probably not consciously) to produce them. And sometimes this is important because a better designed system really could produce better outcomes (cf., for instance, Yudkowsky's discussion of healthcare in Inadequate Equilibria).
I think the goal is like the purpose that the founder or the leader of the organization has. It's usually stated explicitly in writing somewhere in a mission statement.
The purpose is the vector sum of the incentives of all the people who spend labor or resources maintaining the organization. Sometimes people invest in the organization because of a secondary goal, they don't care about the original goal that much. Then after some time passes, if the people who had the original goal leave and enough people with the secondary goal enter, the purpose of the organization becomes different from the stated goal. At least until someone gets around to changing the written mission statement.
For example a school can begin as an institution that educates kids and indoctrinates them to be more religious or patriotic. Then lots of parents send their kids to school because it's convenient to them, it's free daycare. They don't oppose the actual education but it's not their primary purpose. After a few generations, the daycare becomes priority one, the true purpose of the system. Education becomes secondary.
“ the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.”
That is the dictionary definition of “purpose.“ I have a hard time driving a wedge between purpose and intent or even goal. The net result of something is entirely different. The true purpose or intent behind an action may be difficult to discern. It may be intentionally hidden. It may be poorly conceived. It may have unintended consequences. I don’t think it’s terribly helpful to say that the result of a system is in fact it’s purpose. It may well be, but that is a case by case determination.
It is about as informative as saying “it is what it is.“
“the law of unintended consequences“ or “the road to hell is paved with good intentions“ or “the tree shall be known by its fruit.” are all better. Not to mention “the Lord moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.“
It can't be taken to it's full extent in every (or maybe any) cases, and does risk people simply using it to back up their hot take. But it still seems valuable to me.
Perhaps these versions: "If a system is consistently reaching certain outcomes, and any attempts to improve it are primarily blocked, maybe the system is working as intended." (Intended probably isn't the right word here as there's not usually just one actor "intending" something, but rather a mix of dynamics).
For example, the US policing and criminal justice system and prisons seem to continually over imprisons people in general, and especially people of colour. These systems seem not to be changed, while they ostensibly truly could be. So to me this seems that the system may be working "to purpose" for the actors who want it to work that way.
Same for disability benefits I'm Britain. I would say it exists to keep people alive on an as minimal basis as possible, not to support them to thrive or live a truly good life. So in this case, I would say the purpose of the system is indeed what it does.
I don't think the US justice system is a good example, because assuming the rate of imprisonment is excessive*, that is an explicit policy choice. California's Three Strikes law, for example, was enacted by voters. Ditto laws which create lengthy consecutive sentences for gang-related gun murders (often 50 yrs to life or more).
You are also mistaken when you say that nothing has changed. Those same voters have more recently enacted various ameliorative criminal justice progisions.
Maybe. Or maybe all the alternatives are bad, and if you leave the current system in place, at least it's not your fault. Or maybe every alternative is bad for a different person, so no matter what you try, someone's going to block it. Or maybe they care more about the political implications than the action itself. Or maybe it can be improved in the long term, but only through costs in the short term that nobody is willing to bear.
Yes, status quo and inertia does a lot of work. No one would probably have enacted the Jones act over the last 20 years, but once it’s in the books taking it away is a political cost people don’t want to pay.
I've been wondering about that. Part of the dialogue around the Jones Act is that it's so ineffective that the industry it supposedly protects doesn't even exist.
So... who's going to impose a political cost on repealing it? Who's in favor of it, and why would politicians listen to them?
It does exist. Some people build ships in the US with US steel and staff them with Americans just to be allowed to ship from the US to the US. And if the Jones Act gets repealed, they'll suddenly have a lot more competition and not be able to recoup their costs.
I don't think you realize how little money is actually required to "keep people alive on as minimal basis as possible". At the same time, you're right not to expect the system to "support them to thrive or live a truly good life".
>the US policing and criminal justice system and prisons seem to continually over imprisons people in general, and especially people of colour
That implies you have in mind some amount of imprisonment that is the correct amount. What amount would be appropriate? And why do you believe that POC are being over imprisoned?
I think it's not really literally true, but nonetheless there seems to be some insight to it.
I think I interpret it as something like: if you tolerate the bad side effects of a system, and it's not obvious that they are hard to solve or that you've even tried, it's kind of meaningless to call them "unintended" - that shouldn't really get you off the hook.
Side effects you cared more about solving would be solved, or we'd be hearing arguments about why they're hard to solve, instead of platitudes about them being unintended.
Basically: declaring something "unintended" isn't an argument, it's not a get out of jail free card. It's not possible, without making further arguments, to distinguish that point from simply something you don't care to solve, which I think it's pretty fair to describe as "intended".
I was watching a documentary recently about elections in Australia, and it spoke of voters being sceptical about the government not being able to solve various problems. During the pandemic, the government demonstrated enormous state capacity. And yet they say they don't have the power to fix a bunch relatively minor things that seem easier? The conclusion the interviewed voters drew was that the government didn't really care to solve these issues, that they are not a priority.
That's the kind of scenario I think of - something genuinely unintended, but not addressed, if it seems like one *could* address it, its ongoing existence eventually should be judged as intent.
My software has plenty of bugs. Are they the purpose of the program? Literally, no. Could I fix them? Absolutely. They're not a priority to fix though compared to other work, so I think it's fair to point out that in some sense they're intended. I fix other bugs all the time, why? Because they're more important. The reason the low priority bugs persist isn't "whoopsie, code is hard!" and I shouldn't be able to terminate conversation by saying so: the real reason is that they're not a priority, which I think it is useful to conflate with some kind of ongoing intent even if the specific bugs were not anticipated.
If a system produces certain results, and we do nothing to change the system, then it is our intent to have a system that continues to produce those results, even if we are not happy with the results. From that standpoint, the purpose of a system is what it does.
However, if we try a new system and it doesn't produce the desired results, I don't think it makes sense to say that the purpose was to produce the results that weren't desired. But if we keep the system as is, then go back to the first point I made.
“ I think I interpret it as something like: if you tolerate the bad side effects of a system, and it's not obvious that they are hard to solve or that you've even tried, it's kind of meaningless to call them "unintended" - that shouldn't really get you off the hook.”
Can we have some examples of easily solved side effects that are allowed to persist? Very few people seem to think the restorative justice measures before and around COVID went well, for example.
I think this and DAL's post about legal intent vs. legal purpose are the best extensions to Scott's post.
Another angle: once I stop replying to someone's texts promptly - there are socially graceful ways to justify this, but the unstated truth is "I value something else more than you in this moment." It's true, but it's usually uncouth to point this out. A lot of social blunders are like this: people obliviously revealing their internal values to people who can read the subtext e.g. absent-mindedly yawning during a conversation with someone.
I think the POSIWID-posters are pointing out the organizational equivalent of this: "they won't say or acknowledge it, but the priorities of the stakeholders in this organization are creating this outcome."
"Cui bono" is its sibling. No one "benefits" from a third of cancer patients dying (maybe insurance companies?), but it's a useful question to start with when you're in a waiting room for 8 hours due to a staff shortage at the hospital.
Lots of people might plausibly benefit from perpetuating a staff shortage. Does whoever's in charge of hiring get to keep collecting a salary while few or no new staff are being hired? Surely that's easier for them than doing research and interviews, and safer than committing to a decision on whether any given candidate is good enough.
There's a lot of conceptual overlap with the Dan Davies essay defending the phrase (linked elsewhere in the thread):
> So, for example, if you have an air conditioning unit that’s emitting black smoke, you can’t say “the purpose of this air conditioning unit is to emit black smoke”, because it’s not an ongoing system that’s going to be allowed to keep doing that.
> One of the big misconceptions that the POSIWID slogan fosters is that it should always be (but rarely is) mentally expanded to “the purpose of a system is what it systematically does, on an ongoing basis, with the permission of the other systems which form its environment”.
> And that last clause about the other systems is really important.
It's a slogan without terribly deep content. I understand it as having a use when you need to distinguish between stated and actual intentions.
E.g. a 4 year college in the US states that its role is to educate the engineers of the future (or whoever). But it relentlessly raises tuition and adds leadership bloat and increases the salaries of top admin. Meanwhile, the quality of instruction is not rising in lockstep with tuition. The purpose of this system is what it does: extract money from students and federal grants to line the pockets of its upper classes.
Or does this fall into the blindingly obvious category?
I think it's generally taken for granted that the purpose of a for-profit organisation is to make a profit.
But attributing additional, sinister purposes to an organisation is a more dubious way of thinking. It makes sense to say, "The organisation is incentivised to do [harmful thing]", but that statement should be clearly distinguished from "The organisation's purpose is to do [harmful thing]".
My example was based on my personal experience, in which the Uni was a non-profit organisation. All of its formally stated aims were related to education and research. I remember going to a town hall meeting where the president got up and said "Just because we're a non-profit doesn't mean we can't make a profit!"
I thought the mask had slipped a little, but everyone else applauded. The same place had 95% of students coming from the top decile of the income distribution, and committee meetings were generally more occupied with financial than educational discussions. My own salary declined in real terms by 15% in the five years I was there, but the admin salaries were up by 70% or so, and tuition up by 20%.
I don't think this was sinister or malicious - but it was axiomatic that tuition had to rise to cover ever-rising costs, and the only way of reducing costs was voluntary or involuntary layoffs.
Thank you for explaining. I understand and agree with your frustration with administrative bloat in universities.
However, it seems difficult to attribute a purpose to an organisation that very few members of that organisation would endorse, even in the privacy of their own thoughts. What proportion of the uni's senior leadership would need to be intentionally seeking to maximise admin bloat for that to become the uni's 'real' purpose? Does it make a difference if they're pursuing this goal as a means to an end or an end in itself?
I realise that in following this train of thought, I'm backing myself into a corner by implicitly asserting that an organisation's real purpose is either whatever its PR team says it is (obviously not true), or whatever its founders originally intended (also obviously not true). But I'm not ready to accept any of the alternative definitions.
Surely, to the extent that the slogan means anything, it means that the stated objectives and the revealed objectives need not coincide?
I think that bloat is not the end goal in itself, rather the people who make hiring decisions are mostly involved in developing policy and reporting requirements rather than teaching, and so value people who can fulfil those tasks. There's also a well established tendency for people to pursue promotion by increasing the number of their underlings.
From my experience, the underlying goal of that particular uni was to ensure its continued existence and well-being, in particular by 'retaining talent in key positions' with generous raises and 'maintaining a solid financial footing' by increasing tuition at the maximal socially permissible rate.
The school does actually educate people, right? Why not say that's the purpose since it's also something the school does while facilitating the transfer of money?
"An example of what I mean, taken from politics: some people think of government as another name for the things we do together, like providing food to the hungry, or ensuring that old people have the health care they need. These people know that some politicians are corrupt, and sometimes the money actually goes to whoever’s best at demanding pork, and the regulations sometimes favor whichever giant corporation has the best lobbyists. But this is viewed as a weird disease of the body politic, something that can be abstracted away as noise in the system.
And then there are other people who think of government as a giant pork-distribution system, where obviously representatives and bureaucrats, incentivized in every way to support the forces that provide them with campaign funding and personal prestige, will take those incentives. Obviously they’ll use the government to crush their enemies. Sometimes this system also involves the hungry getting food and the elderly getting medical care, as an epiphenomenon of its pork-distribution role, but this isn’t particularly important and can be abstracted away as noise."
It seems like you're just doing that. Most people would reasonably say that schools provide education, but there's some incentives that encourage expensive bloat. But you're just looking at the same situation and insisting that education is just an unintended byproduct of a university busily paying it's administrative staff. .
Oh, an organisation can (and almost always does) have multiple purposes. It would be overly reductive to strengthen the slogan to 'the purpose is just one thing that the organisation does'. Maybe its content is that you shouldn't overlook negative outcomes of an organisations activities as collateral damage or necessary evils?
In the case above the University was providing an education, and that was the primary purpose. The number of tenure track instructors fell, the number of adjuncts rose. Student numbers rose, they packed them ever more tightly into old buildings, the tuition rose much more rapidly than inflation. There were prestige buildings unveiled every few years (think innovation labs rather than classrooms). There was no incentive to provide an affordable education, or to control costs; culturally it was distasteful to raise student financial struggles with faculty or staff.
My argument is that this wasn't an accident of the system, or a side-effect: it was the system functioning as intended.
In that case, saying the purpose of the university is to "extract money from students and federal grants to line the pockets of its upper classes" seems misleading and it seems like a more reasonable statement would be
"The purpose of the university is to educate people, but there's no incentive to do so affordably so students can end up funding unnecessary things"
I have to toss in Pournelle's Iron Law. The purpose of a system - when it is first established - may be dramatically different from the purpose it assumes after a few years.
Consider: You establish a system to solve a problem. That could be homelessness, or asylum, or drug abuse, or any of a number of other things. This system employs people, who then have an automatic interest - not in solving the problem - but in prolonging it, even in making it worse. After all, without the problem, the organization would not need to exist.
I agree with you that POSWID is typically deployed as a vacuous slogan masquerading as critique (its purpose, perhaps?).
But here is what I think the core value of the idea is. Take the example of the cancer hospital. "The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, but curing cancer is hard, so (according to the latest numbers) they only manage 68%."
If the purpose of a cancer hospital were to cure all the cancer patients, we would design cancer care — in and outside the hospital — differently; for example, we'd offer much more intensive and early-stage genetic and clinical screening for risk factors and stage 1 disease, we'd use the hospital as a training and deployment ground for preemptive dietary and lifestyle interventions to prevent or slow the progression of cancer, etc.
We don't do all of those things because they are expensive and/or contentious. As such, a cancer hospital can be understood, in realist terms, as the physical (and financial/operational) manifestation of a stable (but negotiated and ultimately up for debate) social consensus at a given point in time — "what kind of resources do we expend on preventing and curing cancer?". And it turns out the answer is: "cure approximately 68% of patients, because if that number were much lower we would be mad, but also, if the costs (even if also success) were much higher we'd be mad in a different way." This is its purpose, and that is what it does.
Aye. It's the same with the Ukrainian army. If its purpose was to win the war against Russia, the whole country would've been on a war footing, WWII-style: every able-bodied man in the army, every able-bodied woman producing weapons and materiel, every non-essential industry closed and converted into making weapons and materiel.
Instead, we see that its purpose is to prevent Russia from taking over Ukraine while leaving as much civilian economy intact as possible.
Russian goals appear to include destroying as much of Ukraine's civilian economy as possible, so naturally the Ukrainian military is trying not to make that easier for them.
Definitely. You can imagine a theoretical system where every single participant is fully driven towards the stated purpose, and yet the purpose is still not being achieved, despite everyone's best efforts.
In practice however, no system on earth behaves like that! so to improve a system, it's useful to analyze it with the assumption that there are unstated constraints on the stated purpose that prevent people from being fully aligned with it (for reasons that can be totally reasonable, as in the examples above).
Basically, POSWID is simply highlighting the unintuitive fact that caring about the intended purpose of a system is of limited use to understanding the system.
It fails to be insightful when people use it instead as an extension of the concept of "revealed preferences", applied to organizations instead of individuals. Just because a system does a certain thing, does not mean everyone (or even anyone) inside wants that thing to happen.
I'm glad that Stafford Beer is getting famous enough to be vacuously quoted by random people on Twitter!
The formulation isn't really very different from Robin Hanson saying that people's true motivations are different from their stated motivations for doing things -- an insight that rationalists have had no problem integrating. "System" here is a bit of 1970s cybernetic jargon, Beer is really thinking about organizations. And "purpose" here is meant not in an objective sense but in a subjective sense: *from the perspective of organizations*, what are they trying to accomplish.
Much of the logic is evolutionary: the only organizations that exist are those that have survived. So the first role of an organization is self-perpetuation. Generally, for this goal to be accomplished, the organization needs to be able explain how it works to others in society as well as to its members. This is what leads to Hanson-style post hoc rationalizations for what are ultimately directed towards survival.
What is the actually epistemological value of the claim, once we concede that the perceived "purpose" is simply an asserted choice among potential explanations?
The point is certainly more rhetorical than epistemological. Like "the medium is the message," the phrase is meant to work on the margin and challenge recieved wisdom. Of course the stated goals of organiztions and the content of media are important -- but everyone knows that, to such an extent that they implicitly treat these as the *only* frame to understand organizations or media.
Both McLuhan and Beer have written many books explaining their alternative frames, to which the phrases point. In the case of POSIWID in particular, I think the insight is "in the water" now (thanks to decades of public choice economics and the general demystification/disenchantment of our institutions) to an extent that it sits in an unsatisfying valley and comes across as smarmy/mid where it was much more transgressive 50 years ago
I think it makes more sense in context. If you’re a management consultant (which Beer mostly was) trying to unpick what departments in an organization are actually for, POSIWID is a pretty good rule. Just treat it as a black box and look at the inputs and outputs
Reminds me of Conquest's Third Law: The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
This way of thinking may result from taking a strategy for predicting the motives of individuals, and using it to predict the motives of organisations. "Cui bono?" works when you're considering a single action carried out by a single person at a single moment in time, but it doesn't really work when you're considering the behaviour of hundreds of people who are incentivised to somewhat-but-not-perfectly cooperate over a long period to somewhat-but-not-perfectly implement a goal that was established by someone who somewhat-but-not-perfectly understands that that goal is just an instrument to attain a larger, more complex goal set by somebody else.
Hello, welcome to Forced Blue Eye Vaccination Limited.
There is currently a blue eye eating fungus disease that is spreading through the air and infects 80% of people with blue eyes, eating their eyes in an extremely painful and permanently blinding way. We forcibly vaccinate people with blue eyes against the blue eye eating fungus disease, so that nobody has to suffer from the blue eye eating fungus disease.
We have decided to do this by kidnapping people from their homes with ducktape, rope, and tall, buff men, traumatizing them in the process, and then bring them back after vaccination. But we've done the math, and this is less traumatizing than letting them get infected with the disease.
...What? Don't kidnap people from their homes and traumatize them? Oh, that's not the PURPOSE of our operation. It's just a necessary side effect of saving people from the blue eye eating fungus disease. If you disagree, you're ignoring our organization's stated purpose.
All assertions that our president has a bondage videotape collection are fabrications and all pieces of evidence that point to him having one are deepfakes.
If we're talking about forcing smallpox vaccinations on people at wells or whatever, that's a good conversation to have! We can work through the balance for the harm we have to do to get our good, and smallpox eradicators did indeed work through it. Forced Blue Eye Vaccination Limited doesn't seem to be doing this; they're going far beyond just forced vaccination. The unnecessary added harm looks an awful lot like they're doing it on purpose.
Smallpox appears to be quite thoroughly extinct. And AFIK we got there without needing to forcibly vaccinate anyone. We made vaccination the default, yes, but everywhere I know of that was a default that was trivial to opt out of.
ThingofThings recently had a post about it; they actually did forcibly vaccinate some people in the Third World. (Not even in a "legally mandate it" way, in a "lurk by watering holes and jump people with needles" way.)
Well, that's a thoroughly horrible precedent. And seeing as how the United States seems to have extirpated smallpox within its domain, without ambushing people with needles (or, e.g. firing them from their jobs if they don't get the vaccine), a thoroughly unnecessary one.
(Though they specifically did this only with the last off-grid stragglers in what was also the wellspring of the disease, because they wanted to get the job done before the annual pilgrimage to Mecca risked a whole new outbreak that would render their earlier work moot; I might not have made the same choice in their place but, as presented, it was a hard dilemma.)
But whatever else we might say of these people — however harshly we look upon their decision — their intention *actually was* to wipe out smallpox globally, which, in fact, they achieved. Concluding that Their Purpose was to poke desert nomads with needles, and they were lying about only wanting to eradicate smallpox, would have no predictive power.
In the original Stafford Beer sense, the slogan POSIWID means that you can't tell from outside the system whether any given behaviour was *intended* or not. For the purposes of objective analysis, you have to treat your system as a black box that *does* whatever it's observed to do, as opposed to what people *claim* the point of the system is.
It's worth remembering that this is about control, not conspiratorial cynicism. Stuff happens because of a system, and that system is trying to solve a problem. If, to outsiders, the behaviour seems immoral or dysfunctional, it's not because the people in the system are uniquely evil or bad, it's because the system is behaving in a dysfunctional way.
You seem to want to have it both ways. In the first paragraph you tell us that we simply cannot know what the purpose of a system is. But in the second paragraph you tell us that the system is dysfunctional. The problem is that you can only know that the system is dysfunctional if you know that it's function is something else than what it does. But you can't know that the function is something else unless you can peer inside the black box or its history.
So the purpose of (for example) the HS2 project is "build a new modern railway between London and the other large cities in England". And they ended up spending £100 million on a Bat Tunnel, to protect bats; but nobody can confirm if the tunnel will actually help bats.
This strikes many people as dysfunctional and crazy (including people involved in the HS2 project). So why did they design and build the Bat Tunnel? It wasn't because any particular individual was wilfully stupid or ludicrously pro-bat. The Bat Tunnel was the outcome of the system. Inasmuch as the slogan is worthwhile, it encourages us to look at systems, and try and define clear abstractions (i.e. a succession of nested black boxes) to understand why the system is (apparently) set up to do things like create Bat Tunnels.
Bottom line: we have a system. The system did a thing. Saying "the system shouldn't have done this" is empty. The purpose of the system is what it does. Our job is to understand the system well enough to modify it so it does what we want.
I use the phrase "the system is what the system does" and I think this largely avoids discussion of purpose. I think it's a sometimes useful phrase to point out that what one intends doesn't matter and that if the system has been misfiring for a long time, then more drastic steps are necessary.
But that phrase isn't correct either. The system is not just what it does. The system also contains a set of unactualized dispositions that it may enact under the right/wrong circumstances. This is why we may infer, from the trainwreck of democracy during the Covid overreaction crisis, that the system was never democratic to begin with: the system was already disposed to give up the appearance of democracy as soon as the circumstances allowed.
Democracy isn't well defined, but the US was never intended to be a democracy, but rather a republic. I think after various legal decisions (like "money is speech") that it's actually turned into a plutocracy, but that's pretty close to a republic if you look at Roman history.
No. Originally voting in the US was usually restricted to property owning males. And Senators were not directly elected, but were appointed by the states. You could reasonably claim that some of the states were intended to be democracies, but not the country. (And not all the states. Only a republican government was required.)
> The system is not just what it does. The system also contains a set of unactualized dispositions that it may enact under the right/wrong circumstances.
Those are part of what the system does. Saying that the action of the system in response to future events doesn't count as "what the system does" is as bad as saying that the action of the system in response to the events of yesterday doesn't count as "what the system does".
Unactualized dispositions are, by definition, not what the system does, but what the system would have done under different circumstances. If you're misinterpreting them as unactualized-as-yet, that still doesn't help, because a system typically contains dispositions that are not actualized and will *never* be actualized.
Think about the landmine that could have exploded, but ended up getting cleared. The purpose of the landmine was to explode, but that's exactly what it never did.
What? It doesn't work even under the theory that the purpose of an object is set once by some particular person and can't change.
"The purpose of a landmine is to explode" would imply that a landmine that exploded in the factory was a 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴.
The actual purpose of a landmine is, in the general case, to stop people from crossing the mined region. And it does that precisely by its faculty of exploding-if-pressured-from-above. That is a behavior the landmine has whether or not it's exercised, and that behavior is how it serves the goals of the people who placed it.
I think this is about right. It seems to me that POSIWID is mostly a semantic position which people are mistaking for a moral or other normative one. To take Alexander's first example, yes, the purpose of cancer hospitals is to give patients whatever care is currently possible to treat their cancer. The efficacy of said care is neither here nor there.
I think the principle is uninformative when we’re looking at ideal/abstract systems, but is interesting and valuable when we’re dealing with any variation from this ideal (i.e., all human systems)—e.g., if a particular cancer hospital tended to fail to treat bowel cancer more often than the norm then we might have interesting conclusions to draw given POSIWID, or if a nation state happened to imprison a particular category of person more often than one would expect, then we’d have interesting questions to ask about its institutions given POSIWID.
I guess more generally it’s more useful as a practical concept than theoretical.
If the purpose of a system is always what it does, then no system can ever malfunction and fail its purpose. But obviously systems malfunction very often; a system does not always do what its purpose is. Therefore the purpose of a system is not always what it does.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the 1980s BBC political satire "Yes, Minister" (and "Yes, Prime Minister" even more so; in fact I'd probably start there..) for a fantastic, hilarious, prescient, 20-hour-long exploration of this idea.
Sir Humphrey would say (I think possibly actually did say?) that the purpose of the armed forces is not to win wars but to reassure the electorate that wars, should they arise, could be won. Insofar as the best way to do this is sometimes to create armed forces that are actually capable of winning wars, war-winning is a convenient side-effect of the armed forces' true purpose.
Similarly, Sir Humphrey would say that "solving some crime", "tolerating other crimes", and "beating-up suspects" are all just side-effects of the police's true purpose of reassuring the electorate, as directed by and (more importantly) as paid-for by the state; some side-effects being more desirable than others.
Likewise education ("The Department of Education isn't there for eliminating class distinctions amongst *children*; whatever gave you that idea?! Its purpose is to get rid of class distinctions in the *teaching profession*; to have all teachers treated equally. We explain to Labour that selective education is too divisive and to the Tories that it is too expensive, and meanwhile we educate our own children privately.")
[nb. I'm not necessarily espousing Sir Humphrey's viewpoint; merely recommending the internecine conflicts depicted in the programme as a fantastic exploration of system-purpose-related ideas..]
Cosign the media recommendation! And also the application to this topic. The phrase may be overused, but it is obviously applicable to situations where there is organizational behavior clearly at odds with the nominal purpose of the organization. Where such a mismatch is severe and/or persists a long time, the Sir Humphrey explanation becomes more plausible.
The episode of Yes, Prime Minister where Sir Humphrey is locked out of No. 10 almost choked me unconscious with laughter.
It's worth noting that "Yes, [Prime] Minister" is a documentary presented as satire. The writers based it pretty closely on private interviews with two of Harold Wilson's and James Callaghan's senior staffers (Bernard Donoughue and Marcia Williams), some anonymous senior civil servants, and the published diaries for Richard Crossman from when he was Minister of Housing and Local Government. And one of the writers, Antony Jay, also wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe.
Jim Hacker was modeled relatively closely on Crossman, especially in the early serieses, and Sir Humphrey was modeled somewhat less closely on Dame Evelyn Sharpe (later Baroness Sharpe), who was the Permanent Secretary of Crossman's department.
> The Department of Education isn't there for eliminating class distinctions amongst *children*; whatever gave you that idea?!
The purpose of the educational system is to *legitimize* the class distinctions. Some people are poor and have to work bad jobs because they didn't pay attention and didn't work hard at school, unlike you, so they deserve their place. (The important part is to make the poor people believe it, too.)
I think we (humans) anthropomorphise things too much. You think you know why a cat does something. But you don't. Same for a large organisation. Dogs on the other hand... 😀
I asked Gemini to come up with examples that steelman POSIWID. It supplied 5 good ones, the general theme seems to be a sort of "conspiracy theory" thinking used to detect misalignments between stated "plausible deniability" purpose of a system and the more nefarious cynical incentives behind it.
Edit: perhaps the intent of this phrase can best paraphrased as "you're trying to change the system using Mistake Theory, but this state of affairs is no mistake, you should use Conflict Theory instead".
Political slogans need to be pithy and reveal some essential truth. This one is just pithy.
The problem, I think, is the word "purpose", which is too conspiratorial for my liking. What I think is probably more accurate, is that for any system, deficiencies or perverse effects, while unintended initially, come to be tolerated by the owners or proponents of that system.
I think a good example is tax codes. If you look at them, they don't appear to be created by people of sound mind. Loopholes, strange effects, regressiveness etc. etc. However, proposals to substantially change them often meet with howls of anguish. I think one then realises that actually tax codes are really the product of a cobbling together of a compromise by all the interests of society adjusted for their bargaining power/political influence. People highlight the absurdities and claim that the system is ripe for reform - but the absurdities probably benefit some group somewhere. The system persists.
So, I don't think it's that the purpose of system is what it does, but I do think the (side-)effects of a system can be what politicians or others avowedly claim they dislike and want to reform, but are secretly happy with or at least have no desire to change.
I think one context where this phrasing makes sense is when the system has outlived its purpose, but still protects itself and does what it does.
The purpose of a hospital isn't to cure patients, it's to be curing patients. The purpose of the police isn't to make crimes go from "unsolved" to "solved", it's to be solving crimes. The purpose of Longshoremen is to work, not to load and unload cargo ships.
Imagine a miracle drug that could instantly cure any disease. If the purpose of hospitals were to cure patients, they would embrace it immediately and with joy, as it would get all patients instantly cured. I very much doubt that would actually happen in practice, because "the purpose of a system is what it does", and what it does is use elaborate methods and hire a lot of people.
Maybe a better phrasing would be something like "the purpose of a system is to resist change and propagate itself", but that's not as catchy. Those inclined to read the same works of high fantasy as I do may prefer "all systems are corrupt."
I don't think you're right about the miracle drug. Dentists pushed for fluoride toothpaste even though it cost them a lot of money. I'm sure something like you're describing could happen, but I don't think it's the default expectation.
> I very much doubt that would actually happen in practice
I don't disagree with everything you said, but this in particular is conspiratorial nonsense. When penicillin first emerged it was basically a miracle drug for treating bacterial infections, and it was (and still is) widely embraced by hospitals.
I learned this in a software context before I ever heard it in the social science context, so I now have a twist of thought I like that I call POSIWID. The central example is like "the contact customer support button is hard to find because that reduces load on the customer support team" or "Google will never stop producing chat apps, the purpose of the chat app division isn't chat apps, it's staff promotions."
The insight is something like "when a system fails to achieve its stated purpose, consider that it may be being maintained in that state for some other reason" which is true and great to keep in mind
Have you heard the term “sludge”? Freakonomics Radio just did a two part episode on it. The "contact customer support button is hard to find because that reduces load on the customer support team" is a perfect example.
"Sludge" is a word in common use, but no sense that would include "the contact customer support button is hard to find because that reduces load on the customer support team" is in common use, so it makes sense to refer to that as specific to Freakonomics.
If the question was "Have you heard the term 'sludge'? The stuff flowing along the bottom of a sewer is a perfect example", that would be a weirder question.
Yes, and the binary reading Scott does to try to debunk is bizarre from a "rationalist." When there is a mismatch between nominal purpose and actual outcome, one can update one's priors as to whether the nominal purpose is correct. The longer persisting and more severe the mismatch, the more updating is warranted.
So as a former bureaucrat and auditor, I highly disagree with regard to any MATURE system. The people working these systems know exactly the problems and how to effectively fix them or are simply indifferent and don't want to know because their goal isn't for the system to do it's stated function. It's why complaining to management, inspector generals, etc doesn't work, because they already know and don't care because the system IS working as expected to those in the system.
Your hospital example is a great example of this, if you look at the DOCTORS (and their families) outcome rates at that same hospital they are significantly better. The point of that hospital is to provide better outcomes for it's workers under the veneer of egalitarianism to get the masses to fund treatments they won't get otherwise they would have identical outcomes rates. Don't confuse virtue signalling charters and mission statements with the actual purpose once the organization matures.
If the actual goal was for police to reduce crime, they would never leave the station as everyone commits multiple crimes a day and statistically police, judges, and prosecutors commit them at a higher rate that the general public hence they never get around to arresting jaywalkers and beating them because after they cleaned out the station and court house, they'd have to arrest themselves. My probation officer brazenly breaks the law right there in the court house every time I meet her, you want to bet how many times she been arrested for the tens of thousands of felonies she's committed. I'll bet you every dollar to my name it's zero.
Homicides really do go up when police pull back, because homicides committed by police are vastly smaller than the homicides they prevent. But you probably are on the right track in thinking that the police to don't exist to prevent ALL crime considering how many crimes there are. Jaywalkers aren't the metric they're held accountable to, homicides are taken MUCH more seriously.
And yet police spend vastly more effort and resources going after jaywalkers, speeders, homeless people, and truants over murderers hence I'd suggest you are wrong at their accountability metrics because incentives matter. A felony is a felony, just last week on the police blotter for example a homeless guy in my neighborhood was arrested for FELONY littering because police priorities while the overwhelming majority of local murders remain unsolved.
If the goal is to reduce homicides, you don't need the police for that at all, you simply need to provide legal protection (i.e. tort) to illegal transactions. This is a well known and proven effective fix.
No amount of policing is going to ever reduce murders of passion nor mental defect.
Actually many murderers of passion and/or mental defect are considerably less passionate or defective when the chances of punishment go up.
A man incarcerated for beating his wife and mother begged Theodore Dalrymple for help because he didn't need jail but anger management classes. Dalrymple observed that he managed his anger just fine in prison, and the prisoner retorted that he didn't want to get sent to the block. That is, his purported emotional reason was entirely curbed by punishment.
Then make sure the threat is always there. Make sure the police are always visible in public. Make sure that they are feared by everyone. Fear keeps people in line.
You aren't comparing likes though I'd agree he probably doesn't have a mental defect nor is regular beatings an impulsive crime of passion. From your story he "beat his family members whom he cohabitated with", that isn't beating the neighbor's family members nor random strangers on the street, if he was in prison AND shared cell with his wife and mother, he might have very well beat them in prison as well. Basically he got jailed for committing a faux paus and the prosecutor wasted government taxes for something that at most, was a tort.
No amount of policing, nor really anything, stops impulsivity, it's why we can't solve murder, assault, suicide, etc. as there will always been a baseline level of it. But much of it IS preventable if we simply given the participants legal ways to resolve their issues as the overwhelming amount of non-familial violence involves business transactions who simply can't use the legal system to resolve them.
More policing actually DOES significantly reduce homicides. We've seen that with "natural experiments" when homeland security alerts temporarily increased police presence in certain places https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/TerrorAlertProofs.pdf and "dynamic concentration" has been reduced to reduce crime in high-crime areas. Plus, we saw crime spike when police pulled back after George Floyd.
That report makes the standard error of confusing "crimes committed" with "crimes arrested", those aren't related. Policing has near zero statistically significant affect on crime at all, at best it seems increases arrests which then causes an increase in the reported crime level. If you don't arrest murders, you have a murder rate of 0% with a 100% arrest rate, that doesn't mean murder isn't still happening. If the budget is looking low this quarter, just arrest the first fifty people you see and bam, the reported crime rates just increased and your budget will get protected plus the prosecutor will find something to get them to plea and next quarter you can even reduce the rate to get that hero award by simply not arresting a new fifty, you sure solved that crime spike you created, hero!
The highest crime area is the police station followed by the court house yet somehow being inhabited by police at all hours they crime rate hasn't reduced at all, if fact it generally increases in those areas the more police that are present as a counterfactual.
But even if we play your though experiment because you aren't hearing what I'm saying as I assume you have a cop fetish like so many modern Americans from your statements, it's irrelevant. Dropping a nuclear bomb on New York will reduce crime as well in high-crime areas as would giving every resident a trillion dollars cash. The goal isn't to "arbitrarily arrest more criminals based on the fascistically whims of the cop that day", the goal is to prevent the crime from happening in the first place at price comparable to having the police or, as can easily be done, cheaper than the existing police budget. It's a half the price to just give a drug addict cash so she doesn't have to rob people that house her in prison but nope, let's incentivize her to commit crime instead and then spend double when we could have prevented it; and then we wonder why we can't have nice things. It would be 20% the price if Walgreens could sell meth but nope, can't have that because how else will the police get new paramilitary gear to shoot author's in their home.
The TYPE of crime matters, increased policing, even if on every corner, has ZERO affect on a girl walking in on her wife banging a guy and impulsively killing her for being a lesbo traitor. It has ZERO affect on the paranoid schizophrenic having a psychotic break and stabbing someone. It has ZERO affect on school shooters or guys flying planes into buildings or parking vans of fertilizer under them. Nearly all crime is "victimless", how exactly is your cop on the corner preventing that loo. What it does it simply moves niche statistically insignificant crime from area A to area B just like how homeless sweeps don't solve homelessness, it simply moves them to a new neighborhood for a little bit.
For nearly all crime people genuinely care about, cops at best, even when they have a marginal impact, are cost ineffective. Most crimes that the "public" cares about, when they aren't fabricated by the police, are the result of vigilantism and regulatory capture. You can fix both of those at pennies on the dollar over what you pay police but we can't do that because, you know, jealously and spite.
No, I don't believe police spend "vastly more effort and resources going after jaywalkers... over murderers". Instead, I'd suggest YOU are the one who is wrong. On page 4 of https://nicjr.org/wp-content/themes/nicjr-child/assets/Stockton.pdf you'll see some numbers on how much is spent on shootings that result in injuries vs homicides. The latter of course have a bigger price tag, as the more severe crime. Jaywalking isn't compared there, because that's obviously a less severe crime that police care less about.
You are mixing up apples and oranges again girl. Also NICJR is a lobbying group on par with trusting SPLC on anything involving racism by whites lol.
I mean that entire report is amusing with inflated costs. You don't need twenty three people to show up to a murder, you can get by believe it or not with one or two nor are their costs realized, they are already on the clock as an hour of law enforcement is an hour of law enforcement whether it being a murder scene or a jaywalking scene or the cop sleeping in his car like usual. Hospital and medical costs are born by the nobody, they are dead. Likewise prison, jail, and court cost are the same regardless of the crime nor do they "take" longer, all cases even jaywalking take the maximum time the defense can afford as all of them are both making a play to keep their guy out of jail longer, get paid more, and maybe you can get lucky and evidence will get lost, people retire, etc. I had speeding ticket drag out for three years once with nineteen court appearances and that is before we even got to the jury. Nearly ever cost they list is either a sunk cost or non specific outside the margins, felony littering has the identical costs. That entire report is a marketting piece pushing FUD hard to get get a political outcome the funders want.
Even lobbying groups can provide helpful data. You have provided none, and instead just made false assertions.
> You don't need twenty three people to show up to a murder
The claim you made I disputed was not about the resources NEEDED for a murder, but what the police actually SPEND.
> they are already on the clock as an hour of law enforcement is an hour of law enforcement whether it being a murder scene or a jaywalking scene
There number of crimes committed exceeds police resources, and police busy with one crime cannot deal with another. Nor do jaywalking & murders actually take up the same number of hours for investigation!
> Likewise prison, jail, and court cost are the same regardless of the crime nor do they "take" longer, all cases even jaywalking take the maximum time the defense can afford
How dumb can you be to believe that jaywalking & murder convictions take up the same amount of time? Are you unaware that different crimes come with different amounts of prison time?
Nah that would still be a drug charge, literally some homeless guy just littered and got felony littering because, IDK, stupid voters. I just noticed it on the police blotter is all (I peruse it weekly).
Edit: Looked it up, was curious. Seems the law made repeat offenders (third time+ in twenty years) a felony is 2006 because, well we like to put people in prison for five years over nothing. After all, how else will the children of unemployable police and prison guards eat? Seems to me it was just an anti-homeless law in reality masquerading as public safety.
"The purpose of the system is what it does" is an imperfect heuristic, but the idealistic approach is often much worse. In particular, the idealist approach makes a sort of interchangability obscuration where if there's particular methods the system is designed to use and particular exogenous causes that respond differently to these methods, the naive view l would not properly appreciate the constraints of how one can modify those methods to modify the outcomes.
Maybe part of the problem with your examples is that they aren't complete enough. For instance the purpose of a hospital isn't just to cure two-thirds of cancer patients, it's also to poach incentivizable doctors from hyper-rich people, and to allow the state and insurance companies to regulate doctor's treatments, and so on.
I could imagine that if hyper-rich people had more ownership over their teams of doctors, then those doctors would be more focused on innovating for unusually difficult cases rather than optimizing the economies of scale for more common cases, which on longer term would increase the fraction of cancer cases you could cure more. But I might be wrong; obviously as I'm a software engineer, I know less about medicine than you.
Another way of thinking of it: if two-thirds of cancer patients are as many cancer patients as they can possibly cure, then "as many as possible" and "two-thirds" is the same and the distinction disappears. The function of "the purpose of the system is what it does" is dispelling the fallacy that local improvements to the system is a good way to get the remaining one-thirds. That's not necessarily true, of course, and so TPOTSIWID is not necessarily correct. But it's correct more often than one would think.
(Edit: sorry, I now see Petey's comment above nails this , and I missed it somehow. Not much additive in my comment.)
This, plus: the value of TPOTSIWID is that when it seems not to apply, that is a clue that you may be thinking about the system wrong. If "the purpose of a cancer hospital" really were "to cure as many patients as POSSIBLE", you would see different behaviors. For example, Doctors would never be allowed to go home to their families; patients would never be denied a test or procedure just because it didn't seem likely to be helpful or a good tradeoff against noncancerous side effects (or because they couldn't afford it). To move your worldview closer to TPOTSIWID you should reframe your view of the system and/or its "true purpose" (to the extent such a thing really exists... Which is somewhere between "not at all" and "totally"). For example, maybe it's better to model the purpose of a cancer hospital as an optimization of benefits against costs, where benefits include other non-cancer-curing outcomes like patient quality of life or dignity of death, and where costs include economic realities. Maybe there's something in there too about prestige and research publications, and nonlinear aversion to legal risk. It turns out to be a really messy question, so while you investigate it, TPOTSIWID can help remind you to look at revealed preferences instead of espoused mission statements.
And this is particularly helpful in combination with the above comment from tailcalled: Someone may propose a change to the hospital which they think would improve cancer curing on the margin, but which in reality is not a win based on a total accounting of benefits and costs according to the messy hidden evaluation function. Then, if they naively believed that "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible", they might get frustrated when the hospital rejects the idea, and TPOTSIWID can be a succinct reminder to reconsider what the purpose of the system "really" is.
(Why anyone would expect to learn this from twitter shitposters, I cannot fathom.)
You are sort of describing healthcare in the us vs healthcare in the uk.
On average (measured as how long you live) healthcare is better in the uk but if you look at life expectancy vs income the top 1% live longer in the us (from memory in a ft article in mid 24)
I don't think we would expect the innovations produced by this to stay within national lines. If you come up with a new test or treatment, there's a lot of money to be made from scaling it up globally.
Also on reflection, rich people crave economies of scale, so doctors that specialize in rich people probably would be bad at individualized treatment. Maybe doctors who specialize in other doctors would work better.
I don't know about the UK in particular, but apparently rich people in the US have life expectancies that are shorter than their European counterparts and in some cases are worse than much poorer Europeans:
I see it used as "if you have a complex system/bureaucracy to solve X, then the incentives inside it is for X to get worse, and incentives will not have 0 influence on outcomes"
The statement is used as a paraphrase of “this system is working as intended IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE”. Because of how it’s phrased, it sounds like a principle or an argument, but the user is invariably just stating the conclusion.
You can find Stafford Beer's original use in the book "Diagnosing Systems for Organisations".
It's actually part of an analysis of how the central part of an organisation should influence the behavior of the other parts. It may wish to modify the purpose and behavior of sub-organisations, but it first should understand their current purpose in terms of what they are actually doing.
Emergent agents - corporations, government agencies, etc. The purpose of Google is what it does, not "connecting the world's knowledge" or whatever it was.
Of course POSIWID is stupid as an ontological claim. But as a rhetorical device I think it can be useful in at least two situations.
1. As an attack against apologetics. The "but it wasn't designed to do that" defense is just as bad, if not worse, than POSIWID. No one cares that you _intended_ your algorithm to show relevant content if what it _does_ is lead 14-year-olds to self-harm.
2. Once a system's outcomes are well-understood and yet the system persists, especially if it's actively maintained, then you have to assume that those outcomes are at least acceptable to the people overseeing the system. At that point, the intent of the system doesn't matter. The system is a trade-off, and the choice to continue the system as-is constitutes an acceptance of that trade-off. We don't get to choose to get the purpose of the system, our only choice is to get what it does. The purpose of keeping the system in place is what it does (PoKSiPiWiD).
There are at least two meaning of 'purpose' to these kinds of systems - the purpose in the mind of the creator of the system - like the guys who built the hospital might have a purpose to cure cancer. That purpose is in the mind of the creators. And then there is the purpose 'emergent', 'embodied' in the system, operated by the people involved, like making money, keeping jobs, curing diseases. In this case goal=purpose. I'm not sure I agree with the statement though. "What something does" might be a side effect, and not a goal. If the hospital makes a lot of CO2 for some reason, and someone comes up with a plan to reduce the emissions, and the hospital agrees to the plan, then obviously making C02 was not a purpose, but just a side effect. If they resist the plan, then they may well have the purpose of creating CO2, or also likely, there is another, linked purpose that is not obvious.
Stafford Beer coined this phrase, at the same time as he was studying, among other things institutional capture and the "principle/agent problem" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem). In the light of this, it makes a certain amount of sense. The medical field is full of expensive treatments, drugs, and procedures which are no more effective than other cheaper ways to treat patients, and in some cases a lot worse. They persist because only one of the purposes of the medical centre is to cure and treat patients. Another purpose is to pay the medical staff. A third one is to give status to the medical people involved. These purposes can conflict, and there will be resistence to any proposed new treatment, no matter how better it is in outcomes for the patients just because many people don't like changing how they do things -- especially if they benefit from the old way of doing things and lose this benefit if they change, or if they have to admit that the old way was useless or worse than useless.
In the light of all of this it is necessary to look at the whole system and see exactly what it really accomplishes, and not trust that the slogan 'our purpose is to cure patients' will make certain that the better treatments are adopted. Whenever you see that a system is generating a result that is at variance with its stated purpose, it is always a good idea to check first to see who benefits from the way things are running now, because you often find that the system really is working the way it is supposed to. We're just supposed to pretend that it is supposed to be doing something else, and that any deviation from that goal is unintentional, or accidental.
I think it applies in education policy debates but few other places.
There are lots of schemes to help poor kids, that end up helping rich kids, or cheap policies that end up being expensive and employing people who lobbied for them.
It applies to ALL systems, but it always requires interpretation, as it's a shorthand for at least one much more verbose phrasing...and you can't tell which one.
I tend to interpret it as a claim the a putative "sorry, side-effect" of the system was, instead, an intended result. Frequently this claim seems at best weakly-founded, but other times it seems extremely plausible.
I think the application is much stronger for "side-effects" that were pointed out as likely/certain ahead of time. Which applies to a whole lot of both/all sides of the political systems at least. I
f you implement a system that a 5 year old can see will have bad results, you don't get to disclaim those results as unintentional later. You knew or should have known--your choices are malice, wilful blindness, or aggravated incompetence... Which is basically indistinguishable from malice.
This originally struck me as rather silly and as an obvious misinterpretation of an idea that has nothing to do with human intentions...then I read the comments and saw many people claiming exactly that!
Donella Meadows is an important figure in the field of Systems Thinking, and says by definition (whether human designed or not), systems have a purpose.
"A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals”
One way to think about this is that Meadows would be OK talking about Molochs purpose as something coherent. Is changing the climate the purpose of modern capitalism? In one sense, no. But simultaneously, it is perfectly coherent to talk about the system as having that exact purpose because the system seems to work towards that goal. Even if you push against the system, the system seems to adapt and continue with that goal anyways. There is something almost intelligent about systems where they seem to work towards goals that no one ever intended.
Objects exist only in so far as they interact with other things (see the Hard Problem of Matter). So my naive understanding is that everything in the universe—from a grain of sand to the cosmos itself—can be studied as if it were a system with function or purpose. But I think Donella would caution against over-reifying the concept of a system. Where you draw the boundaries around a system is arbitrary from the point of view of the universe. Systems are an epistemological tool, not an ontological reality. (Though see debates about emergence, which blur that distinction.)
In real-world organizations, it's not uncommon that the current plan is obviously problematic and that you can easily suggest a local change which improves it. However, often when you repeatedly apply such local changes of improvement, the resulting conclusion is "we shouldn't be doing this at all" or "we should do something completely different from what we were planning to do", and then the process of local improvement gets shut down because they don't want to cancel the project/do something completely different.
In such a case, it seems appropriate to say "the purpose of the system is what it does".
This sentiment is grasping towards the same sort of place as your "Meditations on Moloch" essay.
No-one involved in the system wants what the system actually ends up doing. But whatever their individual intents, /the system as a whole/, if allowed to grow naturally, inevitably ends up doing what Moloch wants.
Of course the purpose we intended for the system isn't really that, any more than Moloch really exists. But you can't begin the meta level fight - of designing the system's high level organisational structures and incentives to try to reduce this effect, instead of letting it emerge organically like it always does - unless you first admit the problem.
I think this commenter has identified the root issue.
The Carthaginian demon that inhabits your bureaucracy might have purposes at odds with the bureaucrats who sustain it and the Great Founder who summoned it.
Consider the system as an entity: what is it trying to do?
I think the way the phrase is used 'in the wild' is intended to point out that you can have "unintended consequences" which are not truly unintended. If a consequence was unforeseen, or unforeseeable, then we can all wring our hands about unintended consequences relative to the system's stated goals. But once the system has been tried and tested, and we know what the consequences are going to be, can you still call them "unintended"? Wouldn't it be more fair to call them "accepted negative externalities"? The "purpose of the system" is to execute on a specific set of trade-offs. I think it's reasonable for the recipients of the negative externalities to point out that the stated goals of the system are not the full accounting of what the system is implementing, no?
I think the quote is to be taken from the perspective of a person wishing to incorporate the system into their worldview. "Don't think of the system as an agent doing what its purpose purportedly says. When analyzing the agent, change its purpose to what it actually does, otherwise you're creating a false worldview."
The purpose of the Ukrainian resistance is to rid itself of Russian invaders, but I shouldn't have the Ukraine resistance as a concept in my worldview that just rids itself of the invaders.
The purpose of the hospital is to pursue the treatments it is currently pursuing. It's not going out and collecting money from people in a calculated attempt to maximize the number of saved patients.
POSIWID was not originally an antagonistic political snark. It's perfectly sensible to notice that a system may be fulfilling other purposes than it does officially, and this is not incompatible with it operating in good faith. You can think of it as a bit like Chesterton's fence:
* to reform a ssytem you should understand what purposes it fulfils, not just what it is officially supposed to do
* These additonal or alternative purposes may in fact be desirable ones that you should avoid breaking.
Cybernetics (where the phrase originated) drew a lot of inspiration from biology, and there obviously nothing has an 'official purpose' at all. But it nevertheless has organisation and is functional.
I've seen reports (don't know how true) that NGOs in San Fran get paid a lot of money to solve homelessness. But after billions spent, homelessness is worse.
I thought this saying was a kinda reference to that sort of thing: the NGOs are there to collect money by virtue of the fact that there are homeless. Which is not what they are purported to do.
I think the better version of this is “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets,” which I read for the first time in Thinking in Systems by Donella H Meadows and she attributes to Donald Berwick. This formulation, for me at least, prompts a sort of curious reflection on what might be going on with a system that is leading to the observed outputs. It leaves open the door for the potential to redesign a system to get different outputs. The other formulation feels more cynical and pessimistic.
If it's perfectly designed, you wouldn't expect it to get redesigned. But in fact, redesigns happen a lot, including by the people responsible for the previous design.
Unless the desired results change. Then you can get redesigns without flaws. It's Working As Implemented, but not Working As Desired (by at least some stakeholder).
Now you can get cases where WaI is the least-bad compromise between stakeholders whose desires aren't mutually compatible, or where the process of getting to a "better" state is not feasible (ie an optimum separated from current state by some insurmountable barrier in configuration space)
I don't think desired results change often enough to explain how common redesigns are. Technology gets redesigned often, and it's less common for people to prefer the old results and continue using the old design, instead the proverbial Better Mousetrap displaces the old one that people then buy used & cheap if they don't want to splurge on the new on.
The way I see it happen (as a software developer) is as follows:
1. Stakeholders want X.
2. X is too expensive (money, time, talent) to do perfectly.
3. So let's do Y, which does *most* of X, but also has effects A and B that, while aren't necessarily desired, are acceptable compromises.
4. Time passes.
5. Now what they want is X', which is a small (theoretically) evolution from X. But one in which A and B are not acceptable anymore.
6. So they spend time doing a re-design
7. but resources haven't really changed, so all they can get is Y', which has undesired but mostly acceptable effects A' and B'.
8. Rinse and repeat.
Throw that in with "designer's got to design to keep their jobs" (a pressing problem--how many interfaces have been redesigned not because they were *faulty* but because they were *outdated*)?
Remember, the whole point here is that the *actual* desires of the stakeholders and their *stated* desires are not necessarily 1:1. Generally, the stated desires are a simplified front that looks good to the world. Because saying "I want to make lots of money and I don't really care how" is frowned upon--instead we have grand mission statements. That, in the end, are malleable or ignorable enough to end up with "I'm in it to make money" as the real net desire.
You also get cancellation--*these* stakeholders want Q and are willing to accept P and grudgingly go along with R, *those* stakeholders want ~Q and are willing to accept R and grudgingly go along with P, so you end up with P + R, which isn't *anyone*'s stated or preferred outcome.
I've always thought of the phrase as an argument against the "no true Scotsman" fallacy when it's used in an organisational setting. When there are significant failings of an organisation, the response (within the organisation) can sometimes be: "there are some bad apples working against the purpose of our system: our system is not supposed to do this and the failings are due to individuals and not the system itself". POSIWID then is applicable: you can't claim a system "isn't supposed to" do something, if it's repeatedly doing it on a large enough scale.
The original purpose of a system cannot be used as a defence when it's outcomes don't match that claimed purpose.
The police example is not a great one. It is indeed the purpose of the police to discourage deviant behavior through the use of violence or the threat of violence, and it is hardly unheard of for police or the government to define deviance to be that which threatens those in power. Esp outside liberal democracies but not exclusively.
100%, the idea that a police officer is there to serve me is a very Western one. On large majority of the Earth's surface, stating that is a good way to give locals a laugh.
What it might be driving at is better explained by the concept of “revealed preference”: sometimes what a system actually does is a strong indicator of either conscious intent (albeit that can often veer into a conspiracy mindset, albeit sometimes conspiracies happen, they just tend to be mundane!) or an emergent property that enough people in a position to change it are actually happy to accept but won’t necessarily openly admit this (or even consciously consider it) even if other people point out the flaw (it is not a hidden problem, although that can also happen).
To take a completely hypothetical example a nation state with a difficult relationship with certain people that live within its de facto ambit of influence and power might want to maintain structural ambiguity about the legal status of those people to maintain maximum flexibility of action and political power advantage that clarity of legal status either way would not allow. The ambiguity becomes a design feature not a bug (although it may start as just an anomaly).
Then again the bureaucratic version of Occam’s Razor of “assume mess up not conspiracy” also applies. The world is messy and complicated and changing stuff is hard and this often leads to unforeseen stuff happening.
I think the description is specifically for systems which are failing at their stated goals yet not changing. There is a reason why it is not changing, and the most likely explanation is that there are entrenched parties benefiting from the current equilibrium state. Then the heuristic is that it's easier to just start from scratch and hope for a new, better equilibrium, rather than going through the trouble of identifying and breaking these bad incentives.
I’d say the hospital is precisely designed to cure 66% of people because it operates within constraints (financial, #doctors, approved meds). A “system” designed to cure let’s say 99% of people would look wholly different.
There's an inherent assumption here that "improving" or "changing" a system is different from replacing/redesigning it which doesn't hold to scrutiny.
Like, I can look at most of your examples and be like:
"No, that is the actual purpose of the system"
The tube as emissions is a bad one, but just because you are describing 0.1% of the exhibited behavior.
The Ukrainian military example is great, like, you can point to ways in which it's purpose is literally "to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia" -- like, this is part of it's design by Russian puppet dictators.
Like... imagine an army with hundreds of nukes and bioweapons that would be losing as badly as the Ukrainian one is losing.
Imagine an army that is fighting a drone war which is actively imprisoning and conscripting their own contractors working on new drones.
Imagine an army which is both aggressive to it's own citizenry and easy to bribe your way through, such that every man earning more than a few dozen thousand dollars a year flees the country when it most needs the money.
Yes, the purpose of the Ukrainian army is to loose to Russia, and you could not fix it unless you redesigned it over the course of a decade.
Note: Was planning on replying this to a different comment which (I assume) got deleted because it was just a short sentence. My bad for breaking comment ettiquete with it.
There's a closely related and oft-misunderstood idea in software engineering: the interface/implementation distinction.
Something you were getting at is that set of things any action does — its behaviors — is astronomical. The bus system moves people, blocks traffic and cyclists, creates jobs, competes with private shuttles, empowers unions, emits CO2, increases the value of real estate, increases noise pollution, transfers money to bus manufacturers, and a host of other effects. Its promised behavior — of providing transit for passengers according to its route schedule — is a tiny subset of these actual behaviors. When you say that its purpose is just the transit, you're not just making a moralistic claim about the intentions of the creators. You are also making a prediction that providing transit is the only constant. Any other behavior can be changed.
It's a common pitfall of software and system design to begin depending on behaviors not guaranteed. I don't know what it would mean to depend on a bus system empowering unions (maybe creating some security based on union strength and putting all your savings into it), but the other systems named readily lend themselves to examples. The purpose of a commercial airline route is to move passengers and their luggage from point A to point B. Other behaviors, such as that it's always done in a Boeing 737 equipped with wifi and power outlets and the cargo hold is kept pressurized, are details subject to change. If you put a bottle of soda in your luggage and it arrives having exploded onto your clothes, it's your mistake for depending on an unstable implementation detail, not the airline's mistake for not fulfilling (what you thought was) the route's purpose of traveling with a pressurized cargo hold.
- Specifically, I think it can be used to comment on / critique when systems become too focused on *being a system*.
Mostly what systems Do is propagate; sometimes this produces byproducts we like/want; when this goes awry and we catch the system propagating more than we wanted given the byproducts, say: POSIWID.
Some plausibly-true examples of TPOTSIWID I could think of:
Liberal cities tend to have arduous bureaucratic processes for approving new housing. The system's claimed purpose is to do things like "preserve the historic character" of a street or a building or a neighborhood, prevent negative effects on the environment, ensure adequate sunlight exposure to existing buildings, etc. etc. In practice, the system slows down new housing tremendously. TPOTSIWID, i.e. enact NIMBY policies, and NIMBY advocates who couch their defense of the system in lofty-sounding words about the historic character are usually being disingenuous rather than gullible.
Gerrymandering is usually couched with plausible-sounding excuses and justifications, like "natural communities", "geographic compactness" etc. However, TPOTSIWID.
College-level textbooks in popular subjects with lots of students (STEM, business, medicine) often have new editions issued often, with exercises renumbered or scrambled, so that students couldn't use an older second-hand edition. The purpose of the system is to increase the profits by strongly encouraging each new cohorts of students to purchase new textbooks. The books themselves often offer explanations about what's so great about the new edition, but TPOTSIWID.
Higher education as signaling theory. College is not for "teaching you to think", or training you for workforce, it acts in fact as a filter and a signal to employers. TPOTSIWID, that's what it's for.
Freakonomics Radio just did a two part episode on what they call “sludge” (as opposed to “nudge”) and it’s exactly what you’re describing. Definitely worth a listen.
> Gerrymandering is usually couched with plausible-sounding excuses and justifications, like "natural communities", "geographic compactness" etc. However, TPOTSIWID.
Other way around - those are attacks on gerrymandering.
Imagine a dog in a round tub chasing its own tail. The purpose of the dog is to catch the fluffy thing that keeps running away from it. The purpose of the system is to give humans a laugh (and the dog exercise).
It's easy once we separate the system from the people who designed it and/or operate it:
> When people do list a specific example, it’s almost always a claim that, if you’re unhappy with any result of a system, the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you
The system may be evil without anyone intending for it to be.
To use a more serious example, the purpose of the Ukrainian military leadership is to win the war with Russia. Let's even say that's the purpose of every single Ukrainian soldier. And every Russian soldier and general's purpose is to win the war for Russia. Now add Americans/Europeans who supply intel/weapons/targeting. The system is a complex set of relationships and dependencies between all of those individual actors. If the system sends tens or hundreds of thousands of men to die for very little result, then that is its purpose.
"Sometimes what seem like unfortunate side effects are actually desired, especially if those side effects benefit a powerful group" is the gist of it, and often true, but no one can say anything these days without a knowing suggestion that they have the great big secret that explains everything, hence this slogan.
Obviously it's a silly phrase, but it genuinely works for a few cases. My pithy explanation is that the phrase works "when a system generates benefits for people involved in the system, despite the stated benefits being for people outside the system".
Rent extraction is a classic example: licensing bureaucracies or roadblocks that can be circumvented through bribes/corruption might be consciously designed with the purpose of generating revenue for officials. e.g. where police officers pocket on-the-spot fines, it might seem like the stated purpose of maintaining order for law-abiding citizens is being harmed or corrupted, but in fact, the "actual purpose" of augmenting police officers' low wages and incentivising patrolling is being realised.
What I hear when I hear that phrase is more: when a system fails dramatically at its stated purpose, but benefits the designers or operators of the system, it it worth considering that perhaps they are lying about the purpose of the system.
An example I can think of off the top of my head is help to buy in the UK. Its stated intent was to make it easier for less well off first time buyers to get onto the housing ladder. The actual effect seems to have been an increase in house prices that more than counteracts the benefits. So, perhaps the purpose of the system was never really to make it easier for first time buyers, but instead to keep house prices high? How convenient that the people designing the system own lots of property.
Of course the phrase lacks nuance! It's only 9 words! But that doesn't mean it's useless.
The implied meaning I always take from it is that to the degree that avoidable side effects are not in fact avoided, these are not side effects but intended.
I've heard that put as "reasonably foreseeable effects are not unintended". You can't (fairly) disclaim responsibility for bad things just by claiming you didn't intend for them to happen. If I design a computer system with an obvious (to a reasonable person) security hole, the convincingness of my claims of "unintended, therefore not to blame" go way down. Especially if the hole was pointed out to me before hand and I still went through with it.
I'll somewhat defend the NEPA example. Sure, blocking infrastructure projects is probably not what the people who made the system intended it to do, but my guess is that the majority of people who file NEPA lawsuits and politicians/interest groups who advocate for keeping NEPA absolutely do intend to use it as a general purpose tool to block such projects. So at this point the purpose of NEPA (to the people who use it) is to block infrastructure projects.
The POSWID statement is more reasonable if you take "what it does" as a *direction* rather than an absolute. Without a hospital, no cancer patients are cured; with a hospital, two thirds of cancer patients are cured; therefore, the purpose of a hospital is to cure cancer patients (more than would have been cured otherwise). This also explains the second example: the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to reduce the amount of Ukraine occupied by Russia (to less than it would have been otherwise).
It doesn't explain the fourth example: it suggests that the purpose of the New York bus system is to transport people and emit carbon dioxide, when the latter is not a purpose, but a side effect. But it fails the first two examples in the same way: hospitals and militaries both cost money to run, cause stress for their employees, etc., which are likewise side effects, rather than purposes.
(The third example is more complex: you could make some argument that the purpose of the British government is to weigh up competing sentiments to come up with a democratic decision, but this is a lot fuzzier.)
I don’t know about other people, but at least in my experience what it generally means is that if a system predictably does something most of the time you should not expect it to suddenly start doing something else just because you want it to, because it has a demonstrated tendency to do something else, regardless of what you call its purpose. For example, perhaps militaries that have a known habit of overthrowing the government have the platonic purpose of national defence, but that’s clearly not the objective you should actually expect them to pursue in real life when trying to predict their behaviour. For example, you yourself appear to believe that NEPA in actual practice serves as a mechanism for activist groups and local NIMBYs to block new projects, even though that’s obviously not what it’s original framers intended as its purpose or its platonic purpose. There may be other ways of expressing this insight, but none come to mind that are quite as catchy or good as one liners.
As an analogy with individuals, if you come across a drug addict, having a lot of drugs is not his purpose in a platonic sense, or the sense of what he ought to be doing or potentially even in the sense of what he wants to be the purpose he is pursuing, but from the standpoint of predicting his behaviour and responses to external stimulus, having a lot of drugs is clearly an important part of the utility function he actually pursues. The one liner just extends this insite to systems. Generally, from the standpoint of public policy, what matters is what a system will actually do not what it ought to be doing. I agree that the one liner is a little imprecise, and if you can think of some better replacements, I’d be happy to take you up on them, but right now I don’t think we have any better one liners that people would be better off using 2 express the underlying idea succinctly in a single line.
Basically, what the line means is that when trying to predict what a system does you should try to determine its utility function from the systems revealed preferences, instead of talking about the intentions of the people who created the system or the moral justification or moral obligations that you believe apply to the system or even the concrete intentions of any actual individual. Just as with individuals in an economy, when trying to ascertain the goals that determine a system actions, you’re better of looking at the system’s previous actions to determine how it behaves, although of course, it’s possible to overdo this and neglect the impact of changes in the people managing the system or other methods of changing its behaviour. At the end of the day, the one liner is just applying the idea of revealed preferences to systems so criticisms of revealed preferences as applied to individuals often also apply to the one liner. The best criticism that I can myself think of the one liner is that a system can be sufficiently incoherent in its behaviour that trying to ascertain its utility function through behaviour leaves you more confused and you would be better off ignoring all talk of purposes {Although honestly, I might be being too charitable here because in my experience people who use one liner often are not so much insisting that we should look at the previous behaviour of a system and instead stating that you should think about what a system will, in fact, actually do given all the relevant factors Instead of blindly acting as if it will magically do what it ought to be doing or what its platonic purpose is, which is a failure mode I see surprisingly often among some people} because the system is too incoherent to have anything close to a utility function. Although even then there are often predictable tendencies. For example, the American Supreme Court may not necessarily have a coherent utility function over a period of centuries. but it has well known tendencies, like being aligned to the wishes of Congress over a long period of time because of the manner in which its justices are appointed. So it’s generally unlikely to fight with Congress over any laws that have been overwhelmingly popular with Congress in the recent past and is more likely to block unpopular laws or laws that are popular with the general public but not so much with Congress or laws that were popular once passed, but have since lost popularity or raining in the actions of states whose preferences diverge from Congress’s. So even though it doesn’t have a coherent utility function, it’s fair to say that its purpose is not to serve as a countermajoritarian institution, but instead to prevent short-lived, majorities or rogue states with preferences very different from the federal government from acting contrary to the long-term wishes of the federal government. This is true, even though this may not have been the original intent of the framers or the objective of any actual concrete justice on the Supreme Court, because this is how the system behaves in practice.
One of your sentences here that I like and is better than POSIWID and more accurate: " ...what matters is what a system will actually do not what it ought to be doing".
It is obviously not true that those who enact rent control policies are trying to reduce supply. That is not their *purpose*. But reduced supply is (normally) the consequence and POSIWID is a call for Realism and Pragmatism and Extreme Ownership from those who can influence system design.
Is the original purpose of communism to cause mass starvation of the proletariat? No. But the people nowadays pushing communism are aware of the history of their movement. So maybe we should assume that mass starvation of all classes is their purpose. Whether or not they actually looked at previous attempts, thought "yes, these consequences are good; proceed as planned", it might be wise to wonder.
Judge politicians not by their sloganeering but by their results. Judge bureaucracies not by their stated goals but by the fruit of their labour. This, at least, is how I interpret the phrase.
Realism and Pragmatism and Extreme Ownership do not always make sense. It is hard to blame the Ukrainian military for the drawn out war even though they are a but for cause. Consequentialism sshmonshaquentialism.
And it is good to notice that my interpretation do not match the literal meaning of the words of the phrase. But I believe it does explain *usage*.
I agree that the use of POSIWID has been perverted, but I still think it can be useful. I think your first two examples fail to convince me because they counter-factually achieve curing cancer and winning wars. I think NEPA is a good example of POSIWID helping people get to the conclusion that NEPA no longer serves its original intentions.
"When a system consistently produces outcomes that point in a different direction from its stated purpose, consider that the system's true purpose might be different from its stated purpose." If you interpret it like this, POSIWID can be a good heuristic, but of course that's both a weakened version of the proverb and a steelman of its, uh, purpose.
People only say it about institutions/systems they believe are compromised
When I hear the phrase (or use it) what it usually means is
"I believe this system has been co-opted to deliver a different goal than what it's name after, and as such we're better off judging by what it actually does, not it's stated goal as it's only theatrically/aesthetically pursuing that one"
Examples that would come to mind:
Both San Francisco and Dublin (Ireland) where I live employ lots of people who they say are in charge of city planning, building houses, solving affordable housing etc. They spend the majority of their time rejecting planning applications for anything that the NIMBYs don't want. What is the true purpose of that system
The EU claims its AI Act exists to "strengthen uptake, investment and innovation in AI across the EU" - you can take that at face value, or you can look at what the system actually does.
An example from a system more nebulous than an official organization:
[People who identify as] feminists often say that the purpose of their movement is not merely a fight for the rights and wellness of women, but equality between the sexes (genders?) and dissolution of gender roles. But also [people who identify as] feminists often mock awkward, weird and romantically unsuccessful men. (An it's not even necessarily different people withing the same movement, sometimes the same people do both!) Being weird and romantically unsuccessful is failing to conform to the idealized male role, so people like that are (involuntarily) gender non-conforming, and mocking them reifies the gender roles.
If you assume that mocking weird creepy nerds is a higher-order goal of the feminist movement, it will allow you to make predictions about the future behavior of the members of the movement. Predictions like "when given a choice between not reifying gender roles and mocking a man for failing to uphold his role, a typical pop feminist (think Jezebel) will usually choose the latter". Do such predictions have more explanatory/predictive power than their inverse.
("When given a choice between a highly enjoyable gameplay loop and extracting more money from players, what will a gacha company choose?" "Will a sufficiently Javert-like policeman punish a crime committed by someone from the upper class with the same tenacity that they apply to the underclass?" "When presented with a Rotherham-like situation, will a western European judge be leaning towards harsh punishments of leniency?")
Slightly tangential, but my own theory about this tendency in (some) feminism is that it springs from a failure to pass an ideological Turing test. If (as a feminist) you think you are opposing a society [or anti-feminists, or men] that believes ‘all men are superior to women’, then pointing out and mocking inferior men undermines this claim.
Of course, most societies, anti-feminists, or men, don’t believe this. And if they did, it would miss the point. But if you’ve made that mistake about what your opponents believe, you’ll keep on debunking it.
Generally speaking, when faced with a statement such as this one, there's really 3 possibilities. The first one is that it is meant to be applied in an extremely narrow sense, to only a small subset of possibly situations. The second is that the statement is just confused nonsense. But the third one is the interesting one. It's that the statement is not meant to be taking literally, but to make you stop and think, to provoke thought. Most aphorisms fall into that category. When Nietzsche says "What does not kill me makes me stronger" it's easy to think of a thousand counter-examples, but I highly doubt Nietzsche meant this statement to be taken literally in every single situation. Nietzsche is just saying that suffering can sometimes be used as an opportunity to grow as a person.
I had never head of the statement "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does" before, and the Wikipedia page on it is not very thorough, but to me it seems exceedingly likely that this is also the intended meaning of that statement.
And this really seems like a good rule of thumb in many situations. Don't just evaluate a system by what is creators say they want, look at what it's actually doing.
To take your own example about police brutality. You casually dismiss this as an obviously unintended side effect. I think this is exceptionally naive. There are clearly people who benefit from police brutality, some of them in positions of power who have influence on how the system is set up. There are huge differences between how police works between countries. Is it purely a coincidence that police tends to be more brutal in less democratic countries? That beggars belief.
Police in the US is significantly more brutal than in other OECD countries. Why is that? Maybe Americans are just inherently unintelligent and therefore incapable of fixing the problems with their police, just like doctors are incapable of curing more than 2/3rds of cancer patients. Since I'm not American myself I don't feel qualified to comment on that hypothesis, but at face value it seems unlikely. It seems far more likely that US police is brutal because at least some powerful interest groups want it to be brutal.
It makes the most sense if you don't take it as having anything to do with intentions.
The truth at which it gestures is "This system can be relied upon to consistently produce this outcome, just as if it were designed to do so."
The point is to suggest that the "unintended side effects" are a direct result of the "rules" of the system, intentionally so or not, and therefore you can't ignore them as one-off incidents, or hope a minor patch will fix it. The system needs to be abolished, or else given a complete overhaul.
Obviously the ambiguous phrasing also allows you to assign insanely hostile and nonsensical motives to the outgroup. I would like to think this was not intention of the people who came up with the phrase, but whether it is or not, it can be relied upon to consistently produce that outcome.
The saying reminds me of politics is not about policy. Though saying the purpose is what it does is still very misleading. The purpose of all that paperwork hospitals do in the name of safety isn't to generate endless amounts of paper waste. It's to not get sued. The paper waste is a side effect. The purpose of having a bunch of police is to appear tough on crime to get reelected. Actually being tough on crime or on non-criminals that the police officers happen to not like is an unintended side-effect.
Sorry bud, you're just wrong. The purpose of Rationalism is to spawn really funny cults that reinvent Catholic and Jewish demons but they're robots from the future instead of supernatural beings from before time. Like all other things in the universe, how it impacts me is its purpose, because only my perspective matters.
In all your examples, you came with a pre-conceived notion of the purpose of the system.
You could say "The purpose of the hospital is to transfer money to Doctor's pockets, as a side effect, it cures two-thirds of cancer patients".
Or, "The purpose of the New York bus system is [To provide jobs for New Yorkers/To be a place for political appointments/ To transfer New-Yorkers], the side effect is CO2 emissions.
The "The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does" means you can't look at the *declared* reasons, because they can't be trusted. You have to actually look at what the system does - and maybe the hospital actually tries to maximize patient health and not Doctors salaries, or maybe the hospital tries to do both to some extent (Maximize patient health, but keep at least average doctor salaries).
The phrase means that when you look at declared reasons you won't see the whole picture, since declared reasons might be different from actual reasons, because the declaring the actual reasons wouldn't help the actual reasons.
Another thing, is that the phrase is more about "systems" that function for a long time, not events. So the Ukrainian Army (or the Russian Army) might have been jobs programs for political appointees, that got a war on it hands, and now have to manage that.
Or, of course, it could be both!
The Union army in the civil war had lots of Political appointees. It also won the war (Usually in spite of those appointees).
We might say "the purpose of the Ukranian military is to fight for independence, and also to sell some amount of weapons to enrich some random colonel". If you pull some lever marked "more/less of this, please", you will get both more/less independence and more/less corrupt enrichment.
We might also say "the purpose of the Ukranian military is to lose 50-100km of Ukranian territory per year in a bleak and horrible war". If you pull some lever marked "more/less of this, please", you will get a different outcome.
I think the "point" of TPOSIWIT is to accuse your opponent of misreading a situation 1 case as a situation 2 case. I'd like it if someone could come up with a general theory of what makes for a situation 1 case, and what makes for a situation 2 case, but I'm not quite able to myself.
“The purpose of a system is what it does” is a curious type of phrase, really only useful and philosophical-political debates as a cudgel, and in a very different context, uttered by a subset of the population of people who have not yet become competent engineers but are trying to do so.
The first case is where almost all the comments here seem focused.
The second case is more interesting because when that type of shallow thinking is invoked in the settings where real people are responsible for delivering physically or digitally tangible and durable results within a defined period of time and within a defined budget, they are disabused of this type of oversimplification. The entire professional domain of quality focused engineering is centered on authoring test case specifications that define virtually every type of specific positive and negative outcome, creating tooling to automate, running as many of those test as possible, and evaluating the degree to which a system works as designed.
In some of the most effective organizations I’ve been part of, and especially on the windows OS team, test case specifications are authored when a very very large project involving thousands or perhaps 10,000+ people are defined right after the fundamental objectives have been agreed upon.
But it’s also true that almost nobody creates this wheel from scratch, virtually every good large scale system is created by competent engineers, who are well aware of the successful patterns and the fragile, not durable, or overly expensive anti-patterns in system design and architecture. It’s also true that it’s possible to make a sub optimal, organizational structure work even for quite some period of time, but there are different organizational structures that are more suited for teams that have a high enough % of truly talented people versus teams composed mainly of people of average skill, tradecraft, and knowledge of patterns and anti-patterns.
tl,dr: to my ears both statements of “ the purpose of a system…” entirely fail Einstein’s dictum to avoid trying to describe something true and fundamental in terms simpler than the simplest that it possibly can be (described).
The phrase isn’t meant to literally describe every outcome of every system. It’s a proverb. Sometimes proverbs have meanings directly contradictory to other proverbs. The proverb is only useful if you know when to apply it. A less pithy but more accurate version would be “Sometimes the true purpose or an additional purpose of a system is something other than the system’s stated purpose. Even things that look like side effects are sometimes the real point of a system.”
This isn’t even always sinister. Like maybe you have a book club and the stated purpose is to read and discuss a particular book. But in reality it’s an excuse for a group of friends to get together on a regular basis. People are welcome even if they didn’t read the book, and there’s only a limited amount of discussion about the book. Once the group finishes the book, perhaps instead of members leaving to find a new book club, they start a movie night with the same friends.
I think some Stafford Beer quotes help to explain what is meant by “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
The way that I interpret it is that we should look at the actual results produced by a system rather than the intent (or unfounded claims). I think that this is especially important for government policies where positive intentions trump actual results pretty much every time.
“There is after all no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
— Stafford Beer (“The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does, Not What It Claims To Do”)
“According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.”
— Stafford Beer (Beer, S. (2002), "What is cybernetics?", Kybernetes, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 209-219)
This seems like a strange take from the author of "Meditations on Moloch"! I've always understood the term as, precisely, separating the purpose of the system in the abstract from the intentions of anyone within the system. (So people on Twitter who use it to say their outgroup is evil are misapplying it.) Policemen may individually want to deter crime, but the suboptimal policing system "wants" to cause needless brutality, in the same decentralised way that Moloch "wants" us all to wallow in the crab-bucket.
You say that they never provide examples. But in the screenshots, an example was provided: NEPA.
Someone passes a law designed to improve the environmental protection, and the effect of the law is that it makes environmental protection harder. Someone might say, "sure, that was an unintended side effect, but the purpose of NEPA is to protect the environment!" But this is incorrect, that is not the purpose of NEPA.
The purpose of a law is not based on what was in the brain of the people writing the law. That brain state is no longer operational after the law is passed. The purpose of a law is based on the effect of the law, operationally. That is the only coherent way to evaluate a law, from a policy perspective.
It's a mistake to judge such things based on intentions. A law does not have intentions, it has text, that is stored in a database or whatever, and stare decisis.
Beer's original meaning was "let's look at systems as black boxes with inputs and outputs rather than from the perspective of vibes".
If you don't like the inputs and outputs, you have to delve down (perhaps several levels) into subsystems and see how those black boxes are connected up and suggest how to rewire them somehow so you're getting the outcomes you want.
From the perspective of either big-M Management or from running the Chilean economy, something he also took on for a few years, this is all more useful than looking at systems from the perspective of the outcomes their creators wanted, and which inevitably have either changed or not entirely been achieved.
"The purpose of the Russian military is to get stalemated in Ukraine" is overly simplistic. "The purpose of the Russian military is to rely on Russia's large resource and manpower reserves rather than decisive logistics and edges in training" seems accurate to how the institution has functioned throughout the centuries.
"The purpose of cancer hospitals is to cure two thirds of cancer patients" is again too specific. "The purpose of cancer hospitals is to cure curable patients" makes this distinction general.
"The purpose of the New York Bus system is to emit four billions tons of carbon dioxide" omits that it does this "while moving people around". If the bus system belched all that CO2 while moving nobody, then it would be just the former.
I can't comment too much on whether the British system generally likes to tease and flip flop on controversial bills or not.
The statement is only incorrect when you selectively ignore part of the system's output. The key fallacy is cherrypicking / incomplete evidence, and you're correct to call that out.
There is, however, an important insight in the phrase that goes beyond your well-meaning consideration of side-effects: the stated purpose of a system and its actual goals are not necessarily the same. Consider foreign aid, which is a subject in vogue:
- Funds are often misappropriated by local elites;
- Funds are often allocated to countries which have strategic resources or some military importance;
- Funds can be tied to following specific policies or actions;
- Funds can create dependent relationships that give the donor a certain amount of influence in that country's affairs.
Additionally, we've famously seen examples in which foreign aid funding was provided to advance pet causes (e.g., the LGBT/queer stuff). To claim that all foreign aid is self-serving would be false--but it would be correct to state that some of the reasons for why it is pushed, and how much, and in what way, and where, and for what, are self-serving.
It's also true that systems change over time: gaming the system is a universal human past-time, and people with political and institutional power tend to make use of it towards that end. The fact that the American tax system is riddled with exceptions and differential treatment that is hard for an average person to make full use of, but can allow elites to pay fewer taxes (proportionally) than their secretaries: feature or flaw? The fact that H1B visas are functionally a system of indentured servitude for foreign high-skilled workers: possibly not intended, but has made it very popular with tech firms and American elites, who keep pushing it as a preferred solution to immigration.
> There is, however, an important insight (...): the stated purpose of a system and its actual goals are not necessarily the same
There's also another insight: when someone does attempt to better align a complex system to its stated purpose, the individual actors that make up the system are often incentivised to make local decisions that make sense in their individual situations but counteract the broader alignment effort.
The system as a whole ends up /behaving as though/ its purpose is what it currently does, even when no-one actually wants that.
> If a system serves you poorly, it is likely to someone else’s benefit.
Sometimes; perhaps more often in politics than elsewhere. Still, that feels like it could too strongly ascribe a human driver to the system as a whole. It feels to me a little like implying that there may be some single person who is deliberately producing the situation and can be blamed for it. It is important to be clear that this is almost never the case; this is why we talk about the system as a whole. Never ascribe to deliberate malice what can be explained by banality. The global behaviour you see from outside is often emergent, not deliberate.
Consider the average person who works for a multinational corporation. They may be broadly aware of the corporation's overall goals. They may be broadly aware of how their department contributes. However, they are far removed from the board, and the corporation's successes and failures trickle down only slowly and indirectly when they do at all; and so neither of these things is important to them personally. What is important to /them/ is keeping their job, getting the next raise, and the people they regularly interact with not being too angry with them.
They will self-describe as working for the megacorp to further the megacorp's goals, but the decisions they actually make day to day will be driven by the actual concerns above, and if and when those conflict with what the people running the megacorp say the megacorp's purpose is, the megacorp loses.
The entire corporation is made of people like this. There is (almost) no other kind of person (and if one does occur anywhere but board level, the people around them are incentivised to move them along as quickly as possible).
/Each individual part of the system/ works /to that part's benefit/. The overall result, however - how the system as a whole ends up behaving - is far removed from this, and may be far from alignment with any specific human's goals.
It's interesting that one of the quoted tweets cites Stafford Beer: "There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do."
This is the same Stafford Beer who came up with "management cybernetics" and was involved with the (sadly misrepresented?) Cybersyn project in Chile. Beer's take on systems design seems to be that a system which doesn't work as designed should be designed some more.
While POSIWID can be interpreted as an acknowledgment of the effect that human biases, cognitive limitations and preferences have on the systems those humans work in, Beer, on the other hand, believes that we can always improve the design of the system regardless of the human operators.
The quote is an example of people praising POSIWID as a great insight by citing a supposed authority on the subject who didn't really endorse what they think he endorsed. Beer had no insight on why systems don't work as intended.
I'm sorry if I sound too cynical, but the only example of a supposedly successful consulting job by Beer that I see mentioned over and over again is the Cybersyn, which was not a success. Maybe that's not the best sample of his real life work (I suspect the political angle of Cybersyn might have something to do with it), but I can't find other example.
And by successfully I don't mean value > 0; I mean value >> 0. A good enough consulting outcome should be expected from any good enough consultant. I would expect Beer to have done exceptional work, if his reputation is deserved.
Cybersyn did quite well at its nominal goals, to my understanding, but preventing a CIA-backed military coup wasn't part of the original spec. That it was succeeding so well challenged certain narratives about the type of political system it was embedded within, which other political systems - dependent on those narratives - regarded as a threat. In a sense, it overreached, triggered a higher-order feedback mechanism.
Please read my reply to Sol Hando bellow. The project was working by early 1973, and Beer was already making excuses for the lack of tangible results in April 1973.
> That it was succeeding so well
I've been unable to find any evidence of its supposed success. Just people repeating it over and over without providing any data.
wikipedia, firefox, the linux foundation, mega churches, the blue state homeless shelters
Most nonprofits are anti transparency and terrible; I believe "give directly" when they say they are highly effective *by comparison*, while believing that ubi wont help 90% of the population who doesn't under stand compound interest and the inherent lack of scale.
There are harsher criticism of wikipedia elsewhere.
If wikipedia could run for 100 years with let's estimate 5 years of income in savings, that would estimate .2% of this year's income will go to "saving wikipedia" this year.
That article doesn't bring up political causes wikipedia funds at all, which given that they have a fund may(will) be the main recipient of current good will.
Can you spell that out for me please? Because it seems like you're saying 5 years of income could run Wikipedia for 100 years (i.e. 1 year of income runs it for 20 years, or 5% of a year's income runs it for 1 year), but then jump to .2% of a year's income runs it for a year.
I'm confused about where the division by an extra factor of 25 comes from?
Most paradoxes can be resolved by simply including more qualifying weasel words in their statements, for example: "Achilles can never beat the tortoise" - paradox, but "Achilles can never beat the tortoise within two seconds" (or 32 feet if you prefer) - true.
So in this case, maybe, "The purpose of a system is not always served by what it does" or something similar.
"The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, but curing cancer is hard, so they only manage about two-thirds."
No, the purpose of a cancer hospital is provide a location that looks like a hospital, that performs cancer-treatment-like-services, and which behaves in a highly predictable way for the benefit of long-term stakeholders of the hospital.
That means things like high salaries for oncologists, excellent paperwork for governmental, insurance, and medical board compliance standards, nice air conditioning, soothing music for chemo patients, really good parking, etc, etc.
They need to cure 'enough' cancer patients to maintain their credibility AS a cancer-treatment-hospital, but not so many cancer patients that it would ruin their budget, their down-time, their credibility for paperwork compliance, their legal status as a corporate entity, etc, etc.
So, in theory, if a space-traveling time-traveling alien prophet from a strange alien religion showed up mysteriously one day and offered to cure every cancer patient in the hospital with a wave of his hands, but he refuses to provide any explanations for how that is possible, what the side-effects are, and won't stick around afterwards for a repeat performance, nor will he provide anything resembling testimony to courts of law or review boards.... A Cancer Hospital values being PREDICTABLE more than they value curing however many cancer patients they happen to have on-site that day. Magically curing a few thousand cancer patients with no explanation they can show the rest of the world for how and why that happened is a disaster for them. They'll spend the rest of their lives going up before every type of board of inquiry you can imagine.
So, the statement that a Cancer Hospital 'only' exists to cure about 2/3rds of all cancer patients, give or take, and certainly not 0% or 100%, is actually about right, from a certain cynically literal point of view.
The same argument applies to other areas too. There are a lot of perfectly good arguments that the Ukrainian Military is fundamentally un-professional and dis-organized. Most brigade commanders have good reasons not to really TRUST anyone higher-ranking than Division commanders. Ukrainian chain-of-command and front-line-assignments and manpower management and supply management above the brigade-or-division level is really messed up, and doesn't look ANYTHING like what a professional NATO-grade military organization would expect. Lots of small-scale weapon funding and weapon development in the Ukrainian military is happening using private donor funding campaigns. There are lots of excellent arguments for why both the civilian political and senior military generals in Kyiv just don't know how to exercise useful levels of control and decision-making over their own military, and are instead a cesspit of personal feuds and public relations fistfights.
But the reason why the Ukrainian military is doing as well as it is in the war is that the Russian side is EVEN WORSE. There are lots of stories about how NATO advisors can't wrap their heads around how the Ukrainian military really works, because most of the time it doesn't work, and how the Ukrainian military refuses to do things the way NATO advisors recommend, because the Ukrainians just don't have that kind of military culture that would support those kinds of planning assumptions.
And changing all that is a VERY slow process. it has been official Ukrainian Policy that they will someday join NATO as a NATO-competent military for the last 20 years or so, and they're still nowhere near achieving that. Corruption and a Russian-inherited dysfunctional professional military culture just make it SO difficult. From a certain point of view, getting stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia in Eastern Ukraine is EXACTLY the level of wealth, competence, and feasibility the Ukrainian military is 'designed' to achieve, because that's kind of the upper limit of what their fundamental national incentives and restrictions will LET them achieve. Can't design a better system or they'd have to reform their entire government or culture, can't design a worse system or they'd have lost the war already, and can't design a 'different' system, like one optimized for Pyrrhic Victories using deep-strike Special Forces raids into Moscow or a nuclear deterrent or something, because that's not the kind of assurances of personal territorial integrity that the ukrainian population actually wants to have.
The purpose of the British Government is to honor the messed up political incentives of the British political system. With first-past-the-post single-winner districts, an electorate that REFUSES to consolidate into just two parties, and a whole strange weird culture of the civil service and 'public' elite schools and 'corporate' style political parties and the finances of 'City of London' and all the other weird structural inheritances of British Governance that they refuse to do the work of changing, the purpose of being a British Prime Minister in the last 20-30 years kind of IS to stake out an unpopular position with strange incentives and twisted logic, stick to it for as long as possible in hope that something will come out of it, and then fold when enough momentum finally builds up to undeniably demonstrate that absolutely nothing will ever come of it. That's the only hope the British have left of ever accomplishing ANYTHING. Proposing major policy reforms that will simply work the first time and be widely popular stopped being an option in... 1955 or so? Ever since then, the British system has functioned to sacrifice popularity and competence on the altar of maybe hopefully possibly getting something politically done, and usually, but not always, failing.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to move enough people, at the right price point, with a politically palatable level of CO2 emissions. The current CO2 levels are exactly where they want them to be, given the available incentives and tradeoffs. Better than individual cars, worse than forcing everyone to stay at home all day, less expensive than pure electric buses with overhead transmission lines everywhere... the system is right where they want it, or at least right where it's too much trouble to bother changing.
And don't get me started on how the purpose of Major Canadian Weapons Procurement Decisions is to waste time and money while providing an opportunity for Canadian politicians of different political parties to engage in food fights with each other, because honestly, that kind of IS the purpose. Actually procuring actual weapons systems has very obviously not been a high priority of Canada's for a very long time now. This is probably related to the fact that actually having a Real Canadian Military hasn't been a priority of Canada's for a very long time now, either.
To take the post seriously, the main mgmt consulting example where this framing is useful is where you want to critique an organisations management who, through misaligned incentives, undermine an organisations stated purpose.
Think fluff charity that pays execs big salaries while frittering it away on ineffective measures. It's a powerful rhetorical device to ask "is the purpose of your charity to make snr management wealthy?"
Management consulting rightly gets a lot of criticism - but this is the kind of message that an outside view can help with, and where management consultants can actually add value.
(a) underfunded justice implies long investigations in political affairs that leads to closing casess due to too much time after they are investigated.
(b) the autonomical financing system is horrendous and funnels money from poor to rich regions eve tho the stated claim is that is done to pour money from rich to poor.
(c) Taxes by workers are spent in pensions which median value is larger than the median workers wage
Not perfect examples (nothing is crystal clear) but closer to (a) they function as intended rather than (b) Its just imperfect for the three examples
Cybernetics historically has had a big big problem with how its models are translated into lower-variety representations. What Heidegger said about "Das Licht der Offentlichkeit verdunkelt alles!", how the light of the public obscures everything, how common usage flattens words and deprives them of transformative meaning. A good example is the word "cybernetics" itself, which in regular usage just means something about computers ruling everything and not a way to govern a system. Or Stafford Beer's model of a Viable System, which looks like the Tree of Life in Kabbalah because it's trying to describe an object in like five dimensions (a dynamic autopoietic system with a metasystem) and when applied in a corporate environment it just becomes the regular 2-d static organizational chart it was meant to replace. Beer knew all this: he tried hiring singer-songwriters to write popular versions of cybernetics in song form, recorded podcasts, wrote his books with different colored pages and different styles representing different orders of languages. Heidegger would say that to prevent "Das Licht der Offentlichkeit verdunkelt alles!" you should try to be obscure on purpose, so only people who really intend to understand you dig into your work and the rest just say that they don't understand it. Whatever.
What the phrase means is that if you're really trying to win wars but you only get a stalemate, then you should do something different or understand that winning the war is not actually what your trying to do. Maybe the war serves a purpose in a different level of recursion, since the delimitations of where a system begins and ends are arbitrary and subjective, they depend upon your intentions. So maybe try an intervention in a different level of recursion. If "curing cancer patients" actually means that you don't want people dying from cancer then maybe you should focus your efforts on trying to prevent cancer so you'll have more resources to cure whatever cases you do end up getting. Beer emphasized that a cyberneticist should generally try to anticipate and steer away from problems insted of solving them, because it's way easier to dodge an iceberg than dealing with the consecuences of crashing straight into it. Preventing wars instead of winning them, not designing your economy so as to have four billion tons of carbon dioxide emmited just so people get where they have to be and so on.
It's not done because usually if you prevented something from happening, then it didn't happen and you can't claim credit for it. That's another example of POSIWID: the purpose was getting credit. In the case of the British Government, flip-floping in policy could be seen as a way to prevent civil wars from erupting aroud sensitve issues. They used to have them all the time when they didn't flip-floped in policy and haven't had one in a while so I'd say they are succeding, at least in that.
The obviously false corollary is: “every system is succeeding perfectly all the time.”
A better framing that gets at a grain of truth here is something like: “If a system has a surprising and persistent failure mode, consider the hypothesis that those who run the system have an incentive to keep it that way.”
Novel phrasing 1: Downstream consequences which became emergent without intent can become load-bearing.
Novel phrasing 2: Systems can become dependent not only on a component's intended functionality but also on its unintended side-effects.
A made-up example: I write a software library to create database records of every customer purchase. I think its purpose is to record store purchases. Some idiot on another team has been hashing those database entries as a randomness source. Now, because of POSWID we have to hire a guy to buy small items from the store all through the off-hours so we don't run out of randomness. I tell the team to just use their /dev/random file for their random source but the system works so there's no incentive to change it. I actually built a randomness engine without realizing it.
I think you're being overly literal. But also some of the people who use that phrase are using it in an overly literal way.
I've always interpreted the phrase to mean "Treat a system as if it does what it does, instead of what it is intended to do". That is, it is a reminder that the known consequences of keeping a system are necessarily part of the intent of keeping that system.
I think it's more accurate to say that if a system continues to produce some effect, then that effect is not against the purpose of the system.
The police solve crimes and maintain order, but they also beat people up. Beating people up is not against the purpose of the system. I think I could write a pretty convincing argument that this is specifically true - some violence from the police works in tandem with their purpose of maintaining order by keeping people in line.
Emitting carbon is not against the NYC bus lines.
A stalemate is not against Ukraine's military purpose. Now this one is interesting, because I think this is true, and I think we can walk the argument out that it's true. Ukraine doesn't want to conquer Russia, it just wants Russia to back down. Ukraine cannot defeat Russia's attack, but needs outside support, so Ukraine wants to limit what they do such that they do not alienate the West. The Taliban defeated the United States, often by using some extreme measures. The Taliban is much weaker than Ukraine, and the United States much stronger than Russia. If Ukraine fought like the Taliban, then they would likely lose their country but could eventually force Russia to leave. But that's not the point of Ukraine's military. They would lose Western support in such a war, and also lose their status as a country, even if they eventually got it back. So a stalemate is a better outcome than what it would take to win.
The Taliban had some positional advantages which Ukraine lacks - Afghanistan is mostly mountains and desert, rather than wide-open plains and rivers, and they're not one of the world's leading wheat exporters. Not a key choke point on any trade routes, either.
Regardless how much it's got in the bank, an empire (at least, one that's worthy of the name, rather than imminently drowning in its own incompetence) won't spend more to capture a chunk of territory than it expects that territory to eventually pay back. That puts a cap on how much any empire would willingly pay to take and hold Afghanistan. All the Taliban needed to do was make the occupation more expensive than that, and they had natural terrain hazards helping every step of the way. Ukraine is a bigger prize, thus faces a proportionately larger enemy budget from prospective conquerors. They also have fewer mountains to retreat to when the going gets rough.
For about quarter of a year, Ukrainian steppe is so muddy that heavier vehicles don't have a chance to move anywhere but on roads - a major limit on mechanized assaults.
Plus, the plains are very "surveillable", hiding from anything that observes you is very hard, and in the era of drone warfare, moving over open fields is just pure hell.
Ukraine isn't an easy battlefield by any means. Afghanistan is harder, but the difference between the intrinsic hazards is smaller than it would seem. The Russians are bogged down in a bloody stalemate for a good reason.
You're not entirely wrong, but I don't think you're right either. The US spent far more than is at all reasonable to hold Afghanistan for 20 years, with no hope of ever recouping the costs. The USSR did pretty much the same thing in the same country back in the 80s.
Whatever reason the world's two strongest powers decided to bog down there for extended and expensive campaigns, it definitely wasn't to gain money or resources.
Ukrainian forces are able to do the same things for the same reason that the Taliban could hold down stronger powers. Ukraine just needs a bigger and more advanced military to do that, given fewer structural advantages from terrain and geography.
The problem with quoting aphorisms like this is that it misses the context - specifically the context of a management consultant (viz. Stafford Beer) who spends his entire life being told about systems his clients have put in place, with some stated purpose in mind. Those systems do not achieve their stated purposes, but can be continually defended against change by re-stating the purpose - this shouldn't work, but in practice it often does, because most people aren't great at decoupling intent from outcome. "The purpose of a system is what it does" is a good rhetorical counter, because it acknowledges that, in practice, any continuation of a system with known outcomes is a tacit acceptance of those outcomes as the system's real purpose. You don't get to claim some other "real" purpose once you know what the outcomes are.
> My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying.
Another good quote to illustrate the dynamic is Pournelle's Iron Law:
"
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
"
Which, after a certain length of time, makes it increasingly true to say about a given organization that "the purpose of organization X is to enforce it's rules and control it's promotions, in service to what the organization actually DOES, which is Y, and not particularly in accordance to what the organization was ESTABLISHED to do, which is Z."
Edit:
The military version is "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept", which basically means, if it's not important enough to instantly stop what you're doing and address it, then you're basically accepting that it's within the range of acceptable behavior. You can define what an organization actually DOES by watching all the things that officers DON'T stop their walk past when they see it.
If soldiers gambling with dice or cards while allegedly stationed on watch is something an officer will just walk past , then the organization is more of a gambling organization than it is a standing-on-watch organization.
Which explains SO MANY problems with Russian or North Korean or Afghani or other dysfunctional alleged militaries....
I always thought of it as a way to make it clear that many ideas just work poorly no matter the intention, and so, one should look exclusively at the consequences.
The classical example being communism, which keeps being defended on the basis of "actually it's all about ending poverty and giving prosperity to all, what do you mean you're against that?".
But the people in your screenshots are using it to accuse other people of actually being evil and having bad intentions instead, which interestingly is kind of the opposite.
So, I don't know. I guess that, whatever the intention of the phrase, it's not working. (Q.E.D.???)
Come on. The purpose of a sentence is not how it is used. Yes, Stafford Beer introduced POSIWID to emphasize that the true purpose of any system should be understood through its actions and outcomes, not just its stated objectives or intentions. But he was interested in how systems sustain themselves and which feedback loops (!) in them were working to maintain themselves. Not purely results. People being people on X are of course going to misunderstand this more complex principle or abuse for their own purposes (I wonder what POSIWID says about that).
In the hospital example, Beer might look at the feedback mechanisms and find that the hospital is actively working against cancer growth but fails for benign reasons.
To use an example where Beer might find feedback mechanisms that differ from the stated goals, one might consider a broken education system: It still claims to educate students, but looking at the feedback mechanisms, it might be more accurate to describe it as actually trying to reduce costs, serve minorities, or promote propaganda (depending on the case).
Obviously markets are not so efficient that they never have significant swings or that no one ever manages to get rich. They are efficient only in a trivial sense that beating a market is hard and if you managed to do it, then this only improves the efficiency of the markets. So if you think that you are beating the market, you are probably not.
Likewise, yes sure, the purpose of the system isn't literally what it does. But if some system keeps existing the way it is and keeps doing the things that it's doing, then it really might be the case that the things we consider unintended side effects are, in fact, features, not bugs.
The fact that the meme has not, to my knowledge, successfully or widely diffused into a close language like french could be a clue of its vacuousness. That's not an absolute rule, sometimes stupid things get viral in a second everywhere thanks (or not) to social media, however, it is unlikely that a really smart idea do not pass a (moderate) language barrier.
> To deter Russian aggression? Maybe, but this assumes Russia wants to aggress, but why would they do that? To prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?
> Me? I live in a European country, I don't want Ukraine to suddenly start expanding out in a war against the rest of Europe, that seems like it could get my society in danger.
Oh come on. So Russia is a totally peaceful country, and all its neighbors who got attacked they totally brought it on themselves. And Ukraine is the true aggressor who attacked Russia first, and if succeeds, will attack EU next. Do you really believe this?
What about other conflicts: Is Transnistria also Russia's desperate attempt to prevent Moldova from conquering Europe? What about Chechnya? Georgia?
I don't live in Russia, my point is winning wars-plural-nonspecifically is not best done by defending against Russia, it's best done bullying weaker countries. I don't think Ukraine would actually do this which is part of why I say the purpose of the Ukrainian military isn't to win wars.
This strikes me as a particularly low effort post for you, but maybe the obvious “what it does” didn’t occur to you: it makes people money. Let me rephrase some of your examples and see if you still think the purpose is so obvious:
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to recoup investment in cancer research.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is a make-work program for the global defense industry.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to sell four billion tons of carbon dioxide worth of fuel.
I’d like to propose an equally non-specific but novel rephrasing: *Plausible deniability eventually loses its plausibility.*
Even gesturing at the plausible part and saying “oh come on, surely you see that it’s plausible!” (like you’re doing here) eventually stops working.
Government and oil producers are effectively the same they. We’ll literally go to war to maintain their access to (privatized) oil profits, you don’t think we would create the world’s most bloated public transit system?
No, they aren't the same they. For a long time the US was a net oil importer, now it is a net oil exporter. The nature of the US government didn't radically change via that.
Thank you! This phrase always seemed to awkward to me. Obviously systems often do things they weren't intended to do. You have to use a different definition of "purpose" than common understanding to make the statement remotely true. And the definition of "purpose" you have to use is... "what something does", which makes it a tautology.
I like how the phrase inspires people to think beyond what a system is supposed to do and look at the actual end results when judging a system. But to inspire that analysis without being unnecessarily confusing, you could just say "The value of a system is determined by what it does, not it's purpose."
I think the Catholic principle of double effect is helpful here. This often comes up in the case of eg delivering a baby pre-viability because the mom has an infection that will progress to sepsis and death if she and the baby aren’t separated.
The three criteria are:
-the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral;
-the agent intends the good effect and does not intend the bad effect, either as a means to the good or as an end in itself;
-the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect and the agent exercises due diligence to minimize the harm
And I think it’s the second that’s most relevant to POSIWID. If the system could switch to doing the good without the bad, would it happily make the switch?
POSIWID means "The actions of organizations frequently reveal higher purposes than their purported purposes".
Not "everything a system does is its purpose", but "whatever a system prioritizes above its purported purpose is its revealed higher purpose".
For example, the California public school system's purported purpose is to educate children, but their actions reveal that their higher purpose is to provide good jobs and good retirements for teachers and administrators without regard for actual educational performance. POSIWID.
If there's any insight to be gained from POSIWID (and yes, it's minimal), it's that revealed preferences beat stated preferences.
You linked the Wikipedia article, and one of the tweets you quoted also includes an extra sentence from the person who originally coined the phrase:
"There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.", which can be traced back to:
Stafford Beer (1985) Diagnosing the system for organizations Wiley, p. 99.
Unfortunately Internet Archive won't let me borrow it.
I'm not expecting the source material to be that much better, but with the extra quote it's a little clearer what he's talking about. A hospital doesn't constantly fail to cure cancer and so can claim to in fact have that purpose. A homeopathic clinic cannot.
Not an expert in this area, but I've heard from people who are that oncologists very deliberately do not use the term "cure" in their practice. They speak of cancer being "in remission," which means "we can't see the cancer active in your body at the moment," but they know all too well that this doesn't necessarily mean it's gone. In far too many cases, it ends up coming back within a few years. Some people get their cancer driven into remission and then have it return multiple times, in fact.
POSIWID is fundamentally amoral—it encourages you to see what is actually happening, not what you or the people involved wish were happening. There is also an element of consistency to it: if a system only occasionally falls short of its stated purpose, or if it is getting closer to that purpose every day, that is different than a system that has consistently failed to achieve said purpose for 250 years.
I found it odd you never included Stafford Beer's quote "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do". Think about that in terms of your examples. Was it constantly the case that 2/3 of cancer patients die while 1/3 survive? No, my understanding is that the survival rate used to be lower. However, you could say it's a constant that SOME cancer patients die, so the purpose of cancer possible can be to cure some people and manage the deaths of others. In a war, the success of one side's military means failure to the other, so success vs failure isn't a constant for them (even within a war, often even the losing side will have some successes). The British government's policies don't constantly fail, some get passed. And the emissions of the NY bus system aren't constant either.
I see it as a rhetorically helpful way of saying “skill issue”, even if theoretically vacuous. Basically, when you see something poorly designed, consider that it wasn’t designed for you.
Two sub-points: (a) drawing attention to purposeful selection effects and (b) redirecting blame/agency from the system to the user.
(a) “Man I wish it were so much easier to send a message to my congressman” POSIWID—no they don’t want to make it easier to get messages from you
(b) “Hmm I keep getting ripped off because I don’t know Corporate Speak” POSIWID—investing in learning Corporate Speak or hiring an agent is a credible signal that you won’t be rip-off-able
1. The phrase is a bit hyperbolic and tongue-in-cheek, using the language of teleology to defend pure naturalism. In Aristotelian philosophy one of the four causes was the telos, the end towards which the thing was arranged. This end could be natural or designed, but the telos of an acorn was to become an oak tree, even if other conditions conspired to not make that happen. This is largely rejected once modern science comes about; scientists don't say that the potentiality to become an oak tree is inherent to every acorn. If the acorn's physical status and the conditions surrounding it support the grown of an oak tree out of the acorn, that's what happens, but that is describable entirely in terms of its efficient and material causes, and a teleological cause is unnecessary.
So while someone may have an intended purpose (set of outcomes) for a system when they build it, the system as it actually exists is what it is and does not have that telos baked into it; it's describable entirely in terms of efficient and material causes, so whatever language of "purpose" you want to use shouldn't extend beyond that; the system's "purpose" is what it does.
In fact, I suspect even Aristotle would agree that the expressed purpose for a thing by the creator isn't necessarily its telos if the creator sucked at making the thing badly enough, though I'd have to revisit the text to remember for sure.
2. Maybe the guy was so fed up with people dismissing logical explanations of mechanical things with "but that's not what it's supposed to do!" he decided leaning really hard in the other direction was valuable. The wikipedia article for the phrase quotes him as saying it's a good "starting point". So again, perhaps some slight hyperbole to say "a system does what it does, not necessarily what the creator wanted it to do".
Amusingly, insofar as it's causing confusion by people saying e.g. the creator's purpose for a system is what it does (which is obviously wrong as it implies infallibility in all system creation) it's a poorly designed phrase by its own judgement as it is doing something contrary to the purpose of its creator.
All four of the examples provided at the top can be debated. Let me make a point regarding the Ukraine, probably the one I know most about all four: "The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia."
This has been openly stated by various members of the US government over the last three years ("bleed Russia white" has been a particularly popular phrase). The calculation is that the mass killing of Russians and the crippling of their country is in the US’ benefit, given that it's understood (by those who know) that you can't actually defeat the world's foremost nuclear power, at least not without a nuclear Armageddon.
This not my opinion. It's what President Biden told adviser Jake Sullivan: that Russia’s credible nuclear threat put the US in the conundrum from which the years-long stalemate with Russia has emerged. This is Biden, quoted in Robert Woodward's recent book on the topic:
“If we do not expel Russia completely from Ukraine, then to some extent we will allow Putin to achieve what he wants. And if we manage to kick them out, we risk nuclear war. Putin will not allow himself to be driven out of here without the use of nuclear weapons. So we're stuck. Too much success - nuclear, too little - incomprehensible long-term consequences.”
But what about the famous anti-corruption police force of Sovietistan? The one that vowed to root out corruption—only to discover that all the corruption was systematically located in the only credible opposition to their glorious leader?
And what about their national statistics bureau, whose mission was to deliver accurate data on the economy, yet somehow always managed to prove that the glorious leader’s unhinged economic policies were a roaring success.
I agree with Scott that in well-functioning democracies, this heuristic doesn’t yield much groundbreaking wisdom. But most governments aren’t Scandinavia or Vermont. Many are corrupt, authoritarian, and often both—and in those cases, "the purpose of a system is what it does" doesn’t strike me as nearly so dumb.
The point of this saying is to identify what Yarvin would call "power leak".
Any system with power is initially set up to accomplish some legitimate goal. Then, because it has power, bad actors who want power for other reasons are attracted to the system. They become part of the system and gradually, partially, corrupt it.
The list of "things systems do" is not just "work toward goal", "unintended consequences" and "mistakes". It also includes "get more power" and "redirect power to members".
People look at a system that's been corrupted, see that some of the system's power is directed not to the initial legitimate goal, but toward the members' personal (or political or social or whatever) goals, and they say The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does.
So, yes, taking it at its explicit meaning, it's usually wrong. But if you interpret it as a kind of immune response to power leak, it's almost always correctly applied.
"As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.
"But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work."
I think this is a case for using the POSIWID rhetoric - or anything where agents can be said to be after the side effects more than the notional purpose.
How do the companies overcome the free-rider problem?
If one company decided to reduce the workday to e.g. 6 hours, it would have practically no effect on their sales (unless they mostly sell to their own employees), and it could make them wildly popular, so they could choose among the best potential employees.
I agree with this post, but it feels at odds with rationalist consequentialism, which measures the value of an act by what it does. If you combine that with the point someone made earlier about consistency—that if a system keeps on doing the same thing even if it doesn’t actually achieve its stated purpose, what it does is its _real_ purpose—then you end up kinda at POSIWID.
As lots of people have pointed out here, POSIWID is the doctrine of revealed preferences, only for institutions/systems rather than individuals.
I can't see above that anyone has really tried to tease out what the differences are between these two levels - and I think that these differences are the most important, because they drive lots of (bad) political thinking. So I'll try to do that.
An individual can have preferences for doing certain things, and the doctrine of revealed preferences says that we know what those preferences are by observing their actions. Individuals also have explicit commitments, which will in general imperfectly match their revealed preferences.
An institution, properly speaking, doesn't have preferences. It can have institutional objectives, which we assume will be explicitly stated; and it will also have unintended outcomes. Some unintended outcomes are simple, obvious, and innocuous results of their operations (e.g. a shop takes up space - this is not a stated objective, but is an inevitable effect of its business operations). Some unintended consequences will be more socially salient (e.g. gentrifying); and others may contradict or subvert their explicit goals (e.g. Google declared it wouldn't be evil, but occasionally was evil).
When an individual has socially salient impacts, we hold that individual responsible for them. E.g., if you smell, you're responsible for it, and you're expected to be able to read the social signs around you. So there's a natural mechanism of accountability that comes from you being a competent social actor. If an individual's actions have impacts that run contrary to their stated goals, we see them as a hypocrite or a loser. In some cases, as in addiction, we see them as ill.
When an institution has socially salient impacts, there may not be any direct feedback. An institution is not a person; it's not expected to know what it's doing. And even if it does know, there may be no mechanism to change what it does. The institution of the limited company may be responsible for the ongoing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Companies can be expected to be aware of this social impact, because Piketty has told them. But the institution of the company is not a conscious actor. Even if it accepts the critique, it can't act to change itself.
When an institution's actions run contrary to its stated intentions, there should be some kind of legalistic way to intervene in the institution (assuming it is a legal entity, not a more nebulous social convention). But the process is slow and difficult. So again, you can't expect a fast response. When you point out to a vegan that they're wearing leather shoes, they might take the shoes off right there in front of them, throw them away, and never buy leather again. If you point out to Walmart that it is immiserating local communities that it professes to enrich, the execs in the company might not have the tools to change its actions, even if they believe you.
That said... people have pointed out above lots of cases where an institution has some really obvious impacts that are bad/contrary to its stated goals, and could be changed, and yet are not changed by informed decision makers. In those cases, it seems that the revealed preferences vs stated commitments model can in fact be transferred onto these institutions, and offers some insight.
This was fun! It is a version of cynicism being mistaken for wisdom, because it's much easier to appear cynical than do the work of figuring things out.
There is some truth in the idea, certainly. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital my whole career, and Pournelle's Iron Law was a good reminder that not everyone was on the same page. But even then, during the worst of budget cuts and infighting everyone was at least devoted to SOME aspect of what the overall goal was supposed to be. The bureaucracy wishes to perpetuate itself, yes, and bends rather inexorably in that direction. Yet it also brings in fresh new people every year who are there because they want to fix/make/deliver what it says on the masthead.
I think you could steelman it as "the purpose of retaining a system is to continue to obtain its effects" -- that is, it's a statement about the kind of systems that continue to exist over time, not the instantaneous performance of a particular action.
I think it should always be in quotations because it's clearly not meant as a general logical proposition. It seems to me the idea is to consider the systems inputs/outputs and discern it's unstated purposes.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to bill patients as much as possible and create prestige for the doctors/employees. Hmmm? How could we change this structure if we wanted this system to cure more cancer patients?
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to extract US and international support and aid. Hmmm? If our purpose is to defend Ukrain and defeat it's enemies, is this structure/gambit the best option?
The purpose of the British government is to make tea or whatever happens in Britain. Hmmm? Isn't coffee better than tea?
The purpose of the New York bus system is to fund a pension scheme and create municpal jobs. Hmmm? How could we change this structure if we wanted this system to provide better/cheaper public transport?
The hospital example actually strikes as exactly the point of the expression. One might naively (by, say, looking at a mission statement) that the point of a cancer hospital is to cure all the patients.
But, if you looked more closely, you'd quickly discover that losing patients at a cancer hospital does not create a sense of organizational crisis in the same way that, say, planes crashing into one another does for the aircraft control system. There's not an investigation into why a given patient died. Staff are not disciplined. Managers are not replaced. And so, a pretty fair characterization of what a cancer hospital is trying to do is cure patients at about the same rate as comparable hospitals cure comparable patients (I assume 2/3 stands in for this above). This is how the organization is actually defining its own goal in practice, and a sense of crisis or failure would only come if the cure rate started to drop well below this benchmark.
Similarly, a lot of militaries *do* exist to lose or stalemate wars but to do so in a way that tends towards positive political results. If you're facing down a far superior enemy, you're not hoping for a battlefield victory. You're hoping to do something else like hold out long enough to secure outside intervention, lose in a way that attracts public support, or stalemate things long enough that circumstances eventually change. But "your job is to die in a way that buys time and may eventually produce a shift in public opinion favorable to our cause" is not a good slogan for motivating soldiers and so organizations rarely publicly talk in those terms.
I think there are too many systems that fail to take into account the incentives the system creates, and then after some time, people figure out how to hack the system and just play the incentives. And then the system is sort of ruined. How is that controversial?
There are also a lot of systems that aren't created so much as they just emerge, and these systems can have all sorts of problems.
I think this is an over-reduction of what the phrase is supposed to mean and how it is most meaningfully used.
I mean first of all, I agree with you that the phrase is used stupidly - as most phrases are by the public that wants to say clever things. But I also believe there's plenty of baby in the bathwater, as there usually is. The public uses everything stupidly, which means unfortunately conversations like this are necessary.
Here are two examples I can think of, where the phrase most certainly applies in my opinion.
We all know at this point that Instagram and TikTok seem to hook young kids on endless short-form content. It has been long enough, and things have gotten bad enough, and people like Mark Zuckerberg have been informed enough by now, for us to just admit to ourselves: the purpose of Instagram/TikTok is literally and factually to make kids addicted to their screens. It's utterly naive to pretend otherwise at this point. Zuckerberg knows it and so do we. And further, that has always been his intention. He has made it totally clear with his reckless abandon of any systematic principles other than "higher screen time."
We all know at this point that American consumers spend utterly obscene prices for pills/medications in this country. And we also know that doctors have been incentivized for the last couple of decades to continue prescribing pills instead of holisitic, lifestyle, or alternative approaches to medical problem solving. Therefore, we can safely say that the purpose of this system is what it does: to make the American public not only addicted to pills, but to overcharge for those pills. In other words, to enslave the American public to a medical-pharmaceutical system that does not care, at all, whether their problems are solved, and in fact wants them not to be. Are there still doctors who care? Yes, of course. Are there still clinics that approach medicine holistically? Yes, of course. But the "system," as it is currently designed, is the complete opposite when taken as a whole.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a corrupt system. I agree with your point. But some things are. And those are the cases that this phrase is for. People have just ruined the phrase by using it for things they don't like - same way they've done with the word "gaslighting."
The two losing armies: my husband when he was little occasionally accompanied his grandfather on his rural food delivery route.
They pulled over one time, and got out of the truck, as a long funeral procession went by. The custom then.
Why are we doing this? the little boy asked.
To show respect because someone’s passed, the grandfather answered.
What if there are two funerals? wondered the little boy, which question the grandfather filed away in the things kids say file, which is how I heard of it.
But of course, the child really did imagine that things would come to a halt.
Maybe the dissonance is in the interpretation of what we talk about when we talk about "what it does." The interpretation in this article seems to be something like "the observed behavior of a system directly defines it" -- i.e. how you say if an army is losing wars, its purpose is to lose wars (which I agree is how POSIWID is written).
But in the systems thinking/cybernetics community, it's used more to mean "observed behaviors of a system (what it does) tell us more about the goals and incentives in the system (its purpose) more than its explicit mission statement." Kind of a shorthand for "work backwards from what you observe if you want to understand the incentives"
Speaking of the purpose of a hospital, an example that always comes to mind for me:
I have a friend with chronic kidney issues (true story, not a thought experiment hypothetical). He had already had a transplant, but his body had rejected the initial kidney. He managed to match with a program for another donation, and it happened to be the program with the highest success rate for kidney transplants in the country. But after several appointments he was rejected from the program for "high risk of non-compliance" -- even though he had a perfect record of compliance from his first transplant. After talking to some others, he learned this hospital had an incredibly high rejection rate for reasons that usually didn't match the facts. Essentially, in order to be the program with the highest success rate, they rejected any patient that had even a moderately risky surgery.
The program's stated mission said something about helping everyone with kidney issues improve their lives, but that mission statement was clearly a lie. The purpose of the program was to accumulate prestige, so what it did was to condemn people with kidney issues to lead worse lives, in order to maintain their prestige.
I wouldn't say "the purpose of the program was to condemn people with kidney disease"
I agree strongly with this, but need to point out it's yet another entry in the "Scott, who used to be so good at applying the principle of charity, paints an argument he doesn't like in the worst possible light" genre. That's quickly becoming the number one purpose of this blog.
My idiot friends who use this phrase genuinely believe that not only is the system failing to do things, it's not even attempting to do those things. The correct analogy would be a hospital that has "cure cancer" as its mission statement, but all patients are given infinite paperwork to ensure they'll never be admitted. At that point you can at least assume that the system has purposes other than its stated mission.
I think it's important to push back on this! Governments are inefficient by design but that inefficiency is in place to support government's mission, not undermine it. More importantly, government does attempt to do these things, makes gradual progress towards them, and provides a host of benefits to its constituents. Unfortunately, the human mind's tendency to ignore victories and seek out failures is amplified a million times by social media's corrosive lens. As a result there is appetite on both left and right for doing away with checks and balances, throwing out entire successful parts of society, vesting power in one or two trusted individuals, and letting them have free rein to accomplish group goals. This is less likely to work out well than the current system.
If I wanted to push back, though, I couldn't send them this article that calls them an idiot and mischaracterizes their position.
But if the government is inefficient by design, wouldn't that mean it's designed to not do things? If the problem is that the government is failing to provide ample benefits, perhaps it would be better if the government was designed to actually be able to do things.
No. To be fair I was using the term "inefficient" provocatively. A better way to phrase it might be:
People hate the fact that government works procedurally, instead of based on achieving its ends, but the only way government has the legitimacy to act is by working procedurally.
This is a broader issue, but a narrow example might be a court case where you saw the defendant shoot and kill someone and have asked the state to bring charges against him. You saw the crime happen, so from the inside view the "efficient" solution is that the police put him in jail for 30 years or whatever you think the correct punishment is. In fact, let's assume the dude is obviously guilty, and everyone knows it. So there's no reason not to put him in jail for 30 years.
Instead, the police take him to the police station, and ask you to repeat all the stuff you just told them at your house. They then take that statement to a magistrate, who writes out an arrest warrant, and put the defendant in jail temporarily.
A bail hearing is held and the defendant gets a lawyer. You have to come back to court and repeat the same stuff you already said. It's been months, and nobody has yet put the obviously guilty defendant in jail.
Let's say that instead of all that, we get rid of process and let the judge pursue this legitimate government goal in the manner he sees fit. This frees up a lot of bandwidth for quickly and efficiently accomplishing government goals.
The police just call the judge, the judge writes out a 30-year sentence on the grounds of "oh come on" and the defendant goes to jail.
But then that judge retires and the next judge doesn't like his conclusions, so he just releases all the folks that judge imprisoned. Or the guards at the jail happen to know the dude, have no set process they must follow, so they let him go. Or this judge gets one super wrong, it goes viral, and there's a huge protest demanding all his inmates get released.
Because democratic government relies on the consent of the governed, we need a method for checking that we have that consent. Which means using inefficient "process-based" methods instead of efficient "results-based" methods. Those process-based methods can still be the most effective way of getting results.
You can certainly take this idea too far, and in fact I think we definitely do in the U.S. But the people I'm critiquing don't get the idea at all. They think that if we are not taking the most direct route to their specific policy goals, government is in some way corrupt. That's untrue and will harm our ability to do things in the long run.
But what even is the purpose of the justice system if the public does not feel that justice is being served? That's the entire point of having one in the first place! As far as public perception is concerned, what's important is not that the system is objectively fair, but that those perceived as having sinned are appropriately punished. If it fails to do that in an efficient matter, people are going to take matters into their own hands, either by dispensing justice themselves or by changing the system.
And the system is being changed as we speak. We'll get to see first-hand whether or not this new order is more sustainable than liberal democracy.
Well I'd distinguish between the point of the justice system being "giving the public the perception that justice is being served" and "serving justice," but I'm the one arguing that legitimacy is a problem.
I guess what I'm saying is that in an anything goes system, I foresee a lot more progress being undone than in a slow and steady proceduralist one, as the whims of the public and public officials shift and churn. I don't really see North Korea or Russia as having robust, successful public works programs. I guess China does, but China is also somewhat proceduralist, just less answerable to the public.
"You are what you do, not what you say you'll do."
Again, the purpose (motive, intent, goal) of a person who is a lazy bum despite talking productivity mantras is not be a lazy bum, the person is just failing at the stated goals.
Could the phrase have been intended differently but became what it is now due to the ambiguity of the word purpose?
Leading me to this meta:
The meaning of a quote is not what was intended by the original author but what it is quoted to support.
Here's an example that is "sort of" POASIWID: regulatory capture. Strictly speaking, only individuals have purposes, which they might hold in common with some other individuals. If some set up a government regulatory agency (a system) to accomplish something, say, regulate an industry, and then other individuals take over the system and use it to benefit the industry with protection and market power, I suppose that's an example of POASIWID. "Regulatory capture" is a far more precise and clear name, though, and as POASIWID seems entirely confused, for the reasons ACT gives.
I think POSIWID applies when the system consistently performs contrary to its stated goals. No hospital can save every patient; some will die due to limited resources, human error, complexity of disease, and other factors. A well-run hospital would promote doctors with superior track records, optimize its supply chain, invest into medical research, etc. But a hospital that keeps losing patients while promoting doctors based solely on their fundraising ability and spending the bulk of its money on PR and investment opportunities -- such a hospital is subject to POSIWID.
I'm confused. It IS the purpose of the cancer hospital to cure 2/3 of the patients. They know that they can't cure them all and they are doubtlessly making long term plans with this information in mind, no?
The question is, are they even trying to improve the number of people they can cure? Because there doesn't seem to be any meaningful incentive to do so.
If the cancer hospital invests in cancer research too then they cure 2/3 of patients while investing money into research. That is their purpose and the thing they do. The fact that this is their purpose might become relevant if there were an expensive new miracle treatment on the market that could cure 5/6 of their patients but it using it would cost them their whole research budget.
I think one way of putting it is that the outputs of the system have explanatory power over and above just being "side effects" of a system supposedly "optimised" for its explicit purpose.
In the case of the (presumed USA) cancer-hospital system, "what it does" includes, among other things:
- Curing 2/3 of patients
- Compensating oncologists and other medical staff highly
- Accruing a bunch of money for a company or charitable institution
- Managing legal risks by (among other things) declining to try to treat at least some marginal patients that they could otherwise treat
- Conveying social status to staff
It's not wrong per se to describe this all as "trying to cure cancer patients but doing so is difficult", but I see POSIWID as making the testable claim that you see a different equilibrium that biases further towards the other outcomes you see in practice, as compared to a hypothetical system purely optimised for its nominal main goal.
(In this case, it could mean something like: maybe the cancer hospital could actually cure slightly more than 2/3 of patients overall by posting the less urgent ones off to a different country with lower medical costs or more capacity, and then focusing their resources on the most urgent ones; yet they don't do that, why?)
In the same way that YOLO is basically just carpe diem for stupid people, I feel like POSWID is just the uneducated shorthand for Public Choice Theory. You lose all the good insights when you dumb it down.
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is a way of momentarily ignoring what people /say/ the purpose of a system is, and instead focusing on what it actually achieves. It's not the /only/ lens worth using, but it's an important one. Because Purpose as "socially agreed reason for existence" can often drift from the actual perpetuation and consequence of a system.
You should know this, you've written on it.
"The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to win wars" vs "Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!"
"The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide." vs "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!"
I would suggest that X/Twitter are not the best space to learn this, as the phrase is /also/ a snappy sazen and some people only understood the snappyness without understanding the lesson it encapsulates.
I had never looked into it but I always assumed it was an engineering phrase. Like if you have a widget that was designed to do floating point bend straws but in doing so it heats up to 500 degrees you can also use it to heat up the drinks that the straws are being prepared for. It's purpose is now to do both, kind of like a death of the artist analysis.
Some statements are contradictory. How can the purpose of evolution simultaneously be maximizing inclusive fitness and making most species go extinct (which is what it does)?
This is a minor amendment, but I think the examples are bad in that it should be "the purpose of a system is what it does compared to its nonexistence". So I think e.g. "the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get caught in a bloody stallate with the Russians instead of the Russians conquering the country" or "the purpose of cancer wards is to cure two thirds of cancer patients" are reasonable takes. That's effectively what they're there to do.
Of course it would be nice if they could do better, but we've accepted that's not doable and it's largely out of bounds - like how airlines' purposes is to fly people places over several hours (and not instantly teleport them).
Where this gets spicy is when we disagree over what the alternative world is. For example, the New York MTA spends 10-20x more to build subways than other countries. Is the alternative "no MTA exists" (so the purpose of the MTA is to provide public transit) or "an average-competency by global standards transit agency exists" (in which case the purpose of the MTA is to make transit worse and more expensive while giving kickbacks to unions and comfy jobs to political insiders).
Or to make an example more sympathetic to the second interpretation: let's assume your local hospital has a cancer ward that randomly poisons half the patients it saves. The first interpretation (the alternative is no cancer ward) would say its purpose is to save one third of cancer patients (clearly good!). The second interpretation (the alternative is a normal non murdery cancer ward) would say its purpose is to kill random cancer patients. For this case the second interpretation seems more reasonable.
I prefer the formulation: "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it is getting." That does not mean the system is "functioning as intended"—and to be fair, it abuses the term "designed."
But the key insight is that the system's "accidental" design produces precisely the results we are getting. If we want to change the results, we need to rethink the design.
To your example, there's a pretty strong case that Biden explicitly designed the Ukrainian military to ensure that Ukriane would not lose -- but neither would Russia -- so he could preserve the status quo...
Here it exactly pays rent, especially if you draw the system broader as Ukraine + military aid (possibly even Russia).
The heuristic predicts that isolated interventions that would lead to one side being able to break the stalemate lead to compensation elsewhere. It’s plausible that this is happening in practice imo. Eg America withdrawing support, leading to Europe trying to fill the hole. If the intent was to help Ukraine win outright they could have offered that additional aid before.
Exactly. The question we should ask -- if we are unhappy with the result of a system -- is *whose* purpose is being protected by what *we* perceive as an unintended consequence.
This is a concept from cybernetics, right? My understanding of that field is that it tries to analyze "self regulated systems" (in the most general sense, from biological organisms to large scale industrial societies) using a common set of concepts and models.
If you're trying to define a notion of "purpose" in a way that applies equally well to models of thermostats, organelles in a cell, and large scale societies then the definition seems fine. It comes from a purely descriptive discourse - frame, where you're not importing any sense of agency or external teleology
When you're in a prescriptive discourse - frame the concept is usually going to be misapplied, but the fact that motivated reasoners (as social scientists so often are) misuse concepts as cudgels doesn't mean the concepts are stupid.
This is an article that literally has the quote you're trashing, but uses it in an appropriate context (chemical systems) and actually explains it a bit. I'd recommend reading at least until the mathematical model, it's probably fine if you lose it there. It does a good job explaining the cybernetic concept of an "objective purpose" of a system in terms of dynamic stability / autopoesis
This criticism is at the level of "We call ourselves the Anti-Bad Guy Squad and we label our opponents the Bad Guys. How can people not understand this? We can never be terrorists because we're fighting the Bad Guys. It's so simple to understand. Everything we do is justified because of our name."
To try to steelman a bit, the phrase is definitely a rhetorical tool, but at it's most pro-social best it's a rhetorical tool that is one of the few attacks that work for attacking sympathetic things that have intentionally or emergently drifted into ineffectualness or even counter-productiveness that have concentrated interests fighting against their reform. In particular it focuses discussion away from the question of the sympathetic thing by focusing on outcomes rather then intent by using equivalence.
The intent of NEPA/CEQA for example is laudable and it's hard to argue against environmental protection, but if the effect is to prevent apartment building from going up on unused parking lots till various rent seeking groups are "heard" [bribed] and reform is often stymied by the efforts of same groups a reframing of the argument away from environmental protection and towards outcomes is helpful.
It is not literally saying the purpose of NEPA/CEQA is to give BANANAs and rent seeking NGOs vetoes over all construction, only that (with somewhat hyperbolic affect) the situation is indistinguishable from that being it's purpose (and potentially by extension that it's much better at that purpose then it's stated purpose).
Other incisive uses I've seen: Homelessness Charities in CA (lot of government money disappears into the ether with not a lot of visible improvement), rent control, some types of farm subsidies and quotas (eg. ethanol which is supposed to help the environment [but probably doesn't] and raises prices for the consumer two fold [on corn and fuel]), whole language instruction (purpose isn't to make kids stupid, but ...), Corporate DEI training (studies seem pretty uniform in actual effect being neutral to counter-productive) and Black Lives Matter charities, sugar quotas, Jones Act, the growth of the administrative payroll in schools/colleges, various public choice issues, the ACLU's evolution, and lots more.
It of course does get miss-used and often encourages an conspiratorially intent view when incentive driven emergent behavior is probably a more accurate lens, and like most rhetorical tools over simplifies but it can drive action in cases that otherwise hard to coordinate.
Scott is falling into the opposite naive error. The purpose of a system isn't (everything) that it does, but we also shouldn't assume that the purpose of a system is what the system leaders say it is
I think it depends on how distant what the system does from what it claims to do is.
e.g. if a system claims to be democratic and yet consistently ignores the express wishes of voters, then you are probably verging into the system's real purpose being what it does and not what it claims to do.
You can certainly forgive a thing failing to do what it claims to do - there is surely some play here - but a thing consistently faililng to do what it claims to do, and even consistently doing the opposite of what it claims to do, well that's either really unusual incompetence or malice.
I take this phrase to simply be asserting a sort of behaviorist (ie apposed to psycoanalytic) position applied to generic systems. This seems like a reasonable take to me. The word 'purpose' is being used intentionally provocatively and shouldn't be taken literally. I also chafe at this kind of communication style, but I don't see anything especially wrong with the claim.
Are there any actual system engineers among the commentariat? This phrase has a specific meaning within the discipline it came from. The fact that a wider public has taken it from there and has been applying stupidly (on xitter! what's the world coming to!) doesn't in any way detract from its usefulness within the intended context.
This is the kind of low effort confusion that a late and lamented blog called Slate Star Codex used to eviscerate. I miss that blog, anyone know what happened with the author?
I think he just ran out of interesting things to talk about that he was actually knowledgeable enough to write interesting posts on. Can't blame him, seeing as he's been blogging for so long. But with the culture war coming to an end soon, there ain't much to talk about there either. I wonder what he's going to do after that.
None of your examples are of the form "The purpose of a system is what it does". Rather, all of them are of the form "The purpose of a system is one specific thing that it does among many other things", which is obviously non-sense. This also applies to the examples you posted from X, so there are clearly a lot of people who like the phrase but also misuse it like that.
What I believe the phrase is actually trying to convey is that the objective function for the evaluation of a system should be the totality of its outcomes and not just the intended outcome.
Well, this was mean-spirited. Let's start with your strawmen:
> The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The fault here is the weird specificity in the goal. Why 2/3? You even argue further down that sometimes systems just fail. If we ask the question at issue, the answer is "They cure cancer." Sure, they have 67% success rate, but it's reasonable to say the system is designed to cure cancer.
> The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
This is just spiteful. That's not even what the system is doing, that's just a consequence of what it is doing. What it is doing is "Fighting the Russians to keep them from over-running the country."
> The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
Again, weirdly and bitterly specific. You even had to add in multiple goals just to make any sense at all.
> The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide.
What even is this example? You don't really think that anyone refers to this, this seems a deliberate bad-faith reading of the phrase. To the point where I almost wrote you off entirely and just unsubbed. Then I reread the below question and decided to hold out hope.
> Maybe I’m still missing some genuinely good and useful insight that POSIWID can be used for?
Imagine a hospital that declares loudly that it is a cancer hospital. When patients are admitted to the hospital, they and their families are given a whole bunch of material about how donating significant portions of an estate to a charity can both protect against certain tax consequences and a set of recommendations for charities to donate to that are actually all different facets of the same organization. And the hospital's performance is only 15% that of comparable hospitals. POSIWID: the purpose of the hospital is collecting donations, not treating cancer.
Or take a psychiatrist's office where every patient gets a Prozac prescription no matter what issues they walk in with. POSIWID: What is the motivation for just writing Prozac scripts? Is he getting a kickback? Is he lazy and processing patients for insurance payouts?
Let's take a military shipbuilder that builds surface combatants with engines that regularly break and systems that embrace the John Deere approach of locking out critical systems after maintenance until a technician code is entered. It also has basically no weapons because they didn't work. The ships are still actively being built. Why? POSIWID: The system is protecting a bad shipbuilder for largely politically corrupt, but some marginal military-industry, reasons.
POSIWID is one of those base assumptions to start with when analyzing a system. We're talking about Sun Tzu "Don't fight while standing in a river" level of insight here. It seems brick-simple when said but also a lot of people miss it. It's explicitly a pushback against things like the legislative trick of naming a bill "Supporting Puppies and Kittens Act of 2025" while the bill funds an organization dedicated to killing puppies and kittens instead.
The core element here is that one should evaluate a system by the results it produces, not the goals it claims.
I don't like the way people are defending the phrase. It's like if someone stated "All food is red", someone else countered with "No, blueberries are blue", but a third person came up and said, "Actually, the correct interpretation of the phrase 'All food is red' is 'Some food is red', and since apples are red, the phrase is a useful heuristic when describing food". Yes, it's true that some food is red, but it's not true that some food is red is the correct interpretation of the statement all food is red, or that the statement all food is red is true or useful
Systems have a lot of possible outcomes. Some are intended and stated, some are intended and not stated, and some are neither stated nor intended. POSWID ignores the third class of statements entirely, and for the second class of statements, I prefer the phrase, "It's a feature, not a bug", because it acknowledges the existence of bugs and doesn't pretend somehow that all bugs are features.
I had an argument with a friend once that had us circling around this idea one time. I don't think he used the exact phrase POSWID but I was trying to come up with examples of systems that inherently have trade-offs and unintended consequences but he kept coming back to the idea that a system working imperfectly means someone doesn't want it to work perfectly.
There seems to be a very common strain of thought that if the world is not perfect it must mean someone has conspired to make it imperfect for nefarious reasons. It was surprising to hear it from this friend because he is a professional programmer, and I know programmers are familiar with the idea of bugs.
Except, when people are thinking of using this phrase, there is often a nefarious force. Usually a public sector union. A prominent example would be schools. The purpose of schools is paying teachers. That is what schools do. Everything else is extraneous to paying teachers.
If I say that I'm constantly hearing people complain about the weather, it isn't a good rebuttal to say "you aren't hearing it 24 hours a day, and besides, what if you covered your ears?" That's just being autistically hyperliteral.
Likewise, if someone said "food is cheap", it would not make sense to reply "caviar is food, and it isn't cheap".
To me the classic example of "the purpose of a system is what it does" is Patrick McKenzie's dictum (can't find a non-Twitter reference at the moment but see e.g. https://x.com/patio11/status/1654988724353241088) that the purpose of many government agencies is to pay their employees. His evidence: rewrites of their horrible legacy payroll software fail and have to be rolled back even when following the specifications exactly, because if the agency's specifications and on-the-ground reality disagree about how much a particular employee is supposed to be paid _then the employee is right_.
This is a stronger form of evidence than the ones you discuss: not that systems fail in their goals or produce side effects, but that deliberate decisions made by those systems primarily produce results other than the system's stated purpose. Colloquially, the purpose of a system is what it does _at the margin_.
So often this past year I've felt like I'm reading an anthropologist's reports from some faraway place every time I read a blog. I don't think I've ever even heard the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does". I spend far too much time reading on the Internet, yet I barely even speak the lingo.
I think there is some kind of power play emerging, intentionally or not, in which the continual churning of political jargon transfers power to those who have enough free time to waste it in political debates. No one else can participate. Much like the development of jargon in academia, it serves as a barrier to entry.
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is obviously false if applied literally to everything. However, I think it can be valid in cases where (1) the problem in question is widely-known, and (2) the problem could easily be fixed without compromising the system's stated goals.
To take an example from real life.-- Once upon a time, Britain, like pretty much every other country in the world, exempted education from VAT (value-added tax, or sales tax to our transatlantic friends). Recently, however, the government decided to impose VAT on private schools -- not on any other kind of education, mind you, but only private schools. The stated purpose of this was to raise money, but plenty of people pointed out at the time that the tax rise was more likely to be a net cost, because it would cause a large number of children to move from private school (where their own parents bore the cost of educating them) to state school (where the government paid). And indeed, this turned out to be the case. However, the government didn't reverse course, but kept the tax increase, even though the policy clearly wasn't helping with its alleged goals.
Now, in this case, I think the conditions mentioned above both apply. It was widely predicted beforehand that charging VAT to private schools would be a let financial loss, and it's since become clear that those predictions were right. It would also be easy for the British government to not charge VAT without compromising its ability to raise money or to govern more generally. In this situation, therefore, I think it's quite reasonable to say, "TPOASIWID. Claims of 'revenue-raising' are obviously insincere; this tax rise is actually motivated by class warfare, and a desire to reduce the number of children being privately educated."
To the extent I ever thought of the phrase, I think I interpreted it as a cynical way of saying that a badly working system isn't fulfilling its stated goals because it has been co-opted by its leaders to do whatever *they* want it to do (fill their pockets, mess with the other, what have you), and damn the consequences.
Or to phrase it differently, "The people actually in control of a system will co-opt its purpose to their own end, no matter what the stated goals are."
I think of POSIWID in a similar sense as the "every gun is always loaded" rule of firearm safety. It's obviously not literally true in every case; it's a counter to lazy assumptions. "Always loaded" removes the ability to say "I didn't know it was loaded!" after an accidental discharge, and POSIWID removes the ability to say "well that's not what it's meant to be doing" when a system results in abuse.
(I apologise if somebody has already alerted you to this but I have not read all comments)
The phrase comes from management cybernetics and someone you may be aware of (a veteran blogger) called Dan Davies has recently published a great book that uses these ideas - The Unaccountability Machine - which might contain the genuinely useful insight you ask for.
Here is a little bit from a substack of his
"As I say in the book, it’s easy to mistake POSIWID for a much cruder, “it is what it is” kind of cynicism. It’s actually a much deeper concept in my view. The purpose of a system is exactly what is being worked out every day, as that system reproduces and maintains itself, decides what events it is going to react to and how it is going to balance present interests and future possibilities. And so the doing of things is, identically, the creation of purpose. A screwdriver which just lies around in a drawer doesn’t have any purpose at all"
I absolutely agree with this criticism. If i was going to steelman POSIWID into something maybe worth considering, I would paraphrase it as "outcomes reflect incentives more than they reflect stated institutional intent." The purpose of the Russian Army wasn't to get bogged down in Ukraine, but the corruption which exists within its ranks is more explanatory of the observed bad performance of the army than the statement that the purpose of the army is to win wars.
POSIWID is still grossly uncharitable as stated, of course, ignores systemic limitations as a base assumption, and tends to not contribute to the effective development of solutions. And, as you mention, it is very motte and bailey-able and very Moloch-y in assigning a single intent to the product of multiple competing interests.
More generally, I predict that people use POSIWID not to diagnose or fix problems, but to attack groups when they both dislike an outcome and also distrust/dislike/feel they can't sufficiently control the institution involved. It is a more adult sounding version of the eight year old child, forced to do homework before playing, who screams "you don't want me to have any fun!"
The purpose of the system is in fact what it does. The problem is as always “what does a system do”? New York’s buses are really slow - 8mph citywide and 6mph in Manhattan, which is only 50% faster than walking. This is often on lines where the bus parallels the subway and almost all trips would be faster by subway. So in practice, the buses are useless (and fail to recover >80% of costs). Instead, their purpose is to keep heavily unionized bus drivers employed, because they could go on strike and stop the subway, which would be an Actual Catastrophe
> The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to fight cancer in as many patients as possible [as cost effectively as possible, within regulations [...]]
> The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to fight the russian military [and to inflict losses dissuading further conquest / retake occupied territories, while minimizing own losses and expenditure]
> The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
sure
> The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide.
the purpose of the new york bus system is to operationalize bus transport for citizens [only marginally minimize CO2 emissions [where politically desired and not too costly] ...]
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The purpose is written in the actions (does), you are mentioning outcomes (achieves)
It's a naive overreaction to the naive, obviously false, and very popular statement that the purpose of a system is the *declared* purpose of its supporters.
Further helping the situation is that everyone can think of situations where it is clearly true. Where people who purport to fix a problem actually do things that make it worse because their jobs are on the line if they succeed in their declared aim. Or where the zoning board's actual intention and purpose is to block competitors to the town's bigwigs.
I think you're failing to distinguish between two separate purposes to an organization: (1) the internal purpose, as defined by the people who join and lead the organization; and (2) the external purpose, which is why government/economics/society lets the organization exist at all. Stafford isn't saying that "people in a hospital are trying to leave 1/3 cancer cases uncured", corresponding to (1). He's saying "this organization hasn't been raided by the police/gone bankrupt/etc. because attorneys general/financiers/etc. know that closing down the hospital would lead to (insert many bad things here) and consider the 1/3 cancer cases acceptable losses", corresponding to (2).
Now, you might say: Medicare keeps telling hospitals to cure more patients. Zelenskyy and the Rada are frantically trying to develop a military that achieved more on the battlefield. The British people would vote for a more self-confident government, if they had the choice. And the mayor's office is slowly prodding the NYC bus system to crawl towards electric buses. So surely the effects each governing body is trying to reduce aren't part of the external purpose of the system.
To which Stafford would say: he's also trying to hint that "culture eats strategy for breakfast". Systems don't spontaneously start producing different observable results. To achieve different behavior, you need to change the internal nature of the system, with more than just a few policy papers at the head. You need different internal and external metrics and different lines of report. You might even need entirely people to internalize new Standard Operating Procedures.
Once you've made all those changes, you run into the Ship of Theseus effect. Is the system really the same organization anymore? Or is it just an entirely new organization that happens to share the same name as the old?
I think you'd say it's the same organization, but reformed. Stafford would say it's a new organization that ate the old from the inside out.
From your discussion of Twitter, I think you believe Stafford's perspective elides more than it elucidates. In particular, it hides the possibility and desirability of intermediate reform. You're right, *most of the time*. Stafford's perspective turns "Reform Cash Bail" into "Abolish the Criminal Justice System, so That we Might Replace It with a Virtually Identical System Except with a New Bail Policy", which, while mathematically identical, is not *practically* identical. But also, some people naively expect (e.g.) the hospital to stop missing cancer cases when a few spokespeople tell the press that "the hospital will do better now, I swear it". For them, Stafford is directionally correct.
As you yourself once wrote, all debates are bravery debates.
(I'll be honest: I haven't read all the comments and so someone might have written this but much more pithily.)
One valid example: if you notice that a major effect of bad Nimby zoning policies is to segregate housing by race and by wealth, it turns out that was one of the initial purposes of the policies, and in fact perhaps the main one at least at the start.
I agree the naive form of this phrase is often bad, but a weaker "If you notice a system consistently doing something, consider that perhaps that is one of the primary purposes of the system" is worth considering
It seems related to a general problem of people anthropomorphizing things. A nation, hospital, or justice system, taken as a whole, obviously doesn't have a conscious intent, because it doesn't have a consciousness. It's an amalgamation of the preferences, actions, and foibles of a very large number of people, many of whom have completely different and opposing intentions. You should not devote a lot of resources to categorizing outcomes that are outside the control of any individual as unintended consequences or malign intentions.
To say, "the justice system oppresses minorities because it wants their lives to be more difficult" is either meaningless or suggests that justice is thwarted by individual agents in the system with evil intent. This leads to conspiracy theories and paranoia, and is the opposite of considering the role of incentives.
The purpose of a system is what it does is the right way of thinking about a system when you want to reform it.
Nobody should care that affordable housing rules were made to help the poor when it completely fail about it. Moral and economic judment about something should be not on its ambition but on its réalisation.
When judging the fda, we shouldn t consider its stated goal but its met goal, and the purpose of a system is what it does is a way to shift to consequentialism from bad deontologism.
Regarding the UK disability system tweet, there have been claims that the system is set up to reject as many claims as possible for cost-cutting reasons, and that giving the benefits assessment work to private contractors means it is profit-driven to maximise returns on government contracts.
So there is some genuine dispute there about what the real purpose of the system is.
"If you want to predict the future effects a system will have on the world, you should be more inclined to look at the past effects that system has had on the world than at the statement of purpose of the people who established the system"
POSIWID was coined by a management consultant (Stafford Beer) to point out rhetoric like "well, that's not what I'M doing" spoken by each person in the system doesn't matter, because it's the totality of their actions in a system that cause results. Excerpts from Unaccountability Machine:
> The disquieting effect only emerges when you consider a particular case, where
the system under analysis is made up of human beings and the forces
operating on them are their own individual desires. We can all think of
cases where organisations systematically deliver outcomes that are wildly at
odds with their stated objectives. Stafford Beer’s cybernetics tells us that in
these cases, while people’s opinions are important, the facts of the
organisational outcomes are what we need to work with. In his most pithy
formulation of the principle, he expands the black box principle to a rather
more uncomfortable statement.
> It’s easy to mistake the POSIWID view of the world for a slightly
tiresome kind of cynicism. To say that the purpose of the system is what it
does isn’t to make any statement about the intentions of the people working
for it. The danger of confusing the properties of the system with those of its
members is one of the most important reasons for not opening up a black
box. Unfortunately, it’s a very common confusion; very few people are able
to take a step back, view their own organisation as if from outside, and
realise that they are structurally producing results which are exactly the
opposite of what they had intended.
It's about incentive structures, it's a point that all people participating who say "this is my intent - and this is the intent of the system' aren't the actual embodiment of the system, they're simply cogs in it and their 'wishes' don't magically become the purpose of the system thru some metaphysical democracy of purpose.
Repression, sour grapes, etc all contribute to the purpose of a person but are rarely acknowledged by him.
You could liken it to selection effects, the invisible hand, emergent order. Yes, it's very misused. It's also a rhetorical trick to cut the bullshit when people say "well, the NIH had the right intentions it just produced a bad result" for example.
"The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia." The point of posiwid is not to repeat reality and say "this is the purpose of reality".
> POSIWID is not just a glib piece of cynicism; it’s a description of how a system retains viability and identity
In short, the common quibble about posiwid 'purpose means metaphysical magic that I wish would happen, therefore the result produced is not the purpose' is not relevant, see the system as a black box whose purpose must be deducted from looking at inputs and outputs.
Your examples are a bit like "I stubbed my toe, therefore the purpose of the desk is to stub my toe" not "the purpose of the management structure is to evade responsibility" (which none CONSCIOUSLY do) "the purpose of the journal-publishing system is to lower threshold of articles for profits and suck in taxpayer funds" etc. This is too verbose maybe but here's a picture.
A different slant on this I find more helpful is: "the system is working exactly as it was designed". Instead of arguing that the unintended consequences or poor performance of a system shows the *intent* of the creators/operators, this focuses on their *accountability* to how the system performs. If the cops are beating suspects, then the police department's design doesn't have sufficient controls to prevent this. If the British government had a better process for gathering public sentiment before crafting policy, it wouldn't propose such unpopular sentencing changes.
I think there’s some confusion still here. Systems have multiple effects, and to think clearly about them, a few categories of effect seem reasonable:
- Ostensive vs non-ostensive: effects that are intended by the system’s architects and proclaimed in public by its advocates as the rationale for the system’s existence
- Intentional vs accidental: effects that are intended by actors within the system (whether or not they would admit it in public)
- Sustaining vs non-sustaining: effects that incentivize actors within the system to maintain the system itself (without which the system would not be sustained
I think the interesting insights that POSIWID can draw your attention towards all involve effects that are sustaining not non-ostensive.
Take medieval monarchies. Ostensibly, their purpose is to fulfill the mandate of god and protect vassals by maintaining castles and fielding knights and so forth. But on closer inspection of monarchy. you might notice that the nobility itself extracts a lot of wealth from the peasants, and if that if this wasn’t possible, knights would probably not to don their shining armor.
Or, for a modern example, take a police department. You might notice that some police conduct is cruel and corrupt, and while cruelty and corruption might not be the ostensive purpose of the police department. But some critics of the police department might assert that enabling corruption and cruelty is *sustaining* for the PD— if you ended cruelty and corruption, you’d have to find another way to get people to show up. If this is the case, there seems to be a sense in which the purpose of the PD is to give its members opportunities for corruption and abuse, and you would expect attempts to change t
Or take college. Ostensibly, the purpose is to educate students. But and many of my classmates met our romantic partners at college. Is the *purpose* of college to help pair off bright young adults? I don’t think many would say so, but it’s arguably an important part of the college package, and attempts to prevent dating within the student body would be met with stiff resistance.
I think the steel-man of POSIWID is that there are these effects that are not part of the justification for a system (and might even be in tension with its justification), but would nevertheless essential for the system’s persistence.
Perhaps a refinement would be: “a system’s purpose is what incentivizes its upkeep”.
>Am I being unfair here? Maybe the slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” was never meant to apply to situations like these?
The way you're being unfair here is translating 'The purpose of a system is what it does' into 'The purpose of a system is one particular short-term metric taken out of all context'. 'What it does' is much more holistic than that.
If everyone in a hospital is trying their best to cure ever cancer they come across and take as many patients as they can handle with no prejudice, then 'trying to cure as much cancer as possible' is an accurate summary of what the hospital does.
But for the police for example, if you can holistically look at everything they do and find that they punish crimes committed by the poor much more than the same or similar crimes committed by the rich, that they promptly respond to rich people's property being threatened by poor people but tell poor people to file a complaint and then ignore it, and that they are always fast to step us and brutalize protestors and activists speaking out against the dominant power system but not those who are favored by it, then yeah you can holistically say 'the purpose of the police is to enforce the existing power structures and protect the powerful against the oppressed'.
Yes, holistic judgements means there's a level of subjectivity and interpretation and cherry picking at play, and that makes it not a 'science'. But your examples of choosing specific narrow metrics and ignoring everything else the system does also employ a lot of subjectivity and interpretation and cherry picking!
Saying anything short and comprehensible about huge complex systems will always require interpretation and summation. No one-sentence description of something like 'the police' or 'hospitals' will ever be comprehensively accurate, it will always be a holistic summary of one specific facet or one specific insight about the whole.
'The purpose of the system is what it does' is just a heuristic to help you think about how systems work and notice/communicate a particular genre of true insights about them.
I get what you’re saying and mostly agree. But I think you might be taking this too literally. There are of course examples of systems that claim to do one thing while actually attempting and doing something else. I think these POSIWIM people are taking this concept and applying it far too widely. So for example the SPLC’s stated claim is to reduce injustice among the poor or whatever but really they end up fighting with a bunch of people whose views they don’t like. The reality is these people are just justifying their anger with a true concept applied far too widely and not looking too close at it.
If I understand it correctly, POSIWID was introduced to describe situations in which a system is stated to have one purpose, but in actuality does something else. A classic example is the Department of Defense. On 911 the US was infiltrated by agents of a polity who was at war with us. They carried out three successful attacks on military and economic targets causing the deaths of nearly 3000 Americans. It was the most devasting attack on the nation since the War of 1812.
The Defense Department failed to stop these attacks because *it was not their job to do so*. That is, it was not the job of the Department of Defense to defend the country in this situation. After 911 an entirely new department was created to perform this function.
What the DOD *does* is make war. According to POSIWID, the purpose of the Defense Department is to make war. Really it ought to be called the War Department. The funny thing is the DOD *used* to be called the War Department, in alignment with POSIWID.
POSIWID is not a stupid concept, but stupid (or dishonest) people can use it incorrectly. Stupid people use all sorts of tools improperly, that doesn't mean the tools are bad.
War Department was army-only, there was a separate Navy Department that was navy-only.
Defense Department was the name we picked when we decided to merge the two departments together. And then we added the Air Force as the third 'independent-sub-department' because reasons, and from there things rapidly got very complex.
This is true. Thel Secretary of War became the Secretary of the Army who reported to the cabinet-level Secretary of Defense.
Prior to 1947 the cabinet-level Secretary of War was responsible for the Army and the Army Air Corps (forerunner of the Air Force). The War Department was headquartered in the Pentagon.
The the cabinet-level Secretary of the Navy was (and still is) responsible for the Navy and the Marine Corps and had its headquarters in the Eisenhower Building.
The Secretary of War was second in the line of succession among the cabinet (after the Sec of State), the Secretary of the Navy was not.
The newly-created Secretary of Defense was established as a cabinet-level position occupying the position in the order of succession. The War Department headquarters in the Pentagon became the Defense Department headquarters. The Navy Headquarters moved into what had been the War Department Headquarters. Functionally what happened was the Navy was merged into the War Department. Both service secretaries were demoted from cabinet-level positions and the position of the Secretary of War in the cabinet taken over by a newly-created Secretary of Defense.
The only service branch with a primarily peacetime role is the US Coast Guard, which reports to Homeland Security. The other war-fighting branches (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines) are part of DOD. So based on the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does, it sure seems like what the DOD does is fight wars. Functionally it is the Department of Fighting Wars, or War Department for short, but they call it something else for political reasons.
POSWID is a partially correct observation that systems seem to have a mind of their own and can't be steered even if the main figurehead-dictator-ceo tries really hard. "Do X" "No, I will continue to do Y"
There is a strong desire to map the results to some origin source of intention or agency and then try to change the result by targeting the source
But it's really more that systems like DNA or memes have an emergent desire to spread. The agency of the system is ignored because it's a non-person. And the result is like trying to control a single bird to control the shape of a bird flock.
It's a cope that laments the absence of a single lever to pull or a single voldemort to kill. It increases the moral burden of the system and hopes that it concentrates into the stress points or leaders and "breaks" them.
Take the eye. We can say the purpose of an eye is to allow us to see. But nobody designed an eye. Nobody sat down and gave it a purpose and designed it to execute that purpose. So where does its purpose come from?
I haven’t actually read him myself, but it seems like Beer was trying to tackle the same sort of Moloch-esque system’s failure that Scott would be most interested in. His mad-scientist solution was a sort of techno, decentralized-centralization that somehow avoided that whole “Boot stomping on your face forever” issue of many centralized solutions to collective action problems. He was actually pretty close to implementing his theories in Chile in the 70’s, but didn’t get the chance due to political revolutions outside his control.
In brief, he wasn't close to implementing his theories; he did implement them. From his book Brain of the Firm:
"it is still April 1973.
If what we wanted to do was to meet the objectives listed for Cyberstride and Project Cybersyn, then we have succeeded. Those were technical objectives, and meeting them may count as success to some people.
If what we wanted to do was to display that technical achievement in management action, then we may yet succeed. This is the technocratic objective, and meeting it may count as success to some people."
Notice that April 1973 is five months before the coup. Technical objectives were met. Not "displaying that technical achievement" is his way of saying the project was a failure.
Earlier, in January 1973, Beer was ready to announce to the world that the system was working:
"Returning once again to January 10th and the Operations Room, it was clear that the ‘propitious time’ for announcements to the larger public was drawing nigh. These announcements stood to be radically perverted by the opposition‐dominated media...On Sunday, January 7th, the science correspondent of the British Observer newspaper, Nigel Hawkes, published an article entitled ‘Chile run by computer’...Nothing, not even the most expensive public relations programme, can generate the requisite variety needed to regulate the media worldwide. All such attempts have fortunately always failed, and will continue to do so as long as free speech is anywhere allowed. Our plans had gone wrong. I gave very strong advice that the government should immediately make a full‐scale and high‐level press presentation of Cybersyn, with a televised tour of the Operations Room, in order to amplify the government side of the variety equation to the full."
Maybe we could get both sides to agree on "the punishment is the point."
Obviously deterrence also matters. But the idea that criminals should be punished (as long as we properly identify the criminals!) is a pretty popular one. The idea that people can do evil and just get away with it really angers people, across many dimensions of political disagreement.
>When people do list a specific example, it’s almost always a claim that, if you’re unhappy with any result of a system, the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you, and so you should become really paranoid and hate everyone involved.
At least two of these examples seem good though?
Various interests groups, some business and some activist, *do* use the EPA approval process to slow down and prevent building projects that they dislike, and lobby to make the system more onerous so that they have more veto power over development projects.
The UK has been on an explicit policy of austerity and privatization for decades, and more recently an intense crusade against 'benefit scroungers'. Reducing the number of paid benefit claims is 100% in-line with stated political goals by teh government and at the agency, and refusing to make accommodations that would allow people to apply for and receive their proper benefits accomplishes that goal. If the goal of the government and the agency was 'make absolutely sure everyone who qualifies for benefits in the nation is receiving them promptly and conveniently,' the policy regarding accommodations for appointments would probably have changed; noticing that this refusal to accommodate is a symptom of an ethos of 'shrink benefits and push austerity' is not wrong.
I think you're putting too much pressure on this idea of intelligent design. A system doesn't have to be intentionally designed to do X by its creators form the start, in order for X to become its purpose. For the EPA, it seems clear that giving veto power over projects that don't hurt the environment to special interests wasn't the initial intent of the people founding the agency, just an unintended consequence of how they wrote the regulations; but once people noticed that phenomenon, they utilized it and fed into it and built infrastructure around it and lobbied to enhance it until that's a major part of its actual function in the world.
You literally made a post explaining this a few months ago in "backscratcher clubs". You didn't use this phrase, but that's basically what this is referring to. You have an "orphan support club" that says nice things about orphans, takes people's money, and then leverages its position to promote its own members. The stated purpose of the club is "to help orphans", but what the club actually does is backscratch. Basically this is a claim that you should treat organizations using consequentialism: it spends most of its time backscratching, not helping orphans, therefore its "real" purpose is to backscratch. The founder is not an incompetent orphan lover, they are a lying backscratcher who is happy with the way things are.
Obviously in practice this is not literally always true, and is sometimes applied inappropriately. There are cases where an organization legitimately tries to do something and fails because it's hard. But there are cases where an organization consistently and obviously "fails" to do something because its incentives are aligned in a different direction and it's not even trying. Principle Agent Problems 101. You already know this, you criticize this sort of thing all the time, so I'm not even sure why you're confused here.
Though distorted, the kernel of the adage has value. Purpose is determined by intent, but true intentions are fundamentally opaque, so the most reliable way to determine purpose is to look at outcomes.
The issue is when relatively minor outcomes are used to assume the majority of the purpose, such as with any of the listed examples.
You are not being fair. Take the bus example. Is emitting CO2 ALL the bus system does? No. What is the bus system SUPPOSED to do? Provide public transportation. Is this one of the things it does? Yes. So that is one if its purposes, and I would argue its primary purpose.
POSIWID is most usefully applied when a system that is supposed to do X is not doing X. One then sees what is actually is doing and concluded this is probably what it's purpose is.
I have applied this concept to the "neoliberal" economic policies made after 1980. chiefly lower tax rates. Presumably the purpose of these changes was to create an economy that workers better than alternatives such as the policy suite in place over 1941-71, which one might call "New Deal economics". My conclusion was that New Deal economics produces a superior outcome for the bottom 90% of households than the Neoliberal economics, but is both harder to use for the operators AND produces an inferior economic result to the operators.
Applying POSIWID I conclude that the purpose of the shift to neoliberal economics (what was called Reaganomics) was to provide an easier operating experience and better outcome for system operators. The system was *sold* politically as one that would produce a better outcome for everyone, rather than just the operators and people like them.
So, like the DOD (see my previous post) it is built on deception.
>So, for example, if someone is hesitating before making a life decision, it can be helpful to say to that person "fortune favors the bold".
It can also be destructive, since it isn't always true.
But that one's much more universally true. I think it's much harder to write an article called "Come On, Obviously You Shouldn't Always Look Before You Leap."
Basically I think people typically phase out proverbs that don't hold up to scrutiny. Or at least pad it with specific context.
Reminded me of this
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/13/the-proverbial-murder-mystery/
I thought the meaning was more something like “the system took these side effects into account and still considered that what it was doing was net positive in expectation, so the side effects are as much part of the system's purpose as the ‘positive’ outcomes”.
I think this is neither part of the way the phrase is commonly used, nor a fair application of the word "purpose". I think "purpose" specifically means "something that they wanted, rather than a side effect which is only grudgingly tolerated". As I said in the post, the claim "The purpose of the bus system is to emit carbon dioxide" is clearly wrong by any normal interpretation of the word "purpose".
Your claim "If a system exists, someone must have decided it was worth tolerating its side effects", is obvious and non-explosive and nobody would care about it. I wouldn't object if somebody said it, but nobody *would* say it. Rephrasing it as "the purpose of a system is what it does" adds nothing except the ability for people to misinterpret or motte-and-bailey it.
Oh, I completely agree that this phrase is basically just rhetoric. But I thought (perhaps wrongly) that what it was gesturing at was something like “these side effects are something that the system trades off for the ‘positive’ effects; the role of the system (what it does/its purpose) is to perform this very exchange.”
Systems have side effects that are tolerable to the system. They could even be a bonus that further entrenches the system.
Memetic natural selection applies to systems. That doesn't mean systems get continually better; not by a long shot. But they adjust to their environment, including what a community wants and is willing to put up with.
The purpose of a system that has egregious side-effects is very likely not aligned with my values. It might not be malicious, but it does not care about what I care about, and it is worth at least looking under the hood to see if what it cares about and what I care about are zero-sum.
This is an extremely charitable interpretation, know. But I think it is the grain of (or at least validity) attempting to be imparted by people who catch and spread this particular meme.
A system doesn't have conscious intentions, but it can be mapped as if it does, and pursues consistent goals. It doesn't take a single evil person for a system to consistently mimic evil intentions. (Cf. Moloch)
“ The purpose of a system that has egregious side-effects is very likely not aligned with my values. It might not be malicious, but it does not care about what I care about, and it is worth at least looking under the hood to see if what it cares about and what I care about are zero-sum.”
Like chemo?
So a better phrase would be :
"What you think are bad outcomes /seem to go against the purported goals of a system are actually necessary side effects for the system to achieve its goal/remain in place ?"
Then wouldn't a better phrase be "The purpose of a system is first and foremost to perpetuate itself" ?
“Systems do not reach homeostasis in error; ‘side-effects’ are the consequence of accepted trade offs, by definition, or the system would be revised.”
Use “function” instead of “purpose” if it helps you feel better.
Also read a lot more Meaningness. Start here: https://meaningness.com/systems-crisis-breakdown
This is literally just begging the question for "systems are intended for self-perpetuation"; you added that idea de novo into the paraphrase, and then coopted the paraphrase to focus on it.
@ersatz said "The role of the system is to perform this exchange" of, eg, turning fossil fuel into carbon emissions and mass transport of persons via buses, with 'carbon emissions' an accepted negative outcome that is balanced by the positive outcome 'mass transport of persons'. I can't think of a more probably explanation here than 'centering perpetuation is about your own prior bias'. Even if we assume 'bad outcomes are [unalterably] necessary side effects', that still has nothing to do with perpetuation; achieving the intended positive effects would remain the basis for continuing the system.
I’m with you. I think it’s a catchy phrase trying to express something like: “even if there are apparent tensions, the systems we observe in the world are at equilibria: if there is something the system does which seems at cross purposes with its manifest intentions, then this is still part of the maintenance of its balance.”
No, I think as used it is intended to be understood that "no matter what the official reason for this system, in practice what it does is its real function" about such things as systemic racism or discriminatory policing and alleged bias in the justice system.
See this page from the NAACP which tries very hard to tie in "modern day policing" in the USA with 18th century slave patrols:
https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/origins-modern-day-policing
"The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the "Slave Patrol." The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.
...By the 1900s, local municipalities began to establish police departments to enforce local laws in the East and Midwest, including Jim Crow laws. Local municipalities leaned on police to enforce and exert excessive brutality on African Americans who violated any Jim Crow law. Jim Crow Laws continued through the end of the 1960s."
Even restricting a discussion of policing and the police to "modem-day policing", this elides a *ton* of historical development that had little or nothing to do with slave patrols:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#United_States
"The county sheriff, who was an elected official, was responsible for enforcing laws, collecting taxes, supervising elections, and handling the legal business of the county government. Sheriffs would investigate crimes and make arrests after citizens filed complaints or provided information about a crime but did not carry out patrols or otherwise take preventive action. Villages and cities typically hired constables and marshals, who were empowered to make arrests and serve warrants. Many municipalities also formed a night watch, a group of citizen volunteers who would patrol the streets at night looking for crime and fires. Typically, constables and marshals were the main law enforcement officials available during the day while the night watch would serve during the night. Eventually, municipalities formed day watch groups. Rioting was handled by local militias.
In the 1700s, the Province of Carolina (later North- and South Carolina) established slave patrols in order to prevent slave rebellions and enslaved people from escaping. By 1785 the Charleston Guard and Watch had "a distinct chain of command, uniforms, sole responsibility for policing, salary, authorized use of force, and a focus on preventing crime."
In 1751 moves towards a municipal police service in Philadelphia were made when the city's night watchmen and constables began receiving wages and a Board of Wardens was created to oversee the night watch.
...Modern policing influenced by the British model of policing established in 1829 based on the Peelian principles began emerging in the United States in the mid-19th century, replacing previous law enforcement systems based primarily on night watch organizations. Cities began establishing organized, publicly funded, full-time professional police services. In Boston, a day police consisting of six officers under the command of the city marshal was established in 1838 to supplement the city's night watch. This paved the way for the establishment of the Boston Police Department in 1854. In New York City, law enforcement up to the 1840s was handled by a night watch as well as 100 city marshals, 51 municipal police officers, and 31 constables. In 1845, the New York City Police Department was established. In Philadelphia, the first police officers to patrol the city in daytime were employed in 1833 as a supplement to the night watch system, leading to the establishment of the Philadelphia Police Department in 1854.
In the American Old West, law enforcement was carried out by local sheriffs, rangers, constables, and federal marshals. There were also town marshals responsible for serving civil and criminal warrants, maintaining the jails, and carrying out arrests for petty crime."
But this edited version of history, where a localised force at a particular time is taken to represent the origin of all modern-day policing in the USA, has been very successful and I do see it going around on social media. So people are convinced, or convincing themselves, that the purpose of the USA criminal justice system is to oppress, repress, and persecute, to the point of literally murdering, the black population.
"'If a system exists, someone must have decided it was worth tolerating its side effects", is obvious and non-explosive and nobody would care about it."
Nah, it's coming up on 5 years since George Floyd and almost nobody in The Establishment has admitted that the Floyd Effect during the reign of Black Lives Matter got a huge number of Black Lives Murdered due to increased black-on-black shootings and increased black traffic fatalities.
Elites instead keep attributing the spike in homicides and car crash deaths to covid rather than to Black Lives Matter.
Even when Scott admitted that Black Lives Matter got a huge number of Black Lives Murdered, he didn't admit that the Floyd Effect, like the Ferguson Effect before it, got a big increase in Black Lives Splattered on the asphalt.
Personally, I don't believe that the Purpose of the Black Lives Matter system was to end more black lives, even though that's what happened. I just think that the people in charge in the early 2020s were dimwits who were overwhelmed by racist hate.
Recall when President Obama obtained for his beloved daughter Malia an internship with Harvey Weinstein:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/there-is-no-inner-party-obama-let-his-18-year-old-daughter-intern-for-harvey-weinstein/
You are saying a lot more about yourself than Obama here.
Sailer is not saying anything about Obama, only that Obama didn't know that Harvey Weinstein was a pervert, otherwise he wouldn't have let his daughter intern at Weinstein an co.
I am sorry but what are you talking about ?
I don't think continuing to bring up this point or make bad puns on Black Lives Matter does anything but reflect poorly on you and invite inflammatory responses.
The one response I see currently is yours. Is your objection to puns? I personally don't care for them either.
My objection is that bringing up race and policing in response to this post could be trying to raise an interesting point or could be trolling.
Doing it with a post that contains the phrase "Black Lives Splattered" leans far in the direction of heat vs light and is below the level of discourse I expect to from this comment section. The appropriate action was probably just to report rather than reply, though.
Figuring out what to do about people who occasionally produce light but gratuitously generate heat is a tricky question of moderation IMO, and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer. Scott definitely errs in favor of a light touch here, so I'm not sure reporting is the right move. Might just be my tastes though, since I usually shy away from both reporting and replying to the same comment.
Like I said before, it's because people *want very much* to judge systems based on their *intentions* rather than their consequences. Black Lives Matter is aligned with the side of "good" and "antiracism" in people's minds so the consequences of BLM must be good on principle.
The purpose of an arguement is what it does, therefore the purpose of "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to be misinterpreted or motte-and-bailey-ed
Well-played!
But sometimes the side-effects are identified as a problem and the owners of the system agree that it's a problem and that they want to fix it. However, for whatever reason that doesn't happen. At that point, can't one say that this is the purpose of the system?
I think a reasonable analogy is drug side-effects: some are inevitable and they're generally bad, occasionally they're so bad you should just stop taking the drug, but usually you're stuck with them until someone comes up with a better formulation or an entirely new medicine.
It would be bizarre to claim that your hair falling out and your immune system becoming compromised is an intended effect of cancer chemotherapy, it's just difficult to prevent while achieving your actual goal of curing cancer.
It is possible that the "side effect" of the system (e.g. police brutality to criminal justice) is secretly desirable (I can't deny that plenty of people seem to think treating suspects harshly is instrumentally useful to the goal of preventing and punishing crime), but it's also possible that it's undesirable byproduct of the goals and constraints the system faces (e.g. the kind of people willing to work as police officers). I think it's important to actually work out why the bad thing is happening!
> It would be bizarre to claim that your hair falling out and your immune system becoming compromised is an intended effect of cancer chemotherapy, it's just difficult to prevent while achieving your actual goal of curing cancer.
That really depends on the level of your analysis. The way to prevent that while curing cancer is of course to use a different type of treatment, with surgery being the least prone to undesirable side effects. Surgery uses a cancer attack model of "if the cancer is outside me, instead of inside me, I will no longer have a problem with it", which is perfect as long as you get the whole thing.
Chemotherapy uses a very different model. The conceptual model for chemotherapy is "we flood your system with drugs that will kill any cell that divides, be it friend or foe". If you understand that, it very much does look like your hair falling out and your immune system weakening are intended effects of the treatment. Those are both things that chemotherapy is supposed to do; that's how chemotherapy works.
Put another way, if I say that I took the shortest path into the house only for the sake of convenience, and the fact that there's now a hole in the wall is an unfortunate side effect of the fact that the door wasn't on my path, I don't think many people would accept that.
More to the point would be if they agree that it does the thing, but don't want to fix it. In that case one could justly call is part of the purpose of the system If they want to fix it, but just can't figure out how then it's not part of the purpose, but rather a trade-off.
I generally read the comments that use the phrase as claiming that the "side-effects" are intentionally not being fixed. Sometimes I feel this is a valid complaint.
>Your claim "If a system exists, someone must have decided it was worth tolerating its side effects", is obvious and non-explosive and nobody would care about it.
I for one have found it useful to assume that most systems, that were designed at all, and that we have to be aware of enough to think about as such, were designed by people with no understanding of system design, and almost no anticipation of actual consequences or mechanisms. Too many systems look like this for me to think it's intentional, e.g. they de facto ban what they claim to promote, or arrange incentives to guarantee eventual failure in the face of normal everyday challenges.
The primary effect of the bus system isn't to emit carbon dioxide, it's a minor effect.
There are parts of the bus system that are explicitly designed to emit carbon dioxide, e.g. exhaust pipes on buses.
I think you need a conceptual distinction here from legal theory: purpose vs. intent.
Annoyingly, "purpose" in the sense used above is what legal theorists call "intent" so we will need to rephrase below.
"Intent" in legal theory is what the legislators actually wanted to do. So, if they passed a bill to fund a hospital then maybe they wanted to make the community healthier. But, maybe they just wanted to pander to voters or secure campaign contributions from hospital lobbyists, or create jobs for their cronies as hospital administrators, etc. Legal interpreters have moved away from intent over the years because it's often unknowable (given that it requires an inquiry into mental state) and also quite messy.
"Purpose" in legal theory is why a hypothetical, reasonable and public-minded legislator would have passed a given law. It's not a factual inquiry into underlying motives. So, if the legislature funded a hospital then you ask why a "good" legislator would have done that and that leads you to an answer like "to make the community healthier" and away from all the messy bits of intent.
A less pithy way to restate the saying then is "What a system does is a better indication of intent (what "they" wanted) than purpose (why a reasonable, public-minded individual would have done this) is"
> A less pithy way to restate the saying then is "What a system does is a better indication of intent (what "they" wanted) than purpose (why a reasonable, public-minded individual would have done this) is"
Well said. I really like this clarification, because it gets more to the point someone is trying to make when they invoke the phrase. Because sometimes there really *are* malicious (or at least zero-sum) goals involved, and those goals are pursued under the guise/fig leaf justification of the stated nice goal (that never actually gets done).
The phrase implies that the ones who set up a system *actively wanted* the bad outcome that the system ends up doing. Sometimes this is a baseless accusation, and the bad outcome is happening for intractable unavoidable reasons - and sometimes it's completely accurate.
Is this a development in the last 20 years, and if so is it limited to academic theorists? When I went to law school legislative intent was a heavily discussed topic of statutory interpretation, and I never heard "purpose" in the way you're using it here. I was generally disdainful of probing legislative intent, because as you note it is messy, it's a polite fiction to impute such intent in most cases, and a court has limited means to discern it. So over the intervening years both SCOTUS and my own state courts have moved gradually away from it in favor of textualism. Now textualism may include a holistic reading of the text and looking at how the parts work together as a system, indeed Scalia himself would say it ought to. But that's as far as it goes, the statute or statutory scheme isn't seen as a system that has a purpose in that fashion. If that view of analysis is popular anywhere, I haven't seen it in my state court's opinions and I surely wouldn't include it in a brief. It seems like an attempt to re-habilitate legislative intent in a way that appeals to center-left wonks and work around any precedents concerning the weight to assign legislative intent.
Courts routinely analyze statutes as having specific purposes; that's a necessary part of determining whether they serve a "compelling state interest" or any other level of state interest.
Strict scrutiny and the like are not part of a statutory interpretation method. He was proposing this in the context of looking at legislative intent, versus a hypothetical “reasonable legislator”, the theory he’s talking about is for resolving ambiguity in statutory construction.
It's been around for a long time. It's Justice Breyer's favorite method (though he's always been open to multiple methods) and the definition I'm giving above is basically just a paraphrase of what he says in his recent book on this, where he also argues that this is a method dating back all the way to the founding (it's outside my own expertise to comment on how true that is). Here's Breyer:
"When faced with interpreting a phrase, judges will therefore ask themselves what a hypothetical but reasonable legislator would have thought about the matter ... At the time of the founding of the Republic, many judges referred to this way to determine the scope of an ambiguous statutory phrase as an "idealized legislative reading":
Why is this fiction helpful? For one thing, using it increases the likelihood that the statute will work better in light of Congress’s basic purposes. If those purposes include efforts, for example, to provide medical care for those who are ill or education for those who are disabled, the fiction will at least sometimes help the statute’s beneficiaries obtain the benefits Congress may well have intended. One statute, for example, allows a parent with a disabled child the right to obtain a court order that will give the child a better public education. The statute gives that parent the right to recover court-related “costs.” Do those costs include the costs of hiring an educational expert who testifies in favor of the child? As I shall discuss, an “idealized” legislative reading will help the statute’s beneficiaries receive benefits that Congress likely intended. “The legislator voting for the bill that allowed the parents of a disabled child to recover “costs,” for example, can argue to those who thought that the word should cover the costs of experts that the legislator agreed and intended that but the courts did not properly interpret the word “costs.” Insofar as judges interpreting uncertainties use the “reasonable legislator” fiction, the statute is more likely to achieve the basic purposes the members of Congress intended. It is more likely that those judges will interpret the word “costs” to include expert fees, thereby helping parents who win their legal cases recover the costs of bringing the cases (including the experts’ fees). The members can then take credit with the voters for what they have done; or, if the statute has not worked well, the voters will know whom to blame. The members of Congress cannot shift the blame for the statute’s failure to mechanical interpretations that judges have given to the written words.
Of course, those opposed to these methods of interpretation argue that the use of this fiction allows judges greater ability to replace their own view of what constitutes a desirable statute for the statute that Congress actually enacted, i.e., the judges just believe it is “better” to allow the parents to recover the experts’ costs.4But is that so? The judge normally uses the fiction when the language of the statute, together with other commonly used tools of interpretation, yields no definite result. Thus, the judge’s choice is between ignoring the fiction and thereby achieving (in respect to the will of Congress) a random result, or using the fiction and thereby achieving (in respect to the will of Congress) a reasonable result more consistent with Congress’s basic purposes. It is not surprising that many judges have used the fiction for decades, perhaps centuries
Critics also maintain that what a “reasonable” or “idealized” member of Congress would wish to achieve with a particular bill or statutory phrase is often too difficult for judges to discern. That observation may more often prove true of Supreme Court cases where, typically, lower court judges have reached different conclusions as to the application of the same statutory phrase. But where that is so, the judge need not use the fiction. That is not a reason to forgo its use in the many cases where a “reasonable” interpretation is easy, not difficult, to determine. When my wife says, “There isn’t any butter,” I have no trouble understanding she means “in the refrigerator,” not “in the city.”
Finally, some critics agree with a key premise of the “reasonable legislator” fiction—namely, that statutory enactments can reflect the differing intentions of multiple legislators and are often deliberately vague or ambiguous as a result of those differing intentions. Yet these critics maintain that the best way to resolve questions of vagueness or ambiguity is to ask how a hypothetical ordinary reader would interpret a statute rather than how a hypothetical legislator intended the statute to be interpreted. They therefore turn to tools like dictionaries or canons of interpretation (general rules for interpreting statutory language) to approximate the understandings of ordinary readers. But ordinary readers don’t always adopt interpretations that align with dictionary definitions “n fact, empirical evidence suggests that ordinary readers often interpret statutory meaning in light of statutory purpose. Three legal scholars, Kevin Tobia, Brian Slocum, and Victoria Nourse “surveyed a random sample of ordinary people, asking them to interpret a hypothetical statute prohibiting vehicles in the park. They found that, in interpreting the words of the hypothetical statute, people often rejected literal dictionary definitions in favor of readings that comported with the statute’s context and likely purpose. Asking about the purposes of a “reasonable legislator” can therefore be a useful tool in determining how a reasonable reader would understand a particular statute. Not to mention the various other benefits that come with the “reasonable legislator” tool, including its usefulness in helping statutes achieve their purposes and in helping voters hold Congress accountable.”
[End of Breyer Quote]
To your point about what'd you include in a brief or an opinion, I can't speak to your state specifically, but I think "purpose" argument often crop up, just not in a self-conscious way. That is, it's not so common to write explicitly about the hypothetical reasonable legislator but arguments about what a statute is apparently trying to do are pretty common.
Textualists are often smuggling some purpose into their professed textualism -- use of the absurdity canon/doctrine being the most obvious case.
I think you might be underestimating how much average people are willing to accept systems that are clearly dysfunctional based on the idea that the person who built them had "good intentions".
Just look at Trump! The whole tariffs fiasco is tolerated not only because people have a literal messianic faith in Trump, but also because they justify it by saying that even if the tariffs crash worldwide commerce and impoverish everyone, "his heart is in the right place".
> his heart is in the right place
That probably won’t survive a recession, still I can see why people in the American rust belt prefer his actions to elites exporting the manufacturing base of the country, calling the victims of that action deplorable, and demanding continuous struggle sessions until morale improves.
Consider the Establishment's endorsement of the Black Lives Matter worldview upon George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020. That led to a huge increase in black on black homicides by May 31, 2020 (e.g., Chicago's all time record most murderous day was Sunday May 31, 2020), and a large increase in black traffic fatalities by the first couple of weeks of June 2020 as cops retreated to the donut shop and blacks ran amok.
Did the liberal elite really want more blacks to die in the name of Black Lives Matter?
Probably not. Instead, they massively screwed up due to their being ignorant, stupid, and hate-filled.
If the urban elite had wanted to get more blacks killed in shootings and car crashes, they might have taken credit for it, but instead they have assiduously denied the obvious explanation and blamed covid instead.
Yeah, sometimes there are just deleterious side-effects to well-intended policies, but if you dismiss "the purpose of a system is what it does" then you (A) wind up having to take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do and (B) wind up blind to mutualistic synergies between parasitic organisations even if 'well intended'.
e.g, does anyone think the main purpose of California's homeless-assistance bureaucracy is *not* to exacerbate homelessness?
"but if you dismiss "the purpose of a system is what it does" then you (A) wind up having to take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do"
Or you can assume that powerful people are often idiots whose brains are hamstrung by racist ideas. For example, all historical evidence suggests that blacks need strong policing, but that idea was vastly out of fashion in 2020, which led to tens of thousands of additional blacks dying by murder and car crash over the next few years.
I'm not disagreeing with your specific example, I'm saying that POASIWID can't be automatically ruled out either.
Also, "racist ideas"? I believe most of Scott's readership are HBD-pilled, so I wouldn't bother to open with that phrasing.
What fraction of The Establishment who endorsed BLM in 2020 wanted to vastly increase the homicide and motor vehicle accident death rate among young black men?
Doesn't Occam's Razor suggest they were, instead, true believers who were too stupid, ignorant, and hate-filled to understand how the world worked?
Steve, for the third time, I am not disagreeing with your specific example of the BLM-homicide correlation, but this is not the example I brought up or the only problem to consider.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107856642
I'm honestly baffled as to why, when granted a general claim which is so easy to dispute (people don't make grand-scale choices whose side effects are often difficult to predict without accounting for those side effects and pricing them in,) you jump to countering with a negation that's *specific* to bigotry.
People are often just not great at predicting and pricing in all the effects of their decisions. There are all sorts of biases which can contribute to this.
I know this is your famous hobby horse subject, but this is a frankly weird and disconcerting level of subject myopia.
“ For example, all historical evidence suggests that blacks need strong policing, but that idea was vastly out of fashion in 2020, which led to tens of thousands of additional blacks dying by murder and car crash over the next few years.”
Not sure this is even true. Something happened from the 1960s.
They’re trying to ameliorate homelessness but they’re expensively ineffectual.
At some point, if you try the same thing over and over and keep expecting different results, I have to question your good intentions. People who actually want to fix a problem will vary their approach until they see improvement.
They may not be able to vary their approach due to political or social considerations. Just look at the ongoing arguments about involuntary commitment despite having decades of failure of community mental health care in the bluest of blue areas to ponder.
> They may not be able to vary their approach due to political or social considerations
How is this distinguishable from "I am a coward unwilling to push back against my peers' groupthink and unwilling to cross the political aisle to join a party with different policies"? At minimum, they could stop working for the democrats and exacerbating the issue they're pretending to fix.
Involuntarily committed people should be subject to trial by jury first.
Here we are in 2025, and yet practically nobody is aware yet after almost half of a decade that the Floyd Effect, like the previous Ferguson Effect, increased both the black-on-black homicide rate and the black traffic fatality rate. Was this really the incredibly sinister intention of the Black Lives Matter movement, or was it just an idiotic screw-up?
I think there are even liberals who have become aware.
Neither. Black Lives Matter was founded by three Marxists who used it push their revolutionary dogma and to enrich themselves. The effects on black people were irrelevant.
Ok we get it, more black lives were lost because of riots/BLM/whatever happenned than lives lost due to bad policing. Checkmate, BLM.
It's the at least the third comment I read from you and it is basically the same as the previous ones. How many times are you going to ramble about your Floyd effect ? Do you have an agenda ?
It seems so since you stated your point in one of your comments : "blacks need strong policing" (and we can only assume that the corollary is police brutality towards black people is not a big deal since it's less lives lost)
Let me ask you then, didn't America made too much of a big deal about 9/11 ? After all way more people die in car accidents each year, correct ?
Can you accept that when people say that "Black Lives Matter", it doesn't mean "All black lives must be protected at all costs" but "Too many black people are dying in the hands of police and it doesn't need be this way" ?
+100
I do not think their purpose, in the sense of intention, is to exacerbate homelessness.
The point of that example is that many people believe the purpose of government attempts to solve homelessness is (at least in part) to provide jobs (some would say sinecures) for college educated social workers. They also want to help the homeless, but the purpose is the funneling of money to the ingroup.
The reason for the amount of homelessness in California is a moderate climate and relatively generous support...and because the Supreme Court decided that cities couldn't limit their "general assistance" to residents.
I think that last is a crucial piece. Prior to that decision there wasn't a homeless problem. After it (within the year) there was an increased problem.
When did this occur?
Some time in the 1960's or the really early 1970's.
When was "If you're going to San Francisco" a popular song? The year before that.
>does anyone think the main purpose of California's homeless-assistance bureaucracy is *not* to exacerbate homelessness?
No, it's actually orthogonal to the question of the number of homeless; it's to obtain funding and resources for the various agencies/organizations involved, do ideologically-aligned things, and feel good and virtuous about themselves.
Which is enabled by increasing the number of homeless people.
This seems like a retreat to “the purpose of a system _might_ be what it does, in some cases”, which is not super informative.
Also: I don’t think the main purpose of California’s homeless-assistance bureaucracy is to exacerbate homelessness.
It's more a case of "the purpose of a system isn't always what people officialy say it is", which might be unsurprising but nevertheless true. TPOASIWID is intended to puncture a century's worth of accumulating virtue-signalling cruft in western governments.
> Also: I don’t think the main purpose of California’s homeless-assistance bureaucracy is to exacerbate homelessness
That is effectively what it does, and anyone working within the system who doesn't recognise this is either an idiot or lying. That is what TPOASIWID exists to underline.
It depends on what your model is of who is actually making the decision to fund California's homeless-assistance bureaucracy. The answer to that question changes based on whether you consider said decider "the state legislature and governor", "the state legislature and governor plus various movers and shakers including Democratic Party officials", "the median Democratic Party primary voter", "the median voter", or "the voters collectively".
I think they're all responsible to varying degrees, but in particular I would blame anyone actually working for the bureaucracy. And Newsom, of course.
It seems to me like having to "take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do" is only a problem if you also think you have to judge the resulting outcomes on intent rather than the outcome. Like if someone comes to me a starts pouring bleach all over my yard because they're "trying to help the grass grow", I can take them 100% at their word and still demand that they stop because regardless of their intentions they are not actually helping the grass grow. And the "purpose" of their actions is not necessarily to kill the grass even if that's what happens.
How much I believe them might play a factor in how much retribution/justice I seek for the damages they caused, but it has no bearing on the evaluation of "did the thing they do actually accomplish the stated goal".
> It seems to me like having to "take everyone at their word as to the most innocent possible explanation for what they do" is only a problem if you also think you have to judge the resulting outcomes on intent rather than the outcome
I think the purpose of TPOASIWID is precisely to encourage judgement based on outcome rather than intent- we're going to blame you for bad outcomes regardless of alleged good intentions.
And again, I can think of policy positions taken by the left that can only really be explained by some combination of cowardice and greed, I'm not even willing to give the benefit of the doubt as to intention.
It might encourage judgement based on the outcome, but IMO it does so by assigning intent to the outcome rather than separating intent from the outcome. It's "bumper sticker politics" of the sort that's design to make "us" feel noble and true and smart and "them" dumb and evil and ignorant. It's a phrase that gets us into arguments over what we intend and "who is more noble than whom" and distracts from the question of "is the system doing what we want?"
It says that you can't have intended good things with a system and reasonably have not intended the consequences or felt that maybe some of those consequences would be smaller than they are. TPOASIWID is pretty explicit that the outcome is what was intended. It's an expression that immediately puts the implementors of a given system on the defensive because it implicitly attacks them.
If I have legitimate concerns about how much recycling actually just winds up sending products to the landfill with more steps, I'm not going to get very far talking to recycling proponents by asserting that the purpose of the recycling programs they have advocated for is to send otherwise recyclable materials to the landfill via a longer more wasteful route. Whether that's actually what happens or not, they're going to immediately be on the defensive because I'm accusing them of lying about their goals.
Or in other words, if I started saying that "The purpose of saying 'TPOASIWID' is to distract from the real issues at hand and allow bad systems to perpetuate while we have side debates that don't address the issue", you're unlikely to
A) Take that assertion of your intent kindly
B) Be persuaded of my actual concerns
I don't think people take kindly to "you're not malevolent, just incompetent to a degree that is functionally indistinguishable from malevolence", so for political purposes I kinda think this is splitting hairs.
>Did the liberal elite really want more blacks to die in the name of Black Lives Matter?
Maybe not actively, but the fact they tolerated it and did not react with immediate horror indicates that there was something more important to them than the absolute number of black deaths. This isn't quite "TPOASIWID" but it's close.
Exactly. The question is whether the behaviors we see are consistent with stated Goals A, B, and C ranking higher than unstated Goals L, M, and N.
More here: https://thethirdedge.substack.com/p/a-heuristic-is-what-it-does-operational
Isn't there something -in between- 1) tolerating/approving of the spontaneous summary unjudicial murder of random miscreants by knee of cop, and 2) entire withdrawal of policing of black communities? It's almost like - no, it exactly IS - that the police engaged in 2) to try to fool the world into accepting that 1) was the only alternative.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
No other profession gets away with just not doing their job because they felt people were rude to them. And then people with a straight face blame the people criticizing the cops for them not doing their job.
Even that (much weaker) claim seems literally wrong to me, and provides greater faith in the competency of individuals and systems. I don't think you seriously believe that "the system that produced cobra bounties *must* have taken cobra farms seriously as a risk but decided after careful consideration the net benefits of having bounties on cobras was higher than the expected harm of having cobra farms specifically created to farm those bounties." To me it seems plausible, even probable, that they didn't seriously consider the ramifications of cobra farms at all.
A general symptom of conspiracy theorizing is to assume that your opponents are incredibly intelligent and thus whatever they do is the result of brilliant foresight rather than ineptitude.
In contrast, Gregory Cochran tends to assume that "There is no Inner Party." There's no 200 IQ O'Brien or Mustapha Mond who has it all figured out how the world works.
Perhaps mistake theory should more properly be called "stupidity theory". Bad things happen, because people are stupid, duh.
And conflict/conspiracy theory should more properly be called "competence theory". People are smart and good at coordination... so when something bad happens, it obviously was a part of the plan.
So mistake theorists can say "we're the people who think you're competent, they're the people who think you're an idiot"? Bad strategy, I'd say.
Howabout Coordination-is-hard (Prisoners dilemmas suck, and apply even to smart people) theory. Bad things happen because a whole bunch of pretty smart people have failed to coordinate.
Seems to me that in real life often people can talk to each other, so if they find themselves in a Prisoners Dilemma situation, they can discuss possible solutions. At that moment the discussion will probably fail because most of them will misunderstand the nature of the situation (i.e. stupidity), or some of them will undermine the debate on purpose.
Be the change that you don’t want to see in the world, start a secret society.
This has a name, it's Hanlon's Razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" but humans in general don't like accepting things sometimes happen for no good reason.
Finally. Had to do a text search on this comments page to finally find someone who mentioned this.
The steelman of the phrase, which *might* be what Stafford Beer had in mind when he coined the phrase, is that in large complex organisations it's very hard for individual workers to see a link between what they do and the stated purpose of the organisation - people just get on and do what they're told, and orient themselves more towards "doing what they're already doing, just more effectively" than towards "fulfilling the stated purpose of the organisation".
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/politics-isnt-ahtml
"High school students are easily engaged to elect class presidents, even though they have little idea what if any policies a class president might influence. Instead such elections are usually described as “popularity contests.” That is, theses elections are about which school social factions are to have higher social status. If a jock wins, jocks have higher status. If your girlfriend’s brother wins, you have higher status, etc. "
Second paragraph and already he's lost me. Granted, it's been a while since I, personally was in high school. But the idea that high school students take student elections seriously, and that the results have any sort of broad influence on social status just seems bizarre to me. My prior is "student elections are mostly ignored by most of the student body, and the only people who have strong feelings about the results are those with a strong pre-existing interest in politics or politics-adjacent careers." Either Hanson is very out of touch or I am.
Isn’t “out of touch” basically Robin Hanson’s middle name?
Less inflammatorily, the world is a big place and Parallel Worlds is absolutely a thing. Both of your perspectives can be true in different schools!
I don't think the quote says that feelings are "strong", instead just that students do elect class presidents and they do so on the basis of popularity rather than policies.
Well, the quote does also say pretty clearly that the election has a causal effect on popularity, where I would have said it was the other way around.
Why not both? We're talking about a dynamical system with feedback loops.
Not both because, after the election, nobody knows who won.
Election causes public knowledge of popularity.
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
—Jerry Pournelle, 'The Iron Law of Bureaucracy'
You can just read the page where Stafford Beer used the phrase - it's available in this post: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-screwdriver
One of the Twitter posts above gets close to it by including the follow-up sentence, "There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it consistently fails to do." A purpose is formulated for a system, that system acts on how it understands that purpose, there will be discrepancies and eventually the system converges on a compromise purpose, which can be close to or quite far from the initial formulation. It's a tool for analyzing complex systems and feedback, and yes, it's being misused on Twitter.
Anyway, read Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machines on systems, Stafford Beer, and how a subsystem of the Schipol Airport eventually centered on the system purpose of throwing squirrels into an industrial shredder. It's a very good book.
+1 to the Unaccountability Machine (Dan is no relation despite the shared surname; this is a disinterested recommendation)
The correct use of "disinterested" spotted in the wild!
This makes much more sense. Restated as something like:
'If someone is observing a system that has existed in some context for a non-trivial time (ruling out things which have not been subject to some feedback loops), and they don't have some other credible & explicit intention for it communicated to them (ruling out things like a toy car that was left in the woods), then they will be informed of its purpose by what that system consistently does.'
What is word for when a system gets repurposed for "what it does" but leaves the old purpose on the tin.
To take an example, Biden continued Trump's policy of using title 42 health authority for Covid to block people from Mexico.
Now, while this was a covid era measure, obviously the new purpose was to use it to reduce immigration.
Or to take environmental review,.While the purpose was to prevent developers from building a massively polluting X in the 1980's, the new purpose is to block almost all building in places like San Francisco.
Exaptation is fairly close, though generally without the "pretending to be for the original purpose" angle.
I think this is a big blind spot in the post. Because there are a lot of systems that were built for one purpose, over time get used primarily for something else, but still defended/justified using the original purpose.
I agree with this statement. Furthermore, if the revised purpose a system acts on is unpopular, it will use its original purpose as a shield to hide its true intentions. Since many people outside the system will be fooled by people within the system lying, reform is difficult.
I'd describe it as a form of mission creep.
"Entryism" and "institutional capture" aren't exactly that but are related concepts.
One might colorfully say that A has devoured B and is wearing B's skin.
One of these examples appears to be alluding to a specific controversial British Justice bill. I've no idea what that might be. Can someone enlighten me?
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/englands-sentencing-council-suspends-plans-introduce-two-tier-justice-guidelines-2025-03-31/ , but let's not turn the comments into a debate on the merits of this bill.
That's not a bill. It's sentencing guidance from an independent body. There was actually a huge protest movement in 2022 for a policing bill (search "kill the bill" protests) but that bill passed.
Thanks, I stand corrected.
An independent judiciary body which tends to impact sentencing. Not just a few guys down the pub.
Sure but still not a bill. Scott had the narrative completely wrong. It was a spat between the executive and judiciary, and not an example of the government wanting to do something but changing their mind after protests.
I did briefly wonder whether that was what was being mentioned, as it was the only recent justice controversy on my mind.
I have no interest in pursuing such a debate online, but I do have a factual/technical correction to make: the controversial thing here was never a bill. Rather, it was a proposed guideline from the Sentencing Council (an unelected judicial body) which all parties opposed from the moment news focused on it, and the only bill ever proposed was the one that killed it.
‘Prime Minister Keir Starmer was labelled "two-tier Keir" by some politicians last summer’
The purpose of a system is what it does.
's just the usual pareidolia/animism/witch did it stuff. someone gets police brutalitied -> they'll figure the purpose of cops is brutality.
it's also very easy to reframe into less-nonsensical forms. purpose of military isn't to *win wars*, it's to commit mass murder-suicide so that the survivors kill rape loot and occupy everything fightable fuckable transportable and fixed in place.
That’s less nonsensical?
Hahaha
Come on, obviously "The Purpose of a System is What it Does" is meant to draw your attention to the incentives in cases where something different is happening than is supposed to be happening.
My government purposefully raised housing prices for the benefit of people who own assets. They talk about "trying" to make things more affordable, but somehow they only succeeded in raising the cost by 500% in nominal terms. What a curious result.
You could say "Actions Speak Louder Than Words," but that is more suited to individuals, as opposed to cases where people are unwittingly part of a system that is barrelling toward a different end than they think it is. Even if one person isn't the King of the System, enough influential people share the incentives that ultimately make it do what it does.
Why are we sitting here talking about all the cases where it doesn't apply. If someone uses it when it doesn't apply, reprimand them.
"Easy Come, Easy Go... but, what do you mean, I've had lots of things come easily that didn't go easily."
Yes, this. Exactly.
This is the meaning. The phrase is used to object to complacency with systems that lie about their intentions.
So say that instead of the annoying edgelord exaggeration
What annoying edgelord exaggeration?
Hint: it's linked from the first sentence of the post, and what Scott spends the whole post dismantling.
Are you saying that it's an edgelord phrase? I'm pretty sure it's not.
For a given variety of edgelord I'd say it certainly is.
I agree. I don't think it's anywhere near witty enough or edgy enough to count as an edgelord challenge. Seems like a midwit dunk to me.
Yeah, "POSIWID" is kinda edgelord in this context. If you want to say "The current ruling class is running organizations that are deceptive and exploitative, and the only viable response is open violent revolt" then you should probably say that. I'm more sympathetic to that point of view than the generalization that "POSIWID" represents. "POSIWID" is false, and if it is true in some context, it is important to clarify what context that is.
If you are just trying to use it as a dog-whistle, please choose a different dog whistle that won't piss off systems theorists and epistemologists. I hear Mario's brother from the Ninetendo IP is strangely popular right now.
Phrases and idioms often are not true literally. They are a short handle to something those who are in the know can understand. For example, when someone says it's raining cats and dogs, they mean that it's raining heavily. They are not being a vague-posting edgelord even if you personally didn't know that phrase and hence could not correctly decode the message.
Why do people say it's raining "cats and dogs." Say it's raining large drops of water instead of the annoying edgelord exaggeration.
Wutz your stance regarding “it’s raining annoying edgelords”?
I lol'd, but this probably isn't conductive to productive discourse. Alas, no jokes on open forums.
Maybe the annoyance you're feeling is part of the purpose of the phrasing.
The purpose of a phrase is what it does (to your psyche)
Everything that takes status from the oh so Ernest empathy signalers will read as "annoying edgelord exaggeration" to you.
You don't object to rhetorical generalization or the formalization of a catchy rule which might not always hold, everyone does that. Such grammatical and rhetorical structures go back to the ancient Greeks.
You object to the ideological, identity, age, and social category of "edgelords" ie. RW Men outside State and State attached organs, attacking the status and nobility of state and state attached organs.
Your annoyance is not a reason to stop using useful linguistic shorthands and evocative phrases to communicate complex ideas.
Because your annoyance isn't that a rhetorical style is non-descriptive or ineffective, but because it is descriptive and effectively employed by your ideological enemies.
"RW Men outside State and State attached organs, attacking the status and nobility of state and state attached organs." -- I don't know what an RW is, but attacking the status and nobility of state and state attached organs is one reason I expect to always love anarchists.
But I do object to rhetorical generalizations. I study computer science and wish to study memetic systems and their influence on society. I care about language and it's use, both out of an affection for language as an art, and because language shapes narrative and behaviour, which in turn shapes the world.
I do not think it is ok for our society to continue the way it has. I also do not think all institutions of the state are harmful and should be destroyed. The truth, unfortunately, is more complicated. That does not mean the truth is some middle ground or compromise. It means that I think both you and the people you see as your enemies, and certainly myself, are all stupid, and ill equipped to predict and control reality. But we still must all do our best.
In the follow up post I tried to find acronyms that could work in place of "POSIWID" without it's problems.
- *PELCSH*: "Persistent Effects are Likely Caused by Systems in Homeostasis" -- This is for situations where you want to analyze a system.
- *PAINO*: "Purposes Are Interventions Not Outcomes" -- This is for avoiding "no true scotsman" in arguments.
- *SASTAFAO*: "Systems Accomplish Some Things And Fail At Others" -- This is for catharsis when things are less good than you want them to be.
It seems like you are trying to use "POSIWID" to mean, "I'm very angry at the current powers organizing our society and wish to see them destroyed". I agree with the statement "I'm very angry at the current powers organizing our society and wish to see society improved by creating some organizations, changing some organizations, and disbanding some organizations", which I suspect will not sound extreme enough for you. I think all of my replacement acronyms will sound to you like a call for inaction. I do not believe they should. Rather, this is the wrong thing to be saying. The slogan should not be "the purpose of a system is what it does", but rather, "Complex organizations are orchestrated by an competent ruling class and are successfully extorting value from the rest of society", or "It is too late for inaction".
“My government purposefully raised housing prices for the benefit of people who own assets. They talk about "trying" to make things more affordable, but somehow they only succeeded in raising the cost by 500% in nominal terms. What a curious result.l
I think you’re way too cynical about that. Many people and politicians are math inept and don’t believe in economics. See the Left’s own love of protectionism and tariffs and price controls despite ample evidence to the contrary. I think it’s highly possible the lack of housing supply is an unfortunate side effect of misplaced incentives - regulation, heritage preservation, environmental review etc….
EDIT: See also the groundswell of anti-gentrification action 5-10 years ago which was broadly popular with both poor and wealthy leftist urban enclaves. Not economically literate in the least.
I am Canadian and I suspect you are American. I would not say this about the American government. But of Canada's, I am quite confident in this opinion.
It is also just an illustration, so if you still disagree with me and wish to press the point, perhaps we could talk about it somewhere else rather than make a mess in the Astral Codex comments. You could click through to my profile and comment on my main essay about the subject.
The Astral Codex comments are historically a very good place for mess and disagreement
Right, it's more the lack of relevance to the original post.
Also, my essay on that says most of what I'd end up typing, so the leftover discourse would be much briefer.
I think you can still stretch it to apply when innumeracy and economic ignorance seem like they can be to blame.
People's numeracy and willingness to defer to experts seem to totally flip sometimes depending on how invested they are in getting actual results vs looking virtuous among their tribe. It's like when you ask people to put their money where their mouth is and make a bet, suddenly they gain 15 IQ points.
You see people committing absolutely gratuitous logical errors when they prefer to defer to their ideology instead of actually solving a problem when it comes to politics, and then they'll go and optimise their factorio factories or calculate exactly how many lands they should have in their magic deck and you'll be like "ok, you are smart enough to not be dumb about all that other stuff, you just weren't trying because (unbeknownst to you, even) solving the actual problem wasn't your priority".
people don't believe in economics because actually existing economics, as practiced in i.e. university economics departments, is an ideological project to transfer money to the upper class
False
Could you be specific? (This should also be said to the GP.)
I've encountered several theories of economics, and some of them definitely were designed to transfer money from the less powerful to the more powerful. Others didn't appear to have that as an intentional effect, but looked like they might to it anyway. Only a few seemed as if their goal was to transfer money from the powerful to the less powerful (And I often thought those could be gamed.)
So which specific theory of economics do you refer to that wouldn't have that effect, at least not intentionally.
The purpose of the system is what it does.
Yes, University economics departments are packed with socialists, so I agree with you.
I think you're right—but at the same time, it doesn't invalidate the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does.
Using your example, perhaps politicians genuinely wanted to make housing more affordable at first. But when their efforts failed, reversing course became politically impossible because the unintended consequences benefited powerful interest groups that would destroy them if they dared to do so.
And so, "the purpose of a system is what it does", even if no one consciously designed it that way.
Good point
Go to any local zoning or building approval meeting. There will be someone there demanding a project be disallowed on the grounds that it will lower property values because it will increase supply.
I've heard that housing is "unprofitable" for local governments: on average, residents pay less in property taxes than it costs the local government to provide them with services, with one of the most expensive being public education for children. Local governments make up for the shortfall with the revenue from commercial and industrial development.
The effect of this on the willingness of local governments (and the people who vote for those governments) to add more residents by allowing the construction of new housing, without any offsetting increase in revenue from other "ratables", is left as an exercise for the reader.
Then why is commercial or industrial development also hard? Votes > Money
Well the inefficiency of government services is also something that would need o be delved into. It’s not like American return on public school investment dollars is particularly good, for example.
That's because the purpose of education spending is to get votes and funding controlled by the education unions who vote D.
I don’t think this sentiment was ever accepted as the actual reason for constraining supply. Remember also those anti gentrification forces that wanted to preserve neighborhoods for their original inhabitants because they were afraid prices would go up. Two diametrically opposed ideas; I think people just don’t like it when their built environment changes.
It will never be stated as the reason, because it's just greed. That doesn't mean it isn't the reason. (And you see anti-gentrification efforts in communities with a high degree of renters, typically)
> See the Left’s own love of protectionism and tariffs and price controls despite ample evidence to the contrary
Well now that you’ve finally exited that cave you were living in for a few decades it’s worth looking up what ideological faction in the US is pro protectionism and pro tariffs.
The answer may surprise you.
Yes, it's about noticing causal disentanglement between speech and action. If Sam Altman wants to continue rapidly accelerating AI, each time a negative consequence of this goes public, he'll say "whoops, our bad guys, sorry, won't happen again", and will continue on about the same path, or perhaps budge the needle slightly without seriously compromising his real goals. POSIWID's wisdom is this, "If he's said something like that repeatedly, and nothing seems to be changing on a mechanistic level, consider that there's a different incentive being prioritised."
Good example.
Yep.
I can definitely see TPoaSiWiD as an analytical framing that is useful in certain contexts but is not literally true. I'm seen some of the same lines of argument that Scott seems to be reacting to, and I'm inclined to think that those arguments represent an abuse of the concept to situations where it's more misleading than revealing.
I have similar feelings about the concept of "Death of the Author" from literary criticism, where the completed text of the work is analyzed in isolation and the author's intent (either explicitly stated outside the work itself or inferred from the context of the author's life, views, and other works) is no more germane to the analysis than any particular reader's headcanon. It can definitely be useful to analyze a text seperately from its context, as the essay in which Roland Barthes coined the phrase (written in 1967) was a reaction against then-fashionable schools of criticism that (he argued) neglected texts and focused too much on trying to infer authors' intentions. It can also be valid to have your own headcanons and to enjoy a work based on an understanding that is independent of or contrary to what the author had in mind. C.f. Tolkien's bit about the distinction between allegory and applicability.
But in online discussions, you'll occasionally encounter people who have latched on to "Death of the Author" as an absolute and universal principle and will try to use it to shut down anyone who's trying to talk about authorial intent and the context in which the work was written.
How about this?; Each human being is a system
I can say of my system that its purpose is to behave in exactly the way I behave.
That leads to some interesting introspection.
Came here to say more or less this.
A cancer hospital's purpose is to cure as many patients as possible subject to technological and financial (and so on) constraints. You wouldn't use the saying for one that had a survival rate in line with what you would expect given the constraints it was operating under.
But you might use it for a "cancer hospital" that routinely gave patients saline solution instead of chemo, or one that made most of its money selling opioid prescriptions to people who weren't sick.
I've spent a fair amount of time reading about abuses in the justice system, and I think there are a good many people who like the idea of suspects and prisoners being treated badly.
While it's extreme, for the reasons you say, to claim that the purpose of a system is what it does, it's fair to say that what is a bad side effect to some people is at least a desired effect to others.
Yes, I think the somewhat adjacent phrase "the cruelty is the point" is sometimes actually true.
I think POSIWID is best applied to bureaucracies or large structures where the reason bad outcomes occur is not because of difficult battles with reality (like government or hospitals or the Ukrainian military), but because of the way incentives are set up in the system.
If someone said, “the purpose of the Civil Service is to drive through new, innovative ways of delivering rapid change!”, that would clearly be absurd. That may be their goal, or how they see themselves; but the purpose of the system is not defined by either of those things. If it was, they wouldn’t incentivise caution and slowness. Whether that’s good or not, the purpose of the Civil Service is best approximated by what it does!
How do you differentiate between the meanings of "goal" and "purpose"?
Could we say that the goal of the system is what the people in charge of the system are trying to do but the purpose of the system is a sort-of weighted-average of what every actor/subsystem within the system is trying to do?
So for example British Leyland [car manufacturer that went bankrupt owing to a combination of trade union overreach and the practice of making really cool interesting cars (eg. the Mini Cooper) that cost more to manufacture than they could be sold for] had the (top-down directed) *goal* of manufacturing and selling cars, but the (bottom-up aggregated) *purpose* of all its subsystems was to A) make cars in exchange for as much salary as possible (irrespective of whether this helps fulfil the goal) and B) to design as cool/interesting cars as possible (irrespective of how much they could be sold for)?
This seems to give a clear distinction between goal, purpose, and actions/outcomes (these last being, obvs., to die gloriously before the combined fusillade of Ford, Volkswagen, et. al.)
"Goal" is the mission statement, "purpose" is the sum total of value derived from continued operation. These overlap at least to some degree, but pretty much never entirely. Of course, the fact of this discrepancy existing is often used in bad faith, so the main thrust of your criticism is fair, but these tactics are effective precisely because those baileys do have corresponding mottes.
"Goals" exist in the minds of individuals. People who set up an institution did so because they hoped it would have some kind of effect in the world. Those hopes constitute the (initial) goal of the system. Moreover, the people who are presently in the institution, including the leaders, have goals of their own. They may be selfish goals about how they can further their own ends through the institution, or idealistic goals about what the institution ought to accomplish (like driving through new, innovative ways of delivering rapid change).
The "purpose" of an institution is more about its actual pattern of behaviour. One way to think about this is, it's the implicit justification for the continued existence of the institution. This may or may not correspond to the reason it was initially set up, or to what its leaders try to achieve. It's about the way it fits into the rest of the world and the function it fulfils. That's why we can analyse it in terms of its institutional structure: what are the incentives for how individuals behave? What behaviours are rewarded? What actions are penalised? If a bureaucracy doesn’t incentivise speed or experimentation, then regardless of mission statements, its actual purpose is better understood in terms of producing stability and durability than in terms of agile reform.
So in the case of the Ukrainian military: I assume that the incentives and institutional structure are set up to maximise their effectiveness in war. So the stalemate is a consequence of hard constraints, and the presence of a powerful adversary. But it's possible for a military to actually be set up in a bad way that doesn't achieve this end; its purpose might practically be to confer status on certain elites for instance.
The argument is kind of, "the purpose of a system is what it is"; and then in some cases, there's an extremely strong correlation between what it is (incentives, institutional structure, constraints) and what it does (the outcomes attained as a result of the actions of individuals within it). That's where POSIWID is a useful pushback against the notion that its purpose is its goal, i.e., can be found in the "intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it" (Wikipedia).
Your examples are cases in which that correlation is less weak, because even an optimally designed system will struggle to achieve the outcome it wants. In those cases, yes, people who say "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients" are simply wrong. Such people are often being too conspiratorial and/or misunderstanding the reality of how difficult curing cancer is.
I'm just noting that not all cases are like this! Sometimes systems produce bad outcomes not because the task is hard, but because the system is "designed" (probably not consciously) to produce them. And sometimes this is important because a better designed system really could produce better outcomes (cf., for instance, Yudkowsky's discussion of healthcare in Inadequate Equilibria).
I think the goal is like the purpose that the founder or the leader of the organization has. It's usually stated explicitly in writing somewhere in a mission statement.
The purpose is the vector sum of the incentives of all the people who spend labor or resources maintaining the organization. Sometimes people invest in the organization because of a secondary goal, they don't care about the original goal that much. Then after some time passes, if the people who had the original goal leave and enough people with the secondary goal enter, the purpose of the organization becomes different from the stated goal. At least until someone gets around to changing the written mission statement.
For example a school can begin as an institution that educates kids and indoctrinates them to be more religious or patriotic. Then lots of parents send their kids to school because it's convenient to them, it's free daycare. They don't oppose the actual education but it's not their primary purpose. After a few generations, the daycare becomes priority one, the true purpose of the system. Education becomes secondary.
“ the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.”
That is the dictionary definition of “purpose.“ I have a hard time driving a wedge between purpose and intent or even goal. The net result of something is entirely different. The true purpose or intent behind an action may be difficult to discern. It may be intentionally hidden. It may be poorly conceived. It may have unintended consequences. I don’t think it’s terribly helpful to say that the result of a system is in fact it’s purpose. It may well be, but that is a case by case determination.
It is about as informative as saying “it is what it is.“
“the law of unintended consequences“ or “the road to hell is paved with good intentions“ or “the tree shall be known by its fruit.” are all better. Not to mention “the Lord moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.“
It can't be taken to it's full extent in every (or maybe any) cases, and does risk people simply using it to back up their hot take. But it still seems valuable to me.
Perhaps these versions: "If a system is consistently reaching certain outcomes, and any attempts to improve it are primarily blocked, maybe the system is working as intended." (Intended probably isn't the right word here as there's not usually just one actor "intending" something, but rather a mix of dynamics).
For example, the US policing and criminal justice system and prisons seem to continually over imprisons people in general, and especially people of colour. These systems seem not to be changed, while they ostensibly truly could be. So to me this seems that the system may be working "to purpose" for the actors who want it to work that way.
Same for disability benefits I'm Britain. I would say it exists to keep people alive on an as minimal basis as possible, not to support them to thrive or live a truly good life. So in this case, I would say the purpose of the system is indeed what it does.
I don't think the US justice system is a good example, because assuming the rate of imprisonment is excessive*, that is an explicit policy choice. California's Three Strikes law, for example, was enacted by voters. Ditto laws which create lengthy consecutive sentences for gang-related gun murders (often 50 yrs to life or more).
You are also mistaken when you say that nothing has changed. Those same voters have more recently enacted various ameliorative criminal justice progisions.
*a value judgment
An explicit policy choice does make it seem like it's working as (the public) intended.
Right. But it is not an example of the purported phenomenon.
Maybe. Or maybe all the alternatives are bad, and if you leave the current system in place, at least it's not your fault. Or maybe every alternative is bad for a different person, so no matter what you try, someone's going to block it. Or maybe they care more about the political implications than the action itself. Or maybe it can be improved in the long term, but only through costs in the short term that nobody is willing to bear.
Yes, status quo and inertia does a lot of work. No one would probably have enacted the Jones act over the last 20 years, but once it’s in the books taking it away is a political cost people don’t want to pay.
I've been wondering about that. Part of the dialogue around the Jones Act is that it's so ineffective that the industry it supposedly protects doesn't even exist.
So... who's going to impose a political cost on repealing it? Who's in favor of it, and why would politicians listen to them?
It does exist. Some people build ships in the US with US steel and staff them with Americans just to be allowed to ship from the US to the US. And if the Jones Act gets repealed, they'll suddenly have a lot more competition and not be able to recoup their costs.
Right, how many people is that?
The US prison system has varied in how much it incarcerates, and the crime rate has also varied. I'd suggest reading "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" for a broad overview. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
I don't think you realize how little money is actually required to "keep people alive on as minimal basis as possible". At the same time, you're right not to expect the system to "support them to thrive or live a truly good life".
>the US policing and criminal justice system and prisons seem to continually over imprisons people in general, and especially people of colour
That implies you have in mind some amount of imprisonment that is the correct amount. What amount would be appropriate? And why do you believe that POC are being over imprisoned?
I think it's not really literally true, but nonetheless there seems to be some insight to it.
I think I interpret it as something like: if you tolerate the bad side effects of a system, and it's not obvious that they are hard to solve or that you've even tried, it's kind of meaningless to call them "unintended" - that shouldn't really get you off the hook.
Side effects you cared more about solving would be solved, or we'd be hearing arguments about why they're hard to solve, instead of platitudes about them being unintended.
Basically: declaring something "unintended" isn't an argument, it's not a get out of jail free card. It's not possible, without making further arguments, to distinguish that point from simply something you don't care to solve, which I think it's pretty fair to describe as "intended".
I was watching a documentary recently about elections in Australia, and it spoke of voters being sceptical about the government not being able to solve various problems. During the pandemic, the government demonstrated enormous state capacity. And yet they say they don't have the power to fix a bunch relatively minor things that seem easier? The conclusion the interviewed voters drew was that the government didn't really care to solve these issues, that they are not a priority.
That's the kind of scenario I think of - something genuinely unintended, but not addressed, if it seems like one *could* address it, its ongoing existence eventually should be judged as intent.
My software has plenty of bugs. Are they the purpose of the program? Literally, no. Could I fix them? Absolutely. They're not a priority to fix though compared to other work, so I think it's fair to point out that in some sense they're intended. I fix other bugs all the time, why? Because they're more important. The reason the low priority bugs persist isn't "whoopsie, code is hard!" and I shouldn't be able to terminate conversation by saying so: the real reason is that they're not a priority, which I think it is useful to conflate with some kind of ongoing intent even if the specific bugs were not anticipated.
I agree with this interpretation.
If a system produces certain results, and we do nothing to change the system, then it is our intent to have a system that continues to produce those results, even if we are not happy with the results. From that standpoint, the purpose of a system is what it does.
However, if we try a new system and it doesn't produce the desired results, I don't think it makes sense to say that the purpose was to produce the results that weren't desired. But if we keep the system as is, then go back to the first point I made.
“ I think I interpret it as something like: if you tolerate the bad side effects of a system, and it's not obvious that they are hard to solve or that you've even tried, it's kind of meaningless to call them "unintended" - that shouldn't really get you off the hook.”
Can we have some examples of easily solved side effects that are allowed to persist? Very few people seem to think the restorative justice measures before and around COVID went well, for example.
Bryan Caplan made the same point about "state capacity" vs "state priorities" https://www.econlib.org/state-priorities-not-state-capacity/
I think this and DAL's post about legal intent vs. legal purpose are the best extensions to Scott's post.
Another angle: once I stop replying to someone's texts promptly - there are socially graceful ways to justify this, but the unstated truth is "I value something else more than you in this moment." It's true, but it's usually uncouth to point this out. A lot of social blunders are like this: people obliviously revealing their internal values to people who can read the subtext e.g. absent-mindedly yawning during a conversation with someone.
I think the POSIWID-posters are pointing out the organizational equivalent of this: "they won't say or acknowledge it, but the priorities of the stakeholders in this organization are creating this outcome."
"Cui bono" is its sibling. No one "benefits" from a third of cancer patients dying (maybe insurance companies?), but it's a useful question to start with when you're in a waiting room for 8 hours due to a staff shortage at the hospital.
Lots of people might plausibly benefit from perpetuating a staff shortage. Does whoever's in charge of hiring get to keep collecting a salary while few or no new staff are being hired? Surely that's easier for them than doing research and interviews, and safer than committing to a decision on whether any given candidate is good enough.
Right, and so is that POSIWID, or is that just "this organization is semi-dysfunctional due to competing incentives and priorities"
There's a lot of conceptual overlap with the Dan Davies essay defending the phrase (linked elsewhere in the thread):
> So, for example, if you have an air conditioning unit that’s emitting black smoke, you can’t say “the purpose of this air conditioning unit is to emit black smoke”, because it’s not an ongoing system that’s going to be allowed to keep doing that.
> One of the big misconceptions that the POSIWID slogan fosters is that it should always be (but rarely is) mentally expanded to “the purpose of a system is what it systematically does, on an ongoing basis, with the permission of the other systems which form its environment”.
> And that last clause about the other systems is really important.
It's a slogan without terribly deep content. I understand it as having a use when you need to distinguish between stated and actual intentions.
E.g. a 4 year college in the US states that its role is to educate the engineers of the future (or whoever). But it relentlessly raises tuition and adds leadership bloat and increases the salaries of top admin. Meanwhile, the quality of instruction is not rising in lockstep with tuition. The purpose of this system is what it does: extract money from students and federal grants to line the pockets of its upper classes.
Or does this fall into the blindingly obvious category?
I think it's generally taken for granted that the purpose of a for-profit organisation is to make a profit.
But attributing additional, sinister purposes to an organisation is a more dubious way of thinking. It makes sense to say, "The organisation is incentivised to do [harmful thing]", but that statement should be clearly distinguished from "The organisation's purpose is to do [harmful thing]".
My example was based on my personal experience, in which the Uni was a non-profit organisation. All of its formally stated aims were related to education and research. I remember going to a town hall meeting where the president got up and said "Just because we're a non-profit doesn't mean we can't make a profit!"
I thought the mask had slipped a little, but everyone else applauded. The same place had 95% of students coming from the top decile of the income distribution, and committee meetings were generally more occupied with financial than educational discussions. My own salary declined in real terms by 15% in the five years I was there, but the admin salaries were up by 70% or so, and tuition up by 20%.
I don't think this was sinister or malicious - but it was axiomatic that tuition had to rise to cover ever-rising costs, and the only way of reducing costs was voluntary or involuntary layoffs.
Thank you for explaining. I understand and agree with your frustration with administrative bloat in universities.
However, it seems difficult to attribute a purpose to an organisation that very few members of that organisation would endorse, even in the privacy of their own thoughts. What proportion of the uni's senior leadership would need to be intentionally seeking to maximise admin bloat for that to become the uni's 'real' purpose? Does it make a difference if they're pursuing this goal as a means to an end or an end in itself?
I realise that in following this train of thought, I'm backing myself into a corner by implicitly asserting that an organisation's real purpose is either whatever its PR team says it is (obviously not true), or whatever its founders originally intended (also obviously not true). But I'm not ready to accept any of the alternative definitions.
Surely, to the extent that the slogan means anything, it means that the stated objectives and the revealed objectives need not coincide?
I think that bloat is not the end goal in itself, rather the people who make hiring decisions are mostly involved in developing policy and reporting requirements rather than teaching, and so value people who can fulfil those tasks. There's also a well established tendency for people to pursue promotion by increasing the number of their underlings.
From my experience, the underlying goal of that particular uni was to ensure its continued existence and well-being, in particular by 'retaining talent in key positions' with generous raises and 'maintaining a solid financial footing' by increasing tuition at the maximal socially permissible rate.
The school does actually educate people, right? Why not say that's the purpose since it's also something the school does while facilitating the transfer of money?
Scott references figure ground inversion in a book review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/10/book-review-house-of-god/
"An example of what I mean, taken from politics: some people think of government as another name for the things we do together, like providing food to the hungry, or ensuring that old people have the health care they need. These people know that some politicians are corrupt, and sometimes the money actually goes to whoever’s best at demanding pork, and the regulations sometimes favor whichever giant corporation has the best lobbyists. But this is viewed as a weird disease of the body politic, something that can be abstracted away as noise in the system.
And then there are other people who think of government as a giant pork-distribution system, where obviously representatives and bureaucrats, incentivized in every way to support the forces that provide them with campaign funding and personal prestige, will take those incentives. Obviously they’ll use the government to crush their enemies. Sometimes this system also involves the hungry getting food and the elderly getting medical care, as an epiphenomenon of its pork-distribution role, but this isn’t particularly important and can be abstracted away as noise."
It seems like you're just doing that. Most people would reasonably say that schools provide education, but there's some incentives that encourage expensive bloat. But you're just looking at the same situation and insisting that education is just an unintended byproduct of a university busily paying it's administrative staff. .
Oh, an organisation can (and almost always does) have multiple purposes. It would be overly reductive to strengthen the slogan to 'the purpose is just one thing that the organisation does'. Maybe its content is that you shouldn't overlook negative outcomes of an organisations activities as collateral damage or necessary evils?
In the case above the University was providing an education, and that was the primary purpose. The number of tenure track instructors fell, the number of adjuncts rose. Student numbers rose, they packed them ever more tightly into old buildings, the tuition rose much more rapidly than inflation. There were prestige buildings unveiled every few years (think innovation labs rather than classrooms). There was no incentive to provide an affordable education, or to control costs; culturally it was distasteful to raise student financial struggles with faculty or staff.
My argument is that this wasn't an accident of the system, or a side-effect: it was the system functioning as intended.
In that case, saying the purpose of the university is to "extract money from students and federal grants to line the pockets of its upper classes" seems misleading and it seems like a more reasonable statement would be
"The purpose of the university is to educate people, but there's no incentive to do so affordably so students can end up funding unnecessary things"
That's a much less extreme statement though.
I have to toss in Pournelle's Iron Law. The purpose of a system - when it is first established - may be dramatically different from the purpose it assumes after a few years.
Consider: You establish a system to solve a problem. That could be homelessness, or asylum, or drug abuse, or any of a number of other things. This system employs people, who then have an automatic interest - not in solving the problem - but in prolonging it, even in making it worse. After all, without the problem, the organization would not need to exist.
That’s my feeling about NATO.
I agree with you that POSWID is typically deployed as a vacuous slogan masquerading as critique (its purpose, perhaps?).
But here is what I think the core value of the idea is. Take the example of the cancer hospital. "The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, but curing cancer is hard, so (according to the latest numbers) they only manage 68%."
If the purpose of a cancer hospital were to cure all the cancer patients, we would design cancer care — in and outside the hospital — differently; for example, we'd offer much more intensive and early-stage genetic and clinical screening for risk factors and stage 1 disease, we'd use the hospital as a training and deployment ground for preemptive dietary and lifestyle interventions to prevent or slow the progression of cancer, etc.
We don't do all of those things because they are expensive and/or contentious. As such, a cancer hospital can be understood, in realist terms, as the physical (and financial/operational) manifestation of a stable (but negotiated and ultimately up for debate) social consensus at a given point in time — "what kind of resources do we expend on preventing and curing cancer?". And it turns out the answer is: "cure approximately 68% of patients, because if that number were much lower we would be mad, but also, if the costs (even if also success) were much higher we'd be mad in a different way." This is its purpose, and that is what it does.
Aye. It's the same with the Ukrainian army. If its purpose was to win the war against Russia, the whole country would've been on a war footing, WWII-style: every able-bodied man in the army, every able-bodied woman producing weapons and materiel, every non-essential industry closed and converted into making weapons and materiel.
Instead, we see that its purpose is to prevent Russia from taking over Ukraine while leaving as much civilian economy intact as possible.
Can you go on a total war footing without external financial.support? If not, is it not the case that what you can do is limited by your support?
Russian goals appear to include destroying as much of Ukraine's civilian economy as possible, so naturally the Ukrainian military is trying not to make that easier for them.
Definitely. You can imagine a theoretical system where every single participant is fully driven towards the stated purpose, and yet the purpose is still not being achieved, despite everyone's best efforts.
In practice however, no system on earth behaves like that! so to improve a system, it's useful to analyze it with the assumption that there are unstated constraints on the stated purpose that prevent people from being fully aligned with it (for reasons that can be totally reasonable, as in the examples above).
Basically, POSWID is simply highlighting the unintuitive fact that caring about the intended purpose of a system is of limited use to understanding the system.
It fails to be insightful when people use it instead as an extension of the concept of "revealed preferences", applied to organizations instead of individuals. Just because a system does a certain thing, does not mean everyone (or even anyone) inside wants that thing to happen.
I'm glad that Stafford Beer is getting famous enough to be vacuously quoted by random people on Twitter!
The formulation isn't really very different from Robin Hanson saying that people's true motivations are different from their stated motivations for doing things -- an insight that rationalists have had no problem integrating. "System" here is a bit of 1970s cybernetic jargon, Beer is really thinking about organizations. And "purpose" here is meant not in an objective sense but in a subjective sense: *from the perspective of organizations*, what are they trying to accomplish.
Much of the logic is evolutionary: the only organizations that exist are those that have survived. So the first role of an organization is self-perpetuation. Generally, for this goal to be accomplished, the organization needs to be able explain how it works to others in society as well as to its members. This is what leads to Hanson-style post hoc rationalizations for what are ultimately directed towards survival.
source: I'm a big stafford beer fan https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/the-tragedy-of-stafford-beer
What is the actually epistemological value of the claim, once we concede that the perceived "purpose" is simply an asserted choice among potential explanations?
The point is certainly more rhetorical than epistemological. Like "the medium is the message," the phrase is meant to work on the margin and challenge recieved wisdom. Of course the stated goals of organiztions and the content of media are important -- but everyone knows that, to such an extent that they implicitly treat these as the *only* frame to understand organizations or media.
Both McLuhan and Beer have written many books explaining their alternative frames, to which the phrases point. In the case of POSIWID in particular, I think the insight is "in the water" now (thanks to decades of public choice economics and the general demystification/disenchantment of our institutions) to an extent that it sits in an unsatisfying valley and comes across as smarmy/mid where it was much more transgressive 50 years ago
I think it makes more sense in context. If you’re a management consultant (which Beer mostly was) trying to unpick what departments in an organization are actually for, POSIWID is a pretty good rule. Just treat it as a black box and look at the inputs and outputs
Thank god you’re here lol
It’s odd to me that Scott skipped right over that quote despite including it, because I think it’s a much stronger phrasing of POSIWID.
https://open.substack.com/pub/backofmind/p/the-purpose-of-a-system-is-you-cant?r=f2tq9&utm_medium=ios Dan Davies is a prominent systems theory advocate. Give his book the Unaccountability Machine a go. The above link is his last stand defending POSIWID (he ultimately accepts that it causes more confusion than benefit)
Thanks for that link.
Reminds me of Conquest's Third Law: The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
I had the same thought.
This way of thinking may result from taking a strategy for predicting the motives of individuals, and using it to predict the motives of organisations. "Cui bono?" works when you're considering a single action carried out by a single person at a single moment in time, but it doesn't really work when you're considering the behaviour of hundreds of people who are incentivised to somewhat-but-not-perfectly cooperate over a long period to somewhat-but-not-perfectly implement a goal that was established by someone who somewhat-but-not-perfectly understands that that goal is just an instrument to attain a larger, more complex goal set by somebody else.
Hello, welcome to Forced Blue Eye Vaccination Limited.
There is currently a blue eye eating fungus disease that is spreading through the air and infects 80% of people with blue eyes, eating their eyes in an extremely painful and permanently blinding way. We forcibly vaccinate people with blue eyes against the blue eye eating fungus disease, so that nobody has to suffer from the blue eye eating fungus disease.
We have decided to do this by kidnapping people from their homes with ducktape, rope, and tall, buff men, traumatizing them in the process, and then bring them back after vaccination. But we've done the math, and this is less traumatizing than letting them get infected with the disease.
...What? Don't kidnap people from their homes and traumatize them? Oh, that's not the PURPOSE of our operation. It's just a necessary side effect of saving people from the blue eye eating fungus disease. If you disagree, you're ignoring our organization's stated purpose.
All assertions that our president has a bondage videotape collection are fabrications and all pieces of evidence that point to him having one are deepfakes.
Okay, now replace "Forced Blue Eye Vaccination Disease" with "smallpox".
If we're talking about forcing smallpox vaccinations on people at wells or whatever, that's a good conversation to have! We can work through the balance for the harm we have to do to get our good, and smallpox eradicators did indeed work through it. Forced Blue Eye Vaccination Limited doesn't seem to be doing this; they're going far beyond just forced vaccination. The unnecessary added harm looks an awful lot like they're doing it on purpose.
Smallpox appears to be quite thoroughly extinct. And AFIK we got there without needing to forcibly vaccinate anyone. We made vaccination the default, yes, but everywhere I know of that was a default that was trivial to opt out of.
ThingofThings recently had a post about it; they actually did forcibly vaccinate some people in the Third World. (Not even in a "legally mandate it" way, in a "lurk by watering holes and jump people with needles" way.)
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/facts-i-learned-from-angel-of-death
Well, that's a thoroughly horrible precedent. And seeing as how the United States seems to have extirpated smallpox within its domain, without ambushing people with needles (or, e.g. firing them from their jobs if they don't get the vaccine), a thoroughly unnecessary one.
Oh, I agree, and so does ToT.
(Though they specifically did this only with the last off-grid stragglers in what was also the wellspring of the disease, because they wanted to get the job done before the annual pilgrimage to Mecca risked a whole new outbreak that would render their earlier work moot; I might not have made the same choice in their place but, as presented, it was a hard dilemma.)
But whatever else we might say of these people — however harshly we look upon their decision — their intention *actually was* to wipe out smallpox globally, which, in fact, they achieved. Concluding that Their Purpose was to poke desert nomads with needles, and they were lying about only wanting to eradicate smallpox, would have no predictive power.
In the original Stafford Beer sense, the slogan POSIWID means that you can't tell from outside the system whether any given behaviour was *intended* or not. For the purposes of objective analysis, you have to treat your system as a black box that *does* whatever it's observed to do, as opposed to what people *claim* the point of the system is.
It's worth remembering that this is about control, not conspiratorial cynicism. Stuff happens because of a system, and that system is trying to solve a problem. If, to outsiders, the behaviour seems immoral or dysfunctional, it's not because the people in the system are uniquely evil or bad, it's because the system is behaving in a dysfunctional way.
You seem to want to have it both ways. In the first paragraph you tell us that we simply cannot know what the purpose of a system is. But in the second paragraph you tell us that the system is dysfunctional. The problem is that you can only know that the system is dysfunctional if you know that it's function is something else than what it does. But you can't know that the function is something else unless you can peer inside the black box or its history.
So the purpose of (for example) the HS2 project is "build a new modern railway between London and the other large cities in England". And they ended up spending £100 million on a Bat Tunnel, to protect bats; but nobody can confirm if the tunnel will actually help bats.
This strikes many people as dysfunctional and crazy (including people involved in the HS2 project). So why did they design and build the Bat Tunnel? It wasn't because any particular individual was wilfully stupid or ludicrously pro-bat. The Bat Tunnel was the outcome of the system. Inasmuch as the slogan is worthwhile, it encourages us to look at systems, and try and define clear abstractions (i.e. a succession of nested black boxes) to understand why the system is (apparently) set up to do things like create Bat Tunnels.
Bottom line: we have a system. The system did a thing. Saying "the system shouldn't have done this" is empty. The purpose of the system is what it does. Our job is to understand the system well enough to modify it so it does what we want.
I use the phrase "the system is what the system does" and I think this largely avoids discussion of purpose. I think it's a sometimes useful phrase to point out that what one intends doesn't matter and that if the system has been misfiring for a long time, then more drastic steps are necessary.
But that phrase isn't correct either. The system is not just what it does. The system also contains a set of unactualized dispositions that it may enact under the right/wrong circumstances. This is why we may infer, from the trainwreck of democracy during the Covid overreaction crisis, that the system was never democratic to begin with: the system was already disposed to give up the appearance of democracy as soon as the circumstances allowed.
Democracy isn't well defined, but the US was never intended to be a democracy, but rather a republic. I think after various legal decisions (like "money is speech") that it's actually turned into a plutocracy, but that's pretty close to a republic if you look at Roman history.
The US was intended to be a democracy, according to sense 1 here. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democracy
No. Originally voting in the US was usually restricted to property owning males. And Senators were not directly elected, but were appointed by the states. You could reasonably claim that some of the states were intended to be democracies, but not the country. (And not all the states. Only a republican government was required.)
> The system is not just what it does. The system also contains a set of unactualized dispositions that it may enact under the right/wrong circumstances.
Those are part of what the system does. Saying that the action of the system in response to future events doesn't count as "what the system does" is as bad as saying that the action of the system in response to the events of yesterday doesn't count as "what the system does".
Unactualized dispositions are, by definition, not what the system does, but what the system would have done under different circumstances. If you're misinterpreting them as unactualized-as-yet, that still doesn't help, because a system typically contains dispositions that are not actualized and will *never* be actualized.
Think about the landmine that could have exploded, but ended up getting cleared. The purpose of the landmine was to explode, but that's exactly what it never did.
What? It doesn't work even under the theory that the purpose of an object is set once by some particular person and can't change.
"The purpose of a landmine is to explode" would imply that a landmine that exploded in the factory was a 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴.
The actual purpose of a landmine is, in the general case, to stop people from crossing the mined region. And it does that precisely by its faculty of exploding-if-pressured-from-above. That is a behavior the landmine has whether or not it's exercised, and that behavior is how it serves the goals of the people who placed it.
I think this is about right. It seems to me that POSIWID is mostly a semantic position which people are mistaking for a moral or other normative one. To take Alexander's first example, yes, the purpose of cancer hospitals is to give patients whatever care is currently possible to treat their cancer. The efficacy of said care is neither here nor there.
I think the principle is uninformative when we’re looking at ideal/abstract systems, but is interesting and valuable when we’re dealing with any variation from this ideal (i.e., all human systems)—e.g., if a particular cancer hospital tended to fail to treat bowel cancer more often than the norm then we might have interesting conclusions to draw given POSIWID, or if a nation state happened to imprison a particular category of person more often than one would expect, then we’d have interesting questions to ask about its institutions given POSIWID.
I guess more generally it’s more useful as a practical concept than theoretical.
If the purpose of a system is always what it does, then no system can ever malfunction and fail its purpose. But obviously systems malfunction very often; a system does not always do what its purpose is. Therefore the purpose of a system is not always what it does.
Tim Young here links to a relevant discussion of a malfunctioning AC unit.
A system does not have an intrinsic purpose, it merely is. And yet, if it's survived for so long, it's worth looking into how it did that, no?
I can wholeheartedly recommend the 1980s BBC political satire "Yes, Minister" (and "Yes, Prime Minister" even more so; in fact I'd probably start there..) for a fantastic, hilarious, prescient, 20-hour-long exploration of this idea.
Sir Humphrey would say (I think possibly actually did say?) that the purpose of the armed forces is not to win wars but to reassure the electorate that wars, should they arise, could be won. Insofar as the best way to do this is sometimes to create armed forces that are actually capable of winning wars, war-winning is a convenient side-effect of the armed forces' true purpose.
Similarly, Sir Humphrey would say that "solving some crime", "tolerating other crimes", and "beating-up suspects" are all just side-effects of the police's true purpose of reassuring the electorate, as directed by and (more importantly) as paid-for by the state; some side-effects being more desirable than others.
Likewise education ("The Department of Education isn't there for eliminating class distinctions amongst *children*; whatever gave you that idea?! Its purpose is to get rid of class distinctions in the *teaching profession*; to have all teachers treated equally. We explain to Labour that selective education is too divisive and to the Tories that it is too expensive, and meanwhile we educate our own children privately.")
[nb. I'm not necessarily espousing Sir Humphrey's viewpoint; merely recommending the internecine conflicts depicted in the programme as a fantastic exploration of system-purpose-related ideas..]
Cosign the media recommendation! And also the application to this topic. The phrase may be overused, but it is obviously applicable to situations where there is organizational behavior clearly at odds with the nominal purpose of the organization. Where such a mismatch is severe and/or persists a long time, the Sir Humphrey explanation becomes more plausible.
The episode of Yes, Prime Minister where Sir Humphrey is locked out of No. 10 almost choked me unconscious with laughter.
It's worth noting that "Yes, [Prime] Minister" is a documentary presented as satire. The writers based it pretty closely on private interviews with two of Harold Wilson's and James Callaghan's senior staffers (Bernard Donoughue and Marcia Williams), some anonymous senior civil servants, and the published diaries for Richard Crossman from when he was Minister of Housing and Local Government. And one of the writers, Antony Jay, also wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe.
Jim Hacker was modeled relatively closely on Crossman, especially in the early serieses, and Sir Humphrey was modeled somewhat less closely on Dame Evelyn Sharpe (later Baroness Sharpe), who was the Permanent Secretary of Crossman's department.
> The Department of Education isn't there for eliminating class distinctions amongst *children*; whatever gave you that idea?!
The purpose of the educational system is to *legitimize* the class distinctions. Some people are poor and have to work bad jobs because they didn't pay attention and didn't work hard at school, unlike you, so they deserve their place. (The important part is to make the poor people believe it, too.)
> (The important part is to make the poor people believe it, too.)
This is historically not difficult to do; the education system hasn't improved, in that regard, on what came before it.
Nah
People have purposes and hopes and intentions.
People implement Systems.
Systems have outcomes.
Blain's first law: the more complicated a system, the more likely it has outcomes that the creators would see as negative.
Blain's second law. For any of blain's laws, someone else came up with the same some time ago and/ or said it better
I think we (humans) anthropomorphise things too much. You think you know why a cat does something. But you don't. Same for a large organisation. Dogs on the other hand... 😀
> Blain's second law. For any of blain's laws, someone else came up with the same some time ago and/ or said it better
Imagine the person that came up with that law before, and everyone is wondering who Blain is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
I asked Gemini to come up with examples that steelman POSIWID. It supplied 5 good ones, the general theme seems to be a sort of "conspiracy theory" thinking used to detect misalignments between stated "plausible deniability" purpose of a system and the more nefarious cynical incentives behind it.
Examples: https://imgur.com/a/7nmG3aA
Edit: perhaps the intent of this phrase can best paraphrased as "you're trying to change the system using Mistake Theory, but this state of affairs is no mistake, you should use Conflict Theory instead".
Political slogans need to be pithy and reveal some essential truth. This one is just pithy.
The problem, I think, is the word "purpose", which is too conspiratorial for my liking. What I think is probably more accurate, is that for any system, deficiencies or perverse effects, while unintended initially, come to be tolerated by the owners or proponents of that system.
I think a good example is tax codes. If you look at them, they don't appear to be created by people of sound mind. Loopholes, strange effects, regressiveness etc. etc. However, proposals to substantially change them often meet with howls of anguish. I think one then realises that actually tax codes are really the product of a cobbling together of a compromise by all the interests of society adjusted for their bargaining power/political influence. People highlight the absurdities and claim that the system is ripe for reform - but the absurdities probably benefit some group somewhere. The system persists.
So, I don't think it's that the purpose of system is what it does, but I do think the (side-)effects of a system can be what politicians or others avowedly claim they dislike and want to reform, but are secretly happy with or at least have no desire to change.
One man's loophole is another man's principled tax incentive.
I think one context where this phrasing makes sense is when the system has outlived its purpose, but still protects itself and does what it does.
The purpose of a hospital isn't to cure patients, it's to be curing patients. The purpose of the police isn't to make crimes go from "unsolved" to "solved", it's to be solving crimes. The purpose of Longshoremen is to work, not to load and unload cargo ships.
Imagine a miracle drug that could instantly cure any disease. If the purpose of hospitals were to cure patients, they would embrace it immediately and with joy, as it would get all patients instantly cured. I very much doubt that would actually happen in practice, because "the purpose of a system is what it does", and what it does is use elaborate methods and hire a lot of people.
Maybe a better phrasing would be something like "the purpose of a system is to resist change and propagate itself", but that's not as catchy. Those inclined to read the same works of high fantasy as I do may prefer "all systems are corrupt."
I don't think you're right about the miracle drug. Dentists pushed for fluoride toothpaste even though it cost them a lot of money. I'm sure something like you're describing could happen, but I don't think it's the default expectation.
> I very much doubt that would actually happen in practice
I don't disagree with everything you said, but this in particular is conspiratorial nonsense. When penicillin first emerged it was basically a miracle drug for treating bacterial infections, and it was (and still is) widely embraced by hospitals.
I learned this in a software context before I ever heard it in the social science context, so I now have a twist of thought I like that I call POSIWID. The central example is like "the contact customer support button is hard to find because that reduces load on the customer support team" or "Google will never stop producing chat apps, the purpose of the chat app division isn't chat apps, it's staff promotions."
The insight is something like "when a system fails to achieve its stated purpose, consider that it may be being maintained in that state for some other reason" which is true and great to keep in mind
Have you heard the term “sludge”? Freakonomics Radio just did a two part episode on it. The "contact customer support button is hard to find because that reduces load on the customer support team" is a perfect example.
I've heard of Sludge Vohaul, but I don't see what he has to do with anything. I guess his name is just too common.
That's a name I haven't read in a long time... :)
Maybe not his full name, but his given name is so common I wouldn't expect to hear it referred to as specific to Freakonomics.
"Sludge" is a word in common use, but no sense that would include "the contact customer support button is hard to find because that reduces load on the customer support team" is in common use, so it makes sense to refer to that as specific to Freakonomics.
If the question was "Have you heard the term 'sludge'? The stuff flowing along the bottom of a sewer is a perfect example", that would be a weirder question.
I was mocking the use of an already common word for this new specific purpose.
Yes, and the binary reading Scott does to try to debunk is bizarre from a "rationalist." When there is a mismatch between nominal purpose and actual outcome, one can update one's priors as to whether the nominal purpose is correct. The longer persisting and more severe the mismatch, the more updating is warranted.
So as a former bureaucrat and auditor, I highly disagree with regard to any MATURE system. The people working these systems know exactly the problems and how to effectively fix them or are simply indifferent and don't want to know because their goal isn't for the system to do it's stated function. It's why complaining to management, inspector generals, etc doesn't work, because they already know and don't care because the system IS working as expected to those in the system.
Your hospital example is a great example of this, if you look at the DOCTORS (and their families) outcome rates at that same hospital they are significantly better. The point of that hospital is to provide better outcomes for it's workers under the veneer of egalitarianism to get the masses to fund treatments they won't get otherwise they would have identical outcomes rates. Don't confuse virtue signalling charters and mission statements with the actual purpose once the organization matures.
If the actual goal was for police to reduce crime, they would never leave the station as everyone commits multiple crimes a day and statistically police, judges, and prosecutors commit them at a higher rate that the general public hence they never get around to arresting jaywalkers and beating them because after they cleaned out the station and court house, they'd have to arrest themselves. My probation officer brazenly breaks the law right there in the court house every time I meet her, you want to bet how many times she been arrested for the tens of thousands of felonies she's committed. I'll bet you every dollar to my name it's zero.
Homicides really do go up when police pull back, because homicides committed by police are vastly smaller than the homicides they prevent. But you probably are on the right track in thinking that the police to don't exist to prevent ALL crime considering how many crimes there are. Jaywalkers aren't the metric they're held accountable to, homicides are taken MUCH more seriously.
And yet police spend vastly more effort and resources going after jaywalkers, speeders, homeless people, and truants over murderers hence I'd suggest you are wrong at their accountability metrics because incentives matter. A felony is a felony, just last week on the police blotter for example a homeless guy in my neighborhood was arrested for FELONY littering because police priorities while the overwhelming majority of local murders remain unsolved.
If the goal is to reduce homicides, you don't need the police for that at all, you simply need to provide legal protection (i.e. tort) to illegal transactions. This is a well known and proven effective fix.
No amount of policing is going to ever reduce murders of passion nor mental defect.
Actually many murderers of passion and/or mental defect are considerably less passionate or defective when the chances of punishment go up.
A man incarcerated for beating his wife and mother begged Theodore Dalrymple for help because he didn't need jail but anger management classes. Dalrymple observed that he managed his anger just fine in prison, and the prisoner retorted that he didn't want to get sent to the block. That is, his purported emotional reason was entirely curbed by punishment.
Perhaps he need BOTH jail and anger management. That someone can be intimidated by imminent threats doesn't mean he can manage on his own.
Then make sure the threat is always there. Make sure the police are always visible in public. Make sure that they are feared by everyone. Fear keeps people in line.
You aren't comparing likes though I'd agree he probably doesn't have a mental defect nor is regular beatings an impulsive crime of passion. From your story he "beat his family members whom he cohabitated with", that isn't beating the neighbor's family members nor random strangers on the street, if he was in prison AND shared cell with his wife and mother, he might have very well beat them in prison as well. Basically he got jailed for committing a faux paus and the prosecutor wasted government taxes for something that at most, was a tort.
No amount of policing, nor really anything, stops impulsivity, it's why we can't solve murder, assault, suicide, etc. as there will always been a baseline level of it. But much of it IS preventable if we simply given the participants legal ways to resolve their issues as the overwhelming amount of non-familial violence involves business transactions who simply can't use the legal system to resolve them.
Very improbable. They sent you to the block for attacking other inmates.
More policing actually DOES significantly reduce homicides. We've seen that with "natural experiments" when homeland security alerts temporarily increased police presence in certain places https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/TerrorAlertProofs.pdf and "dynamic concentration" has been reduced to reduce crime in high-crime areas. Plus, we saw crime spike when police pulled back after George Floyd.
That report makes the standard error of confusing "crimes committed" with "crimes arrested", those aren't related. Policing has near zero statistically significant affect on crime at all, at best it seems increases arrests which then causes an increase in the reported crime level. If you don't arrest murders, you have a murder rate of 0% with a 100% arrest rate, that doesn't mean murder isn't still happening. If the budget is looking low this quarter, just arrest the first fifty people you see and bam, the reported crime rates just increased and your budget will get protected plus the prosecutor will find something to get them to plea and next quarter you can even reduce the rate to get that hero award by simply not arresting a new fifty, you sure solved that crime spike you created, hero!
The highest crime area is the police station followed by the court house yet somehow being inhabited by police at all hours they crime rate hasn't reduced at all, if fact it generally increases in those areas the more police that are present as a counterfactual.
But even if we play your though experiment because you aren't hearing what I'm saying as I assume you have a cop fetish like so many modern Americans from your statements, it's irrelevant. Dropping a nuclear bomb on New York will reduce crime as well in high-crime areas as would giving every resident a trillion dollars cash. The goal isn't to "arbitrarily arrest more criminals based on the fascistically whims of the cop that day", the goal is to prevent the crime from happening in the first place at price comparable to having the police or, as can easily be done, cheaper than the existing police budget. It's a half the price to just give a drug addict cash so she doesn't have to rob people that house her in prison but nope, let's incentivize her to commit crime instead and then spend double when we could have prevented it; and then we wonder why we can't have nice things. It would be 20% the price if Walgreens could sell meth but nope, can't have that because how else will the police get new paramilitary gear to shoot author's in their home.
The TYPE of crime matters, increased policing, even if on every corner, has ZERO affect on a girl walking in on her wife banging a guy and impulsively killing her for being a lesbo traitor. It has ZERO affect on the paranoid schizophrenic having a psychotic break and stabbing someone. It has ZERO affect on school shooters or guys flying planes into buildings or parking vans of fertilizer under them. Nearly all crime is "victimless", how exactly is your cop on the corner preventing that loo. What it does it simply moves niche statistically insignificant crime from area A to area B just like how homeless sweeps don't solve homelessness, it simply moves them to a new neighborhood for a little bit.
For nearly all crime people genuinely care about, cops at best, even when they have a marginal impact, are cost ineffective. Most crimes that the "public" cares about, when they aren't fabricated by the police, are the result of vigilantism and regulatory capture. You can fix both of those at pennies on the dollar over what you pay police but we can't do that because, you know, jealously and spite.
No, I don't believe police spend "vastly more effort and resources going after jaywalkers... over murderers". Instead, I'd suggest YOU are the one who is wrong. On page 4 of https://nicjr.org/wp-content/themes/nicjr-child/assets/Stockton.pdf you'll see some numbers on how much is spent on shootings that result in injuries vs homicides. The latter of course have a bigger price tag, as the more severe crime. Jaywalking isn't compared there, because that's obviously a less severe crime that police care less about.
You are mixing up apples and oranges again girl. Also NICJR is a lobbying group on par with trusting SPLC on anything involving racism by whites lol.
I mean that entire report is amusing with inflated costs. You don't need twenty three people to show up to a murder, you can get by believe it or not with one or two nor are their costs realized, they are already on the clock as an hour of law enforcement is an hour of law enforcement whether it being a murder scene or a jaywalking scene or the cop sleeping in his car like usual. Hospital and medical costs are born by the nobody, they are dead. Likewise prison, jail, and court cost are the same regardless of the crime nor do they "take" longer, all cases even jaywalking take the maximum time the defense can afford as all of them are both making a play to keep their guy out of jail longer, get paid more, and maybe you can get lucky and evidence will get lost, people retire, etc. I had speeding ticket drag out for three years once with nineteen court appearances and that is before we even got to the jury. Nearly ever cost they list is either a sunk cost or non specific outside the margins, felony littering has the identical costs. That entire report is a marketting piece pushing FUD hard to get get a political outcome the funders want.
Even lobbying groups can provide helpful data. You have provided none, and instead just made false assertions.
> You don't need twenty three people to show up to a murder
The claim you made I disputed was not about the resources NEEDED for a murder, but what the police actually SPEND.
> they are already on the clock as an hour of law enforcement is an hour of law enforcement whether it being a murder scene or a jaywalking scene
There number of crimes committed exceeds police resources, and police busy with one crime cannot deal with another. Nor do jaywalking & murders actually take up the same number of hours for investigation!
> Likewise prison, jail, and court cost are the same regardless of the crime nor do they "take" longer, all cases even jaywalking take the maximum time the defense can afford
How dumb can you be to believe that jaywalking & murder convictions take up the same amount of time? Are you unaware that different crimes come with different amounts of prison time?
Damn, how do you get a felony littering charge? Fentanyl-laced caltrops?
Nah that would still be a drug charge, literally some homeless guy just littered and got felony littering because, IDK, stupid voters. I just noticed it on the police blotter is all (I peruse it weekly).
Edit: Looked it up, was curious. Seems the law made repeat offenders (third time+ in twenty years) a felony is 2006 because, well we like to put people in prison for five years over nothing. After all, how else will the children of unemployable police and prison guards eat? Seems to me it was just an anti-homeless law in reality masquerading as public safety.
"The purpose of the system is what it does" is an imperfect heuristic, but the idealistic approach is often much worse. In particular, the idealist approach makes a sort of interchangability obscuration where if there's particular methods the system is designed to use and particular exogenous causes that respond differently to these methods, the naive view l would not properly appreciate the constraints of how one can modify those methods to modify the outcomes.
Maybe part of the problem with your examples is that they aren't complete enough. For instance the purpose of a hospital isn't just to cure two-thirds of cancer patients, it's also to poach incentivizable doctors from hyper-rich people, and to allow the state and insurance companies to regulate doctor's treatments, and so on.
I could imagine that if hyper-rich people had more ownership over their teams of doctors, then those doctors would be more focused on innovating for unusually difficult cases rather than optimizing the economies of scale for more common cases, which on longer term would increase the fraction of cancer cases you could cure more. But I might be wrong; obviously as I'm a software engineer, I know less about medicine than you.
Like in the short term it would of course lead to curing less than two thirds of cancer cases.
Another way of thinking of it: if two-thirds of cancer patients are as many cancer patients as they can possibly cure, then "as many as possible" and "two-thirds" is the same and the distinction disappears. The function of "the purpose of the system is what it does" is dispelling the fallacy that local improvements to the system is a good way to get the remaining one-thirds. That's not necessarily true, of course, and so TPOTSIWID is not necessarily correct. But it's correct more often than one would think.
(Edit: sorry, I now see Petey's comment above nails this , and I missed it somehow. Not much additive in my comment.)
This, plus: the value of TPOTSIWID is that when it seems not to apply, that is a clue that you may be thinking about the system wrong. If "the purpose of a cancer hospital" really were "to cure as many patients as POSSIBLE", you would see different behaviors. For example, Doctors would never be allowed to go home to their families; patients would never be denied a test or procedure just because it didn't seem likely to be helpful or a good tradeoff against noncancerous side effects (or because they couldn't afford it). To move your worldview closer to TPOTSIWID you should reframe your view of the system and/or its "true purpose" (to the extent such a thing really exists... Which is somewhere between "not at all" and "totally"). For example, maybe it's better to model the purpose of a cancer hospital as an optimization of benefits against costs, where benefits include other non-cancer-curing outcomes like patient quality of life or dignity of death, and where costs include economic realities. Maybe there's something in there too about prestige and research publications, and nonlinear aversion to legal risk. It turns out to be a really messy question, so while you investigate it, TPOTSIWID can help remind you to look at revealed preferences instead of espoused mission statements.
And this is particularly helpful in combination with the above comment from tailcalled: Someone may propose a change to the hospital which they think would improve cancer curing on the margin, but which in reality is not a win based on a total accounting of benefits and costs according to the messy hidden evaluation function. Then, if they naively believed that "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible", they might get frustrated when the hospital rejects the idea, and TPOTSIWID can be a succinct reminder to reconsider what the purpose of the system "really" is.
(Why anyone would expect to learn this from twitter shitposters, I cannot fathom.)
There's also a need to not get bogged down in excess complexity, though, rather than it turning into an endless fractal of tradeoffs and exceptions.
You are sort of describing healthcare in the us vs healthcare in the uk.
On average (measured as how long you live) healthcare is better in the uk but if you look at life expectancy vs income the top 1% live longer in the us (from memory in a ft article in mid 24)
I don't think we would expect the innovations produced by this to stay within national lines. If you come up with a new test or treatment, there's a lot of money to be made from scaling it up globally.
Also on reflection, rich people crave economies of scale, so doctors that specialize in rich people probably would be bad at individualized treatment. Maybe doctors who specialize in other doctors would work better.
I don't know about the UK in particular, but apparently rich people in the US have life expectancies that are shorter than their European counterparts and in some cases are worse than much poorer Europeans:
https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap
I see it used as "if you have a complex system/bureaucracy to solve X, then the incentives inside it is for X to get worse, and incentives will not have 0 influence on outcomes"
For example : https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034
The statement is used as a paraphrase of “this system is working as intended IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE”. Because of how it’s phrased, it sounds like a principle or an argument, but the user is invariably just stating the conclusion.
You can find Stafford Beer's original use in the book "Diagnosing Systems for Organisations".
It's actually part of an analysis of how the central part of an organisation should influence the behavior of the other parts. It may wish to modify the purpose and behavior of sub-organisations, but it first should understand their current purpose in terms of what they are actually doing.
"But then what was it meant to apply to?"
Emergent agents - corporations, government agencies, etc. The purpose of Google is what it does, not "connecting the world's knowledge" or whatever it was.
The purpose of Google is to make money. What it does is lots of different things.
Of course POSIWID is stupid as an ontological claim. But as a rhetorical device I think it can be useful in at least two situations.
1. As an attack against apologetics. The "but it wasn't designed to do that" defense is just as bad, if not worse, than POSIWID. No one cares that you _intended_ your algorithm to show relevant content if what it _does_ is lead 14-year-olds to self-harm.
2. Once a system's outcomes are well-understood and yet the system persists, especially if it's actively maintained, then you have to assume that those outcomes are at least acceptable to the people overseeing the system. At that point, the intent of the system doesn't matter. The system is a trade-off, and the choice to continue the system as-is constitutes an acceptance of that trade-off. We don't get to choose to get the purpose of the system, our only choice is to get what it does. The purpose of keeping the system in place is what it does (PoKSiPiWiD).
> The "but it wasn't designed to do that" defense is just as bad, if not worse, than POSIWID.
Why not "the value of a system is what it does"?
There are at least two meaning of 'purpose' to these kinds of systems - the purpose in the mind of the creator of the system - like the guys who built the hospital might have a purpose to cure cancer. That purpose is in the mind of the creators. And then there is the purpose 'emergent', 'embodied' in the system, operated by the people involved, like making money, keeping jobs, curing diseases. In this case goal=purpose. I'm not sure I agree with the statement though. "What something does" might be a side effect, and not a goal. If the hospital makes a lot of CO2 for some reason, and someone comes up with a plan to reduce the emissions, and the hospital agrees to the plan, then obviously making C02 was not a purpose, but just a side effect. If they resist the plan, then they may well have the purpose of creating CO2, or also likely, there is another, linked purpose that is not obvious.
Stafford Beer coined this phrase, at the same time as he was studying, among other things institutional capture and the "principle/agent problem" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem). In the light of this, it makes a certain amount of sense. The medical field is full of expensive treatments, drugs, and procedures which are no more effective than other cheaper ways to treat patients, and in some cases a lot worse. They persist because only one of the purposes of the medical centre is to cure and treat patients. Another purpose is to pay the medical staff. A third one is to give status to the medical people involved. These purposes can conflict, and there will be resistence to any proposed new treatment, no matter how better it is in outcomes for the patients just because many people don't like changing how they do things -- especially if they benefit from the old way of doing things and lose this benefit if they change, or if they have to admit that the old way was useless or worse than useless.
In the light of all of this it is necessary to look at the whole system and see exactly what it really accomplishes, and not trust that the slogan 'our purpose is to cure patients' will make certain that the better treatments are adopted. Whenever you see that a system is generating a result that is at variance with its stated purpose, it is always a good idea to check first to see who benefits from the way things are running now, because you often find that the system really is working the way it is supposed to. We're just supposed to pretend that it is supposed to be doing something else, and that any deviation from that goal is unintentional, or accidental.
I think it applies in education policy debates but few other places.
There are lots of schemes to help poor kids, that end up helping rich kids, or cheap policies that end up being expensive and employing people who lobbied for them.
It applies to ALL systems, but it always requires interpretation, as it's a shorthand for at least one much more verbose phrasing...and you can't tell which one.
I tend to interpret it as a claim the a putative "sorry, side-effect" of the system was, instead, an intended result. Frequently this claim seems at best weakly-founded, but other times it seems extremely plausible.
I think the application is much stronger for "side-effects" that were pointed out as likely/certain ahead of time. Which applies to a whole lot of both/all sides of the political systems at least. I
f you implement a system that a 5 year old can see will have bad results, you don't get to disclaim those results as unintentional later. You knew or should have known--your choices are malice, wilful blindness, or aggravated incompetence... Which is basically indistinguishable from malice.
This originally struck me as rather silly and as an obvious misinterpretation of an idea that has nothing to do with human intentions...then I read the comments and saw many people claiming exactly that!
Donella Meadows is an important figure in the field of Systems Thinking, and says by definition (whether human designed or not), systems have a purpose.
"A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals”
One way to think about this is that Meadows would be OK talking about Molochs purpose as something coherent. Is changing the climate the purpose of modern capitalism? In one sense, no. But simultaneously, it is perfectly coherent to talk about the system as having that exact purpose because the system seems to work towards that goal. Even if you push against the system, the system seems to adapt and continue with that goal anyways. There is something almost intelligent about systems where they seem to work towards goals that no one ever intended.
But the phrase isn't about human goals at all!
Is there anything that isn't a system or doesn't have a purpose?
Objects exist only in so far as they interact with other things (see the Hard Problem of Matter). So my naive understanding is that everything in the universe—from a grain of sand to the cosmos itself—can be studied as if it were a system with function or purpose. But I think Donella would caution against over-reifying the concept of a system. Where you draw the boundaries around a system is arbitrary from the point of view of the universe. Systems are an epistemological tool, not an ontological reality. (Though see debates about emergence, which blur that distinction.)
Maybe the clearest analysis of an instance of POTSIWID comes from Benjamin Ross Hoffman here: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/parkinsons-law-ideology-statistics/
Maybe to add:
In real-world organizations, it's not uncommon that the current plan is obviously problematic and that you can easily suggest a local change which improves it. However, often when you repeatedly apply such local changes of improvement, the resulting conclusion is "we shouldn't be doing this at all" or "we should do something completely different from what we were planning to do", and then the process of local improvement gets shut down because they don't want to cancel the project/do something completely different.
In such a case, it seems appropriate to say "the purpose of the system is what it does".
This sentiment is grasping towards the same sort of place as your "Meditations on Moloch" essay.
No-one involved in the system wants what the system actually ends up doing. But whatever their individual intents, /the system as a whole/, if allowed to grow naturally, inevitably ends up doing what Moloch wants.
Of course the purpose we intended for the system isn't really that, any more than Moloch really exists. But you can't begin the meta level fight - of designing the system's high level organisational structures and incentives to try to reduce this effect, instead of letting it emerge organically like it always does - unless you first admit the problem.
I think this commenter has identified the root issue.
The Carthaginian demon that inhabits your bureaucracy might have purposes at odds with the bureaucrats who sustain it and the Great Founder who summoned it.
Consider the system as an entity: what is it trying to do?
I think the way the phrase is used 'in the wild' is intended to point out that you can have "unintended consequences" which are not truly unintended. If a consequence was unforeseen, or unforeseeable, then we can all wring our hands about unintended consequences relative to the system's stated goals. But once the system has been tried and tested, and we know what the consequences are going to be, can you still call them "unintended"? Wouldn't it be more fair to call them "accepted negative externalities"? The "purpose of the system" is to execute on a specific set of trade-offs. I think it's reasonable for the recipients of the negative externalities to point out that the stated goals of the system are not the full accounting of what the system is implementing, no?
Regulatory capture?
I think the quote is to be taken from the perspective of a person wishing to incorporate the system into their worldview. "Don't think of the system as an agent doing what its purpose purportedly says. When analyzing the agent, change its purpose to what it actually does, otherwise you're creating a false worldview."
The purpose of the Ukrainian resistance is to rid itself of Russian invaders, but I shouldn't have the Ukraine resistance as a concept in my worldview that just rids itself of the invaders.
The purpose of the hospital is to pursue the treatments it is currently pursuing. It's not going out and collecting money from people in a calculated attempt to maximize the number of saved patients.
POSIWID was not originally an antagonistic political snark. It's perfectly sensible to notice that a system may be fulfilling other purposes than it does officially, and this is not incompatible with it operating in good faith. You can think of it as a bit like Chesterton's fence:
* to reform a ssytem you should understand what purposes it fulfils, not just what it is officially supposed to do
* These additonal or alternative purposes may in fact be desirable ones that you should avoid breaking.
Cybernetics (where the phrase originated) drew a lot of inspiration from biology, and there obviously nothing has an 'official purpose' at all. But it nevertheless has organisation and is functional.
I've seen reports (don't know how true) that NGOs in San Fran get paid a lot of money to solve homelessness. But after billions spent, homelessness is worse.
I thought this saying was a kinda reference to that sort of thing: the NGOs are there to collect money by virtue of the fact that there are homeless. Which is not what they are purported to do.
I think the better version of this is “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets,” which I read for the first time in Thinking in Systems by Donella H Meadows and she attributes to Donald Berwick. This formulation, for me at least, prompts a sort of curious reflection on what might be going on with a system that is leading to the observed outputs. It leaves open the door for the potential to redesign a system to get different outputs. The other formulation feels more cynical and pessimistic.
If it's perfectly designed, you wouldn't expect it to get redesigned. But in fact, redesigns happen a lot, including by the people responsible for the previous design.
Unless the desired results change. Then you can get redesigns without flaws. It's Working As Implemented, but not Working As Desired (by at least some stakeholder).
Now you can get cases where WaI is the least-bad compromise between stakeholders whose desires aren't mutually compatible, or where the process of getting to a "better" state is not feasible (ie an optimum separated from current state by some insurmountable barrier in configuration space)
I don't think desired results change often enough to explain how common redesigns are. Technology gets redesigned often, and it's less common for people to prefer the old results and continue using the old design, instead the proverbial Better Mousetrap displaces the old one that people then buy used & cheap if they don't want to splurge on the new on.
The way I see it happen (as a software developer) is as follows:
1. Stakeholders want X.
2. X is too expensive (money, time, talent) to do perfectly.
3. So let's do Y, which does *most* of X, but also has effects A and B that, while aren't necessarily desired, are acceptable compromises.
4. Time passes.
5. Now what they want is X', which is a small (theoretically) evolution from X. But one in which A and B are not acceptable anymore.
6. So they spend time doing a re-design
7. but resources haven't really changed, so all they can get is Y', which has undesired but mostly acceptable effects A' and B'.
8. Rinse and repeat.
Throw that in with "designer's got to design to keep their jobs" (a pressing problem--how many interfaces have been redesigned not because they were *faulty* but because they were *outdated*)?
Remember, the whole point here is that the *actual* desires of the stakeholders and their *stated* desires are not necessarily 1:1. Generally, the stated desires are a simplified front that looks good to the world. Because saying "I want to make lots of money and I don't really care how" is frowned upon--instead we have grand mission statements. That, in the end, are malleable or ignorable enough to end up with "I'm in it to make money" as the real net desire.
You also get cancellation--*these* stakeholders want Q and are willing to accept P and grudgingly go along with R, *those* stakeholders want ~Q and are willing to accept R and grudgingly go along with P, so you end up with P + R, which isn't *anyone*'s stated or preferred outcome.
I'm also a software developer, and in my experience redesigns happen because there's a continual demand for more features.
That's exactly "the desired results changed". It did X, now they want X + Y or X' (X but with a twist or change).
I've always thought of the phrase as an argument against the "no true Scotsman" fallacy when it's used in an organisational setting. When there are significant failings of an organisation, the response (within the organisation) can sometimes be: "there are some bad apples working against the purpose of our system: our system is not supposed to do this and the failings are due to individuals and not the system itself". POSIWID then is applicable: you can't claim a system "isn't supposed to" do something, if it's repeatedly doing it on a large enough scale.
The original purpose of a system cannot be used as a defence when it's outcomes don't match that claimed purpose.
The police example is not a great one. It is indeed the purpose of the police to discourage deviant behavior through the use of violence or the threat of violence, and it is hardly unheard of for police or the government to define deviance to be that which threatens those in power. Esp outside liberal democracies but not exclusively.
100%, the idea that a police officer is there to serve me is a very Western one. On large majority of the Earth's surface, stating that is a good way to give locals a laugh.
Do they prefer their system then?
Do people really have that idea in the West? Clearly the primary purpose of the legal system is to enforce government power.
One can see the duality of the term in how "police state" and "well-policed country" mean very different things
What it might be driving at is better explained by the concept of “revealed preference”: sometimes what a system actually does is a strong indicator of either conscious intent (albeit that can often veer into a conspiracy mindset, albeit sometimes conspiracies happen, they just tend to be mundane!) or an emergent property that enough people in a position to change it are actually happy to accept but won’t necessarily openly admit this (or even consciously consider it) even if other people point out the flaw (it is not a hidden problem, although that can also happen).
To take a completely hypothetical example a nation state with a difficult relationship with certain people that live within its de facto ambit of influence and power might want to maintain structural ambiguity about the legal status of those people to maintain maximum flexibility of action and political power advantage that clarity of legal status either way would not allow. The ambiguity becomes a design feature not a bug (although it may start as just an anomaly).
Then again the bureaucratic version of Occam’s Razor of “assume mess up not conspiracy” also applies. The world is messy and complicated and changing stuff is hard and this often leads to unforeseen stuff happening.
I think the description is specifically for systems which are failing at their stated goals yet not changing. There is a reason why it is not changing, and the most likely explanation is that there are entrenched parties benefiting from the current equilibrium state. Then the heuristic is that it's easier to just start from scratch and hope for a new, better equilibrium, rather than going through the trouble of identifying and breaking these bad incentives.
I’d say the hospital is precisely designed to cure 66% of people because it operates within constraints (financial, #doctors, approved meds). A “system” designed to cure let’s say 99% of people would look wholly different.
The purpose of POSWID is insight porn that makes wordcels feel better about themselves.
There's an inherent assumption here that "improving" or "changing" a system is different from replacing/redesigning it which doesn't hold to scrutiny.
Like, I can look at most of your examples and be like:
"No, that is the actual purpose of the system"
The tube as emissions is a bad one, but just because you are describing 0.1% of the exhibited behavior.
The Ukrainian military example is great, like, you can point to ways in which it's purpose is literally "to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia" -- like, this is part of it's design by Russian puppet dictators.
Like... imagine an army with hundreds of nukes and bioweapons that would be losing as badly as the Ukrainian one is losing.
Imagine an army that is fighting a drone war which is actively imprisoning and conscripting their own contractors working on new drones.
Imagine an army which is both aggressive to it's own citizenry and easy to bribe your way through, such that every man earning more than a few dozen thousand dollars a year flees the country when it most needs the money.
Yes, the purpose of the Ukrainian army is to loose to Russia, and you could not fix it unless you redesigned it over the course of a decade.
Note: Was planning on replying this to a different comment which (I assume) got deleted because it was just a short sentence. My bad for breaking comment ettiquete with it.
There's a closely related and oft-misunderstood idea in software engineering: the interface/implementation distinction.
Something you were getting at is that set of things any action does — its behaviors — is astronomical. The bus system moves people, blocks traffic and cyclists, creates jobs, competes with private shuttles, empowers unions, emits CO2, increases the value of real estate, increases noise pollution, transfers money to bus manufacturers, and a host of other effects. Its promised behavior — of providing transit for passengers according to its route schedule — is a tiny subset of these actual behaviors. When you say that its purpose is just the transit, you're not just making a moralistic claim about the intentions of the creators. You are also making a prediction that providing transit is the only constant. Any other behavior can be changed.
It's a common pitfall of software and system design to begin depending on behaviors not guaranteed. I don't know what it would mean to depend on a bus system empowering unions (maybe creating some security based on union strength and putting all your savings into it), but the other systems named readily lend themselves to examples. The purpose of a commercial airline route is to move passengers and their luggage from point A to point B. Other behaviors, such as that it's always done in a Boeing 737 equipped with wifi and power outlets and the cargo hold is kept pressurized, are details subject to change. If you put a bottle of soda in your luggage and it arrives having exploded onto your clothes, it's your mistake for depending on an unstable implementation detail, not the airline's mistake for not fulfilling (what you thought was) the route's purpose of traveling with a pressurized cargo hold.
More discussion: pathsensitive.com/2018/01/the-three-levels-of-software-why-code.html
That CO2 emissions figure for New York's bus system must be incorrect. That is 10% of the world's total CO2 emissions.
I've sketched out my thoughts at https://mjkerrison.substack.com/p/salvaging-posiwid - not a plug, just a long-form. TL;DR -
- I basically agree about common usage being bad
- I think it can be salvaged, however
- Specifically, I think it can be used to comment on / critique when systems become too focused on *being a system*.
Mostly what systems Do is propagate; sometimes this produces byproducts we like/want; when this goes awry and we catch the system propagating more than we wanted given the byproducts, say: POSIWID.
Some plausibly-true examples of TPOTSIWID I could think of:
Liberal cities tend to have arduous bureaucratic processes for approving new housing. The system's claimed purpose is to do things like "preserve the historic character" of a street or a building or a neighborhood, prevent negative effects on the environment, ensure adequate sunlight exposure to existing buildings, etc. etc. In practice, the system slows down new housing tremendously. TPOTSIWID, i.e. enact NIMBY policies, and NIMBY advocates who couch their defense of the system in lofty-sounding words about the historic character are usually being disingenuous rather than gullible.
Gerrymandering is usually couched with plausible-sounding excuses and justifications, like "natural communities", "geographic compactness" etc. However, TPOTSIWID.
College-level textbooks in popular subjects with lots of students (STEM, business, medicine) often have new editions issued often, with exercises renumbered or scrambled, so that students couldn't use an older second-hand edition. The purpose of the system is to increase the profits by strongly encouraging each new cohorts of students to purchase new textbooks. The books themselves often offer explanations about what's so great about the new edition, but TPOTSIWID.
Higher education as signaling theory. College is not for "teaching you to think", or training you for workforce, it acts in fact as a filter and a signal to employers. TPOTSIWID, that's what it's for.
Freakonomics Radio just did a two part episode on what they call “sludge” (as opposed to “nudge”) and it’s exactly what you’re describing. Definitely worth a listen.
> Gerrymandering is usually couched with plausible-sounding excuses and justifications, like "natural communities", "geographic compactness" etc. However, TPOTSIWID.
Other way around - those are attacks on gerrymandering.
Imagine a dog in a round tub chasing its own tail. The purpose of the dog is to catch the fluffy thing that keeps running away from it. The purpose of the system is to give humans a laugh (and the dog exercise).
It's easy once we separate the system from the people who designed it and/or operate it:
> When people do list a specific example, it’s almost always a claim that, if you’re unhappy with any result of a system, the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you
The system may be evil without anyone intending for it to be.
To use a more serious example, the purpose of the Ukrainian military leadership is to win the war with Russia. Let's even say that's the purpose of every single Ukrainian soldier. And every Russian soldier and general's purpose is to win the war for Russia. Now add Americans/Europeans who supply intel/weapons/targeting. The system is a complex set of relationships and dependencies between all of those individual actors. If the system sends tens or hundreds of thousands of men to die for very little result, then that is its purpose.
"Sometimes what seem like unfortunate side effects are actually desired, especially if those side effects benefit a powerful group" is the gist of it, and often true, but no one can say anything these days without a knowing suggestion that they have the great big secret that explains everything, hence this slogan.
Obviously it's a silly phrase, but it genuinely works for a few cases. My pithy explanation is that the phrase works "when a system generates benefits for people involved in the system, despite the stated benefits being for people outside the system".
Rent extraction is a classic example: licensing bureaucracies or roadblocks that can be circumvented through bribes/corruption might be consciously designed with the purpose of generating revenue for officials. e.g. where police officers pocket on-the-spot fines, it might seem like the stated purpose of maintaining order for law-abiding citizens is being harmed or corrupted, but in fact, the "actual purpose" of augmenting police officers' low wages and incentivising patrolling is being realised.
What I hear when I hear that phrase is more: when a system fails dramatically at its stated purpose, but benefits the designers or operators of the system, it it worth considering that perhaps they are lying about the purpose of the system.
An example I can think of off the top of my head is help to buy in the UK. Its stated intent was to make it easier for less well off first time buyers to get onto the housing ladder. The actual effect seems to have been an increase in house prices that more than counteracts the benefits. So, perhaps the purpose of the system was never really to make it easier for first time buyers, but instead to keep house prices high? How convenient that the people designing the system own lots of property.
Of course the phrase lacks nuance! It's only 9 words! But that doesn't mean it's useless.
The implied meaning I always take from it is that to the degree that avoidable side effects are not in fact avoided, these are not side effects but intended.
I've heard that put as "reasonably foreseeable effects are not unintended". You can't (fairly) disclaim responsibility for bad things just by claiming you didn't intend for them to happen. If I design a computer system with an obvious (to a reasonable person) security hole, the convincingness of my claims of "unintended, therefore not to blame" go way down. Especially if the hole was pointed out to me before hand and I still went through with it.
I'll somewhat defend the NEPA example. Sure, blocking infrastructure projects is probably not what the people who made the system intended it to do, but my guess is that the majority of people who file NEPA lawsuits and politicians/interest groups who advocate for keeping NEPA absolutely do intend to use it as a general purpose tool to block such projects. So at this point the purpose of NEPA (to the people who use it) is to block infrastructure projects.
The POSWID statement is more reasonable if you take "what it does" as a *direction* rather than an absolute. Without a hospital, no cancer patients are cured; with a hospital, two thirds of cancer patients are cured; therefore, the purpose of a hospital is to cure cancer patients (more than would have been cured otherwise). This also explains the second example: the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to reduce the amount of Ukraine occupied by Russia (to less than it would have been otherwise).
It doesn't explain the fourth example: it suggests that the purpose of the New York bus system is to transport people and emit carbon dioxide, when the latter is not a purpose, but a side effect. But it fails the first two examples in the same way: hospitals and militaries both cost money to run, cause stress for their employees, etc., which are likewise side effects, rather than purposes.
(The third example is more complex: you could make some argument that the purpose of the British government is to weigh up competing sentiments to come up with a democratic decision, but this is a lot fuzzier.)
I don’t know about other people, but at least in my experience what it generally means is that if a system predictably does something most of the time you should not expect it to suddenly start doing something else just because you want it to, because it has a demonstrated tendency to do something else, regardless of what you call its purpose. For example, perhaps militaries that have a known habit of overthrowing the government have the platonic purpose of national defence, but that’s clearly not the objective you should actually expect them to pursue in real life when trying to predict their behaviour. For example, you yourself appear to believe that NEPA in actual practice serves as a mechanism for activist groups and local NIMBYs to block new projects, even though that’s obviously not what it’s original framers intended as its purpose or its platonic purpose. There may be other ways of expressing this insight, but none come to mind that are quite as catchy or good as one liners.
As an analogy with individuals, if you come across a drug addict, having a lot of drugs is not his purpose in a platonic sense, or the sense of what he ought to be doing or potentially even in the sense of what he wants to be the purpose he is pursuing, but from the standpoint of predicting his behaviour and responses to external stimulus, having a lot of drugs is clearly an important part of the utility function he actually pursues. The one liner just extends this insite to systems. Generally, from the standpoint of public policy, what matters is what a system will actually do not what it ought to be doing. I agree that the one liner is a little imprecise, and if you can think of some better replacements, I’d be happy to take you up on them, but right now I don’t think we have any better one liners that people would be better off using 2 express the underlying idea succinctly in a single line.
Basically, what the line means is that when trying to predict what a system does you should try to determine its utility function from the systems revealed preferences, instead of talking about the intentions of the people who created the system or the moral justification or moral obligations that you believe apply to the system or even the concrete intentions of any actual individual. Just as with individuals in an economy, when trying to ascertain the goals that determine a system actions, you’re better of looking at the system’s previous actions to determine how it behaves, although of course, it’s possible to overdo this and neglect the impact of changes in the people managing the system or other methods of changing its behaviour. At the end of the day, the one liner is just applying the idea of revealed preferences to systems so criticisms of revealed preferences as applied to individuals often also apply to the one liner. The best criticism that I can myself think of the one liner is that a system can be sufficiently incoherent in its behaviour that trying to ascertain its utility function through behaviour leaves you more confused and you would be better off ignoring all talk of purposes {Although honestly, I might be being too charitable here because in my experience people who use one liner often are not so much insisting that we should look at the previous behaviour of a system and instead stating that you should think about what a system will, in fact, actually do given all the relevant factors Instead of blindly acting as if it will magically do what it ought to be doing or what its platonic purpose is, which is a failure mode I see surprisingly often among some people} because the system is too incoherent to have anything close to a utility function. Although even then there are often predictable tendencies. For example, the American Supreme Court may not necessarily have a coherent utility function over a period of centuries. but it has well known tendencies, like being aligned to the wishes of Congress over a long period of time because of the manner in which its justices are appointed. So it’s generally unlikely to fight with Congress over any laws that have been overwhelmingly popular with Congress in the recent past and is more likely to block unpopular laws or laws that are popular with the general public but not so much with Congress or laws that were popular once passed, but have since lost popularity or raining in the actions of states whose preferences diverge from Congress’s. So even though it doesn’t have a coherent utility function, it’s fair to say that its purpose is not to serve as a countermajoritarian institution, but instead to prevent short-lived, majorities or rogue states with preferences very different from the federal government from acting contrary to the long-term wishes of the federal government. This is true, even though this may not have been the original intent of the framers or the objective of any actual concrete justice on the Supreme Court, because this is how the system behaves in practice.
One of your sentences here that I like and is better than POSIWID and more accurate: " ...what matters is what a system will actually do not what it ought to be doing".
It's about theodicy
It is obviously not true that those who enact rent control policies are trying to reduce supply. That is not their *purpose*. But reduced supply is (normally) the consequence and POSIWID is a call for Realism and Pragmatism and Extreme Ownership from those who can influence system design.
Is the original purpose of communism to cause mass starvation of the proletariat? No. But the people nowadays pushing communism are aware of the history of their movement. So maybe we should assume that mass starvation of all classes is their purpose. Whether or not they actually looked at previous attempts, thought "yes, these consequences are good; proceed as planned", it might be wise to wonder.
Judge politicians not by their sloganeering but by their results. Judge bureaucracies not by their stated goals but by the fruit of their labour. This, at least, is how I interpret the phrase.
Realism and Pragmatism and Extreme Ownership do not always make sense. It is hard to blame the Ukrainian military for the drawn out war even though they are a but for cause. Consequentialism sshmonshaquentialism.
And it is good to notice that my interpretation do not match the literal meaning of the words of the phrase. But I believe it does explain *usage*.
I agree that the use of POSIWID has been perverted, but I still think it can be useful. I think your first two examples fail to convince me because they counter-factually achieve curing cancer and winning wars. I think NEPA is a good example of POSIWID helping people get to the conclusion that NEPA no longer serves its original intentions.
The phrase seems to be saying that things are bad and that the systems doesnt care and must be changed.
It doesnt have to be literally the purpose of the system for people to say this.
"When a system consistently produces outcomes that point in a different direction from its stated purpose, consider that the system's true purpose might be different from its stated purpose." If you interpret it like this, POSIWID can be a good heuristic, but of course that's both a weakened version of the proverb and a steelman of its, uh, purpose.
People only say it about institutions/systems they believe are compromised
When I hear the phrase (or use it) what it usually means is
"I believe this system has been co-opted to deliver a different goal than what it's name after, and as such we're better off judging by what it actually does, not it's stated goal as it's only theatrically/aesthetically pursuing that one"
Examples that would come to mind:
Both San Francisco and Dublin (Ireland) where I live employ lots of people who they say are in charge of city planning, building houses, solving affordable housing etc. They spend the majority of their time rejecting planning applications for anything that the NIMBYs don't want. What is the true purpose of that system
The EU claims its AI Act exists to "strengthen uptake, investment and innovation in AI across the EU" - you can take that at face value, or you can look at what the system actually does.
etc.
An example from a system more nebulous than an official organization:
[People who identify as] feminists often say that the purpose of their movement is not merely a fight for the rights and wellness of women, but equality between the sexes (genders?) and dissolution of gender roles. But also [people who identify as] feminists often mock awkward, weird and romantically unsuccessful men. (An it's not even necessarily different people withing the same movement, sometimes the same people do both!) Being weird and romantically unsuccessful is failing to conform to the idealized male role, so people like that are (involuntarily) gender non-conforming, and mocking them reifies the gender roles.
If you assume that mocking weird creepy nerds is a higher-order goal of the feminist movement, it will allow you to make predictions about the future behavior of the members of the movement. Predictions like "when given a choice between not reifying gender roles and mocking a man for failing to uphold his role, a typical pop feminist (think Jezebel) will usually choose the latter". Do such predictions have more explanatory/predictive power than their inverse.
("When given a choice between a highly enjoyable gameplay loop and extracting more money from players, what will a gacha company choose?" "Will a sufficiently Javert-like policeman punish a crime committed by someone from the upper class with the same tenacity that they apply to the underclass?" "When presented with a Rotherham-like situation, will a western European judge be leaning towards harsh punishments of leniency?")
Slightly tangential, but my own theory about this tendency in (some) feminism is that it springs from a failure to pass an ideological Turing test. If (as a feminist) you think you are opposing a society [or anti-feminists, or men] that believes ‘all men are superior to women’, then pointing out and mocking inferior men undermines this claim.
Of course, most societies, anti-feminists, or men, don’t believe this. And if they did, it would miss the point. But if you’ve made that mistake about what your opponents believe, you’ll keep on debunking it.
Generally speaking, when faced with a statement such as this one, there's really 3 possibilities. The first one is that it is meant to be applied in an extremely narrow sense, to only a small subset of possibly situations. The second is that the statement is just confused nonsense. But the third one is the interesting one. It's that the statement is not meant to be taking literally, but to make you stop and think, to provoke thought. Most aphorisms fall into that category. When Nietzsche says "What does not kill me makes me stronger" it's easy to think of a thousand counter-examples, but I highly doubt Nietzsche meant this statement to be taken literally in every single situation. Nietzsche is just saying that suffering can sometimes be used as an opportunity to grow as a person.
I had never head of the statement "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does" before, and the Wikipedia page on it is not very thorough, but to me it seems exceedingly likely that this is also the intended meaning of that statement.
And this really seems like a good rule of thumb in many situations. Don't just evaluate a system by what is creators say they want, look at what it's actually doing.
To take your own example about police brutality. You casually dismiss this as an obviously unintended side effect. I think this is exceptionally naive. There are clearly people who benefit from police brutality, some of them in positions of power who have influence on how the system is set up. There are huge differences between how police works between countries. Is it purely a coincidence that police tends to be more brutal in less democratic countries? That beggars belief.
Police in the US is significantly more brutal than in other OECD countries. Why is that? Maybe Americans are just inherently unintelligent and therefore incapable of fixing the problems with their police, just like doctors are incapable of curing more than 2/3rds of cancer patients. Since I'm not American myself I don't feel qualified to comment on that hypothesis, but at face value it seems unlikely. It seems far more likely that US police is brutal because at least some powerful interest groups want it to be brutal.
It makes the most sense if you don't take it as having anything to do with intentions.
The truth at which it gestures is "This system can be relied upon to consistently produce this outcome, just as if it were designed to do so."
The point is to suggest that the "unintended side effects" are a direct result of the "rules" of the system, intentionally so or not, and therefore you can't ignore them as one-off incidents, or hope a minor patch will fix it. The system needs to be abolished, or else given a complete overhaul.
Obviously the ambiguous phrasing also allows you to assign insanely hostile and nonsensical motives to the outgroup. I would like to think this was not intention of the people who came up with the phrase, but whether it is or not, it can be relied upon to consistently produce that outcome.
The saying reminds me of politics is not about policy. Though saying the purpose is what it does is still very misleading. The purpose of all that paperwork hospitals do in the name of safety isn't to generate endless amounts of paper waste. It's to not get sued. The paper waste is a side effect. The purpose of having a bunch of police is to appear tough on crime to get reelected. Actually being tough on crime or on non-criminals that the police officers happen to not like is an unintended side-effect.
Sorry bud, you're just wrong. The purpose of Rationalism is to spawn really funny cults that reinvent Catholic and Jewish demons but they're robots from the future instead of supernatural beings from before time. Like all other things in the universe, how it impacts me is its purpose, because only my perspective matters.
In all your examples, you came with a pre-conceived notion of the purpose of the system.
You could say "The purpose of the hospital is to transfer money to Doctor's pockets, as a side effect, it cures two-thirds of cancer patients".
Or, "The purpose of the New York bus system is [To provide jobs for New Yorkers/To be a place for political appointments/ To transfer New-Yorkers], the side effect is CO2 emissions.
The "The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does" means you can't look at the *declared* reasons, because they can't be trusted. You have to actually look at what the system does - and maybe the hospital actually tries to maximize patient health and not Doctors salaries, or maybe the hospital tries to do both to some extent (Maximize patient health, but keep at least average doctor salaries).
The phrase means that when you look at declared reasons you won't see the whole picture, since declared reasons might be different from actual reasons, because the declaring the actual reasons wouldn't help the actual reasons.
Another thing, is that the phrase is more about "systems" that function for a long time, not events. So the Ukrainian Army (or the Russian Army) might have been jobs programs for political appointees, that got a war on it hands, and now have to manage that.
Or, of course, it could be both!
The Union army in the civil war had lots of Political appointees. It also won the war (Usually in spite of those appointees).
We might say "the purpose of the Ukranian military is to fight for independence, and also to sell some amount of weapons to enrich some random colonel". If you pull some lever marked "more/less of this, please", you will get both more/less independence and more/less corrupt enrichment.
We might also say "the purpose of the Ukranian military is to lose 50-100km of Ukranian territory per year in a bleak and horrible war". If you pull some lever marked "more/less of this, please", you will get a different outcome.
I think the "point" of TPOSIWIT is to accuse your opponent of misreading a situation 1 case as a situation 2 case. I'd like it if someone could come up with a general theory of what makes for a situation 1 case, and what makes for a situation 2 case, but I'm not quite able to myself.
“The purpose of a system is what it does” is a curious type of phrase, really only useful and philosophical-political debates as a cudgel, and in a very different context, uttered by a subset of the population of people who have not yet become competent engineers but are trying to do so.
The first case is where almost all the comments here seem focused.
The second case is more interesting because when that type of shallow thinking is invoked in the settings where real people are responsible for delivering physically or digitally tangible and durable results within a defined period of time and within a defined budget, they are disabused of this type of oversimplification. The entire professional domain of quality focused engineering is centered on authoring test case specifications that define virtually every type of specific positive and negative outcome, creating tooling to automate, running as many of those test as possible, and evaluating the degree to which a system works as designed.
In some of the most effective organizations I’ve been part of, and especially on the windows OS team, test case specifications are authored when a very very large project involving thousands or perhaps 10,000+ people are defined right after the fundamental objectives have been agreed upon.
But it’s also true that almost nobody creates this wheel from scratch, virtually every good large scale system is created by competent engineers, who are well aware of the successful patterns and the fragile, not durable, or overly expensive anti-patterns in system design and architecture. It’s also true that it’s possible to make a sub optimal, organizational structure work even for quite some period of time, but there are different organizational structures that are more suited for teams that have a high enough % of truly talented people versus teams composed mainly of people of average skill, tradecraft, and knowledge of patterns and anti-patterns.
tl,dr: to my ears both statements of “ the purpose of a system…” entirely fail Einstein’s dictum to avoid trying to describe something true and fundamental in terms simpler than the simplest that it possibly can be (described).
The phrase isn’t meant to literally describe every outcome of every system. It’s a proverb. Sometimes proverbs have meanings directly contradictory to other proverbs. The proverb is only useful if you know when to apply it. A less pithy but more accurate version would be “Sometimes the true purpose or an additional purpose of a system is something other than the system’s stated purpose. Even things that look like side effects are sometimes the real point of a system.”
This isn’t even always sinister. Like maybe you have a book club and the stated purpose is to read and discuss a particular book. But in reality it’s an excuse for a group of friends to get together on a regular basis. People are welcome even if they didn’t read the book, and there’s only a limited amount of discussion about the book. Once the group finishes the book, perhaps instead of members leaving to find a new book club, they start a movie night with the same friends.
I think some Stafford Beer quotes help to explain what is meant by “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
The way that I interpret it is that we should look at the actual results produced by a system rather than the intent (or unfounded claims). I think that this is especially important for government policies where positive intentions trump actual results pretty much every time.
“There is after all no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
— Stafford Beer (“The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does, Not What It Claims To Do”)
https://web.archive.org/web/20210913130445/https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjaminkomlos/2021/09/13/the-purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does-not-what-it-claims-to-do/
“According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.”
— Stafford Beer (Beer, S. (2002), "What is cybernetics?", Kybernetes, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 209-219)
https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920210417283
This seems like a strange take from the author of "Meditations on Moloch"! I've always understood the term as, precisely, separating the purpose of the system in the abstract from the intentions of anyone within the system. (So people on Twitter who use it to say their outgroup is evil are misapplying it.) Policemen may individually want to deter crime, but the suboptimal policing system "wants" to cause needless brutality, in the same decentralised way that Moloch "wants" us all to wallow in the crab-bucket.
Yes. ‘The system’ is not ‘the organisation’.
You say that they never provide examples. But in the screenshots, an example was provided: NEPA.
Someone passes a law designed to improve the environmental protection, and the effect of the law is that it makes environmental protection harder. Someone might say, "sure, that was an unintended side effect, but the purpose of NEPA is to protect the environment!" But this is incorrect, that is not the purpose of NEPA.
The purpose of a law is not based on what was in the brain of the people writing the law. That brain state is no longer operational after the law is passed. The purpose of a law is based on the effect of the law, operationally. That is the only coherent way to evaluate a law, from a policy perspective.
It's a mistake to judge such things based on intentions. A law does not have intentions, it has text, that is stored in a database or whatever, and stare decisis.
Beer's original meaning was "let's look at systems as black boxes with inputs and outputs rather than from the perspective of vibes".
If you don't like the inputs and outputs, you have to delve down (perhaps several levels) into subsystems and see how those black boxes are connected up and suggest how to rewire them somehow so you're getting the outcomes you want.
From the perspective of either big-M Management or from running the Chilean economy, something he also took on for a few years, this is all more useful than looking at systems from the perspective of the outcomes their creators wanted, and which inevitably have either changed or not entirely been achieved.
"The purpose of the Russian military is to get stalemated in Ukraine" is overly simplistic. "The purpose of the Russian military is to rely on Russia's large resource and manpower reserves rather than decisive logistics and edges in training" seems accurate to how the institution has functioned throughout the centuries.
"The purpose of cancer hospitals is to cure two thirds of cancer patients" is again too specific. "The purpose of cancer hospitals is to cure curable patients" makes this distinction general.
"The purpose of the New York Bus system is to emit four billions tons of carbon dioxide" omits that it does this "while moving people around". If the bus system belched all that CO2 while moving nobody, then it would be just the former.
I can't comment too much on whether the British system generally likes to tease and flip flop on controversial bills or not.
The statement is only incorrect when you selectively ignore part of the system's output. The key fallacy is cherrypicking / incomplete evidence, and you're correct to call that out.
There is, however, an important insight in the phrase that goes beyond your well-meaning consideration of side-effects: the stated purpose of a system and its actual goals are not necessarily the same. Consider foreign aid, which is a subject in vogue:
- Funds are often misappropriated by local elites;
- Funds are often allocated to countries which have strategic resources or some military importance;
- Funds can be tied to following specific policies or actions;
- Funds can create dependent relationships that give the donor a certain amount of influence in that country's affairs.
Additionally, we've famously seen examples in which foreign aid funding was provided to advance pet causes (e.g., the LGBT/queer stuff). To claim that all foreign aid is self-serving would be false--but it would be correct to state that some of the reasons for why it is pushed, and how much, and in what way, and where, and for what, are self-serving.
It's also true that systems change over time: gaming the system is a universal human past-time, and people with political and institutional power tend to make use of it towards that end. The fact that the American tax system is riddled with exceptions and differential treatment that is hard for an average person to make full use of, but can allow elites to pay fewer taxes (proportionally) than their secretaries: feature or flaw? The fact that H1B visas are functionally a system of indentured servitude for foreign high-skilled workers: possibly not intended, but has made it very popular with tech firms and American elites, who keep pushing it as a preferred solution to immigration.
> There is, however, an important insight (...): the stated purpose of a system and its actual goals are not necessarily the same
There's also another insight: when someone does attempt to better align a complex system to its stated purpose, the individual actors that make up the system are often incentivised to make local decisions that make sense in their individual situations but counteract the broader alignment effort.
The system as a whole ends up /behaving as though/ its purpose is what it currently does, even when no-one actually wants that.
Yes. As a tool of political analysis and a call to action, it might be restated as:
Every system is designed to benefit those who use it. If a system serves you poorly, it is likely to someone else’s benefit.
> If a system serves you poorly, it is likely to someone else’s benefit.
Sometimes; perhaps more often in politics than elsewhere. Still, that feels like it could too strongly ascribe a human driver to the system as a whole. It feels to me a little like implying that there may be some single person who is deliberately producing the situation and can be blamed for it. It is important to be clear that this is almost never the case; this is why we talk about the system as a whole. Never ascribe to deliberate malice what can be explained by banality. The global behaviour you see from outside is often emergent, not deliberate.
Consider the average person who works for a multinational corporation. They may be broadly aware of the corporation's overall goals. They may be broadly aware of how their department contributes. However, they are far removed from the board, and the corporation's successes and failures trickle down only slowly and indirectly when they do at all; and so neither of these things is important to them personally. What is important to /them/ is keeping their job, getting the next raise, and the people they regularly interact with not being too angry with them.
They will self-describe as working for the megacorp to further the megacorp's goals, but the decisions they actually make day to day will be driven by the actual concerns above, and if and when those conflict with what the people running the megacorp say the megacorp's purpose is, the megacorp loses.
The entire corporation is made of people like this. There is (almost) no other kind of person (and if one does occur anywhere but board level, the people around them are incentivised to move them along as quickly as possible).
/Each individual part of the system/ works /to that part's benefit/. The overall result, however - how the system as a whole ends up behaving - is far removed from this, and may be far from alignment with any specific human's goals.
Per this article, the phrase sounds like a textbook deepity.
It's interesting that one of the quoted tweets cites Stafford Beer: "There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do."
This is the same Stafford Beer who came up with "management cybernetics" and was involved with the (sadly misrepresented?) Cybersyn project in Chile. Beer's take on systems design seems to be that a system which doesn't work as designed should be designed some more.
While POSIWID can be interpreted as an acknowledgment of the effect that human biases, cognitive limitations and preferences have on the systems those humans work in, Beer, on the other hand, believes that we can always improve the design of the system regardless of the human operators.
The quote is an example of people praising POSIWID as a great insight by citing a supposed authority on the subject who didn't really endorse what they think he endorsed. Beer had no insight on why systems don't work as intended.
Beer wrote entire books about why systems don't work as intended... I'd recommend them if you get some time.
It's a pity he didn't fix or improve any real life system so we can actually evaluate whether his books are any good or just bullshit.
He spent three decades as a management consultant improving real life systems?
Spent successfully or wastefully?
I'm sorry if I sound too cynical, but the only example of a supposedly successful consulting job by Beer that I see mentioned over and over again is the Cybersyn, which was not a success. Maybe that's not the best sample of his real life work (I suspect the political angle of Cybersyn might have something to do with it), but I can't find other example.
And by successfully I don't mean value > 0; I mean value >> 0. A good enough consulting outcome should be expected from any good enough consultant. I would expect Beer to have done exceptional work, if his reputation is deserved.
Cybersyn did quite well at its nominal goals, to my understanding, but preventing a CIA-backed military coup wasn't part of the original spec. That it was succeeding so well challenged certain narratives about the type of political system it was embedded within, which other political systems - dependent on those narratives - regarded as a threat. In a sense, it overreached, triggered a higher-order feedback mechanism.
Please read my reply to Sol Hando bellow. The project was working by early 1973, and Beer was already making excuses for the lack of tangible results in April 1973.
> That it was succeeding so well
I've been unable to find any evidence of its supposed success. Just people repeating it over and over without providing any data.
The purpose of a management consultant is to tell the managers the need to fire people although the already know that.
More useful: "The purpose of a system is what it's agents use it for". For example, keep their jobs, stay in power, get a bonus, and maybe, do good.
If a supposed charity sends .001% of the money to the stated goal, TPOFSIWID; you should follow the money and accuse who ever gets it of fraud.
Are there specific charities you're thinking of?
wikipedia, firefox, the linux foundation, mega churches, the blue state homeless shelters
Most nonprofits are anti transparency and terrible; I believe "give directly" when they say they are highly effective *by comparison*, while believing that ubi wont help 90% of the population who doesn't under stand compound interest and the inherent lack of scale.
I checked the first, and even people complaining about Wikipedia's funding don't claim it only spends 0.01% on its stated purpose https://marketrealist.com/p/why-does-wikipedia-need-money/
There are harsher criticism of wikipedia elsewhere.
If wikipedia could run for 100 years with let's estimate 5 years of income in savings, that would estimate .2% of this year's income will go to "saving wikipedia" this year.
That article doesn't bring up political causes wikipedia funds at all, which given that they have a fund may(will) be the main recipient of current good will.
Can you spell that out for me please? Because it seems like you're saying 5 years of income could run Wikipedia for 100 years (i.e. 1 year of income runs it for 20 years, or 5% of a year's income runs it for 1 year), but then jump to .2% of a year's income runs it for a year.
I'm confused about where the division by an extra factor of 25 comes from?
> I'm confused about where the division by an extra factor of 25 comes from?
Swapping a *5 for /5
Most paradoxes can be resolved by simply including more qualifying weasel words in their statements, for example: "Achilles can never beat the tortoise" - paradox, but "Achilles can never beat the tortoise within two seconds" (or 32 feet if you prefer) - true.
So in this case, maybe, "The purpose of a system is not always served by what it does" or something similar.
see also "it's not a bug, it's a feature"
I don't think I agree with your reasoning...
for example
"The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, but curing cancer is hard, so they only manage about two-thirds."
No, the purpose of a cancer hospital is provide a location that looks like a hospital, that performs cancer-treatment-like-services, and which behaves in a highly predictable way for the benefit of long-term stakeholders of the hospital.
That means things like high salaries for oncologists, excellent paperwork for governmental, insurance, and medical board compliance standards, nice air conditioning, soothing music for chemo patients, really good parking, etc, etc.
They need to cure 'enough' cancer patients to maintain their credibility AS a cancer-treatment-hospital, but not so many cancer patients that it would ruin their budget, their down-time, their credibility for paperwork compliance, their legal status as a corporate entity, etc, etc.
So, in theory, if a space-traveling time-traveling alien prophet from a strange alien religion showed up mysteriously one day and offered to cure every cancer patient in the hospital with a wave of his hands, but he refuses to provide any explanations for how that is possible, what the side-effects are, and won't stick around afterwards for a repeat performance, nor will he provide anything resembling testimony to courts of law or review boards.... A Cancer Hospital values being PREDICTABLE more than they value curing however many cancer patients they happen to have on-site that day. Magically curing a few thousand cancer patients with no explanation they can show the rest of the world for how and why that happened is a disaster for them. They'll spend the rest of their lives going up before every type of board of inquiry you can imagine.
So, the statement that a Cancer Hospital 'only' exists to cure about 2/3rds of all cancer patients, give or take, and certainly not 0% or 100%, is actually about right, from a certain cynically literal point of view.
The same argument applies to other areas too. There are a lot of perfectly good arguments that the Ukrainian Military is fundamentally un-professional and dis-organized. Most brigade commanders have good reasons not to really TRUST anyone higher-ranking than Division commanders. Ukrainian chain-of-command and front-line-assignments and manpower management and supply management above the brigade-or-division level is really messed up, and doesn't look ANYTHING like what a professional NATO-grade military organization would expect. Lots of small-scale weapon funding and weapon development in the Ukrainian military is happening using private donor funding campaigns. There are lots of excellent arguments for why both the civilian political and senior military generals in Kyiv just don't know how to exercise useful levels of control and decision-making over their own military, and are instead a cesspit of personal feuds and public relations fistfights.
But the reason why the Ukrainian military is doing as well as it is in the war is that the Russian side is EVEN WORSE. There are lots of stories about how NATO advisors can't wrap their heads around how the Ukrainian military really works, because most of the time it doesn't work, and how the Ukrainian military refuses to do things the way NATO advisors recommend, because the Ukrainians just don't have that kind of military culture that would support those kinds of planning assumptions.
And changing all that is a VERY slow process. it has been official Ukrainian Policy that they will someday join NATO as a NATO-competent military for the last 20 years or so, and they're still nowhere near achieving that. Corruption and a Russian-inherited dysfunctional professional military culture just make it SO difficult. From a certain point of view, getting stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia in Eastern Ukraine is EXACTLY the level of wealth, competence, and feasibility the Ukrainian military is 'designed' to achieve, because that's kind of the upper limit of what their fundamental national incentives and restrictions will LET them achieve. Can't design a better system or they'd have to reform their entire government or culture, can't design a worse system or they'd have lost the war already, and can't design a 'different' system, like one optimized for Pyrrhic Victories using deep-strike Special Forces raids into Moscow or a nuclear deterrent or something, because that's not the kind of assurances of personal territorial integrity that the ukrainian population actually wants to have.
The purpose of the British Government is to honor the messed up political incentives of the British political system. With first-past-the-post single-winner districts, an electorate that REFUSES to consolidate into just two parties, and a whole strange weird culture of the civil service and 'public' elite schools and 'corporate' style political parties and the finances of 'City of London' and all the other weird structural inheritances of British Governance that they refuse to do the work of changing, the purpose of being a British Prime Minister in the last 20-30 years kind of IS to stake out an unpopular position with strange incentives and twisted logic, stick to it for as long as possible in hope that something will come out of it, and then fold when enough momentum finally builds up to undeniably demonstrate that absolutely nothing will ever come of it. That's the only hope the British have left of ever accomplishing ANYTHING. Proposing major policy reforms that will simply work the first time and be widely popular stopped being an option in... 1955 or so? Ever since then, the British system has functioned to sacrifice popularity and competence on the altar of maybe hopefully possibly getting something politically done, and usually, but not always, failing.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to move enough people, at the right price point, with a politically palatable level of CO2 emissions. The current CO2 levels are exactly where they want them to be, given the available incentives and tradeoffs. Better than individual cars, worse than forcing everyone to stay at home all day, less expensive than pure electric buses with overhead transmission lines everywhere... the system is right where they want it, or at least right where it's too much trouble to bother changing.
And don't get me started on how the purpose of Major Canadian Weapons Procurement Decisions is to waste time and money while providing an opportunity for Canadian politicians of different political parties to engage in food fights with each other, because honestly, that kind of IS the purpose. Actually procuring actual weapons systems has very obviously not been a high priority of Canada's for a very long time now. This is probably related to the fact that actually having a Real Canadian Military hasn't been a priority of Canada's for a very long time now, either.
To take the post seriously, the main mgmt consulting example where this framing is useful is where you want to critique an organisations management who, through misaligned incentives, undermine an organisations stated purpose.
Think fluff charity that pays execs big salaries while frittering it away on ineffective measures. It's a powerful rhetorical device to ask "is the purpose of your charity to make snr management wealthy?"
Management consulting rightly gets a lot of criticism - but this is the kind of message that an outside view can help with, and where management consultants can actually add value.
In Spain:
(a) underfunded justice implies long investigations in political affairs that leads to closing casess due to too much time after they are investigated.
(b) the autonomical financing system is horrendous and funnels money from poor to rich regions eve tho the stated claim is that is done to pour money from rich to poor.
(c) Taxes by workers are spent in pensions which median value is larger than the median workers wage
Not perfect examples (nothing is crystal clear) but closer to (a) they function as intended rather than (b) Its just imperfect for the three examples
Cybernetics historically has had a big big problem with how its models are translated into lower-variety representations. What Heidegger said about "Das Licht der Offentlichkeit verdunkelt alles!", how the light of the public obscures everything, how common usage flattens words and deprives them of transformative meaning. A good example is the word "cybernetics" itself, which in regular usage just means something about computers ruling everything and not a way to govern a system. Or Stafford Beer's model of a Viable System, which looks like the Tree of Life in Kabbalah because it's trying to describe an object in like five dimensions (a dynamic autopoietic system with a metasystem) and when applied in a corporate environment it just becomes the regular 2-d static organizational chart it was meant to replace. Beer knew all this: he tried hiring singer-songwriters to write popular versions of cybernetics in song form, recorded podcasts, wrote his books with different colored pages and different styles representing different orders of languages. Heidegger would say that to prevent "Das Licht der Offentlichkeit verdunkelt alles!" you should try to be obscure on purpose, so only people who really intend to understand you dig into your work and the rest just say that they don't understand it. Whatever.
What the phrase means is that if you're really trying to win wars but you only get a stalemate, then you should do something different or understand that winning the war is not actually what your trying to do. Maybe the war serves a purpose in a different level of recursion, since the delimitations of where a system begins and ends are arbitrary and subjective, they depend upon your intentions. So maybe try an intervention in a different level of recursion. If "curing cancer patients" actually means that you don't want people dying from cancer then maybe you should focus your efforts on trying to prevent cancer so you'll have more resources to cure whatever cases you do end up getting. Beer emphasized that a cyberneticist should generally try to anticipate and steer away from problems insted of solving them, because it's way easier to dodge an iceberg than dealing with the consecuences of crashing straight into it. Preventing wars instead of winning them, not designing your economy so as to have four billion tons of carbon dioxide emmited just so people get where they have to be and so on.
It's not done because usually if you prevented something from happening, then it didn't happen and you can't claim credit for it. That's another example of POSIWID: the purpose was getting credit. In the case of the British Government, flip-floping in policy could be seen as a way to prevent civil wars from erupting aroud sensitve issues. They used to have them all the time when they didn't flip-floped in policy and haven't had one in a while so I'd say they are succeding, at least in that.
Yeah, this was always a deepity.
The obviously false corollary is: “every system is succeeding perfectly all the time.”
A better framing that gets at a grain of truth here is something like: “If a system has a surprising and persistent failure mode, consider the hypothesis that those who run the system have an incentive to keep it that way.”
Novel phrasing 1: Downstream consequences which became emergent without intent can become load-bearing.
Novel phrasing 2: Systems can become dependent not only on a component's intended functionality but also on its unintended side-effects.
A made-up example: I write a software library to create database records of every customer purchase. I think its purpose is to record store purchases. Some idiot on another team has been hashing those database entries as a randomness source. Now, because of POSWID we have to hire a guy to buy small items from the store all through the off-hours so we don't run out of randomness. I tell the team to just use their /dev/random file for their random source but the system works so there's no incentive to change it. I actually built a randomness engine without realizing it.
I think you're being overly literal. But also some of the people who use that phrase are using it in an overly literal way.
I've always interpreted the phrase to mean "Treat a system as if it does what it does, instead of what it is intended to do". That is, it is a reminder that the known consequences of keeping a system are necessarily part of the intent of keeping that system.
I think it's more accurate to say that if a system continues to produce some effect, then that effect is not against the purpose of the system.
The police solve crimes and maintain order, but they also beat people up. Beating people up is not against the purpose of the system. I think I could write a pretty convincing argument that this is specifically true - some violence from the police works in tandem with their purpose of maintaining order by keeping people in line.
Emitting carbon is not against the NYC bus lines.
A stalemate is not against Ukraine's military purpose. Now this one is interesting, because I think this is true, and I think we can walk the argument out that it's true. Ukraine doesn't want to conquer Russia, it just wants Russia to back down. Ukraine cannot defeat Russia's attack, but needs outside support, so Ukraine wants to limit what they do such that they do not alienate the West. The Taliban defeated the United States, often by using some extreme measures. The Taliban is much weaker than Ukraine, and the United States much stronger than Russia. If Ukraine fought like the Taliban, then they would likely lose their country but could eventually force Russia to leave. But that's not the point of Ukraine's military. They would lose Western support in such a war, and also lose their status as a country, even if they eventually got it back. So a stalemate is a better outcome than what it would take to win.
The Taliban had some positional advantages which Ukraine lacks - Afghanistan is mostly mountains and desert, rather than wide-open plains and rivers, and they're not one of the world's leading wheat exporters. Not a key choke point on any trade routes, either.
Regardless how much it's got in the bank, an empire (at least, one that's worthy of the name, rather than imminently drowning in its own incompetence) won't spend more to capture a chunk of territory than it expects that territory to eventually pay back. That puts a cap on how much any empire would willingly pay to take and hold Afghanistan. All the Taliban needed to do was make the occupation more expensive than that, and they had natural terrain hazards helping every step of the way. Ukraine is a bigger prize, thus faces a proportionately larger enemy budget from prospective conquerors. They also have fewer mountains to retreat to when the going gets rough.
For about quarter of a year, Ukrainian steppe is so muddy that heavier vehicles don't have a chance to move anywhere but on roads - a major limit on mechanized assaults.
Plus, the plains are very "surveillable", hiding from anything that observes you is very hard, and in the era of drone warfare, moving over open fields is just pure hell.
Ukraine isn't an easy battlefield by any means. Afghanistan is harder, but the difference between the intrinsic hazards is smaller than it would seem. The Russians are bogged down in a bloody stalemate for a good reason.
You're not entirely wrong, but I don't think you're right either. The US spent far more than is at all reasonable to hold Afghanistan for 20 years, with no hope of ever recouping the costs. The USSR did pretty much the same thing in the same country back in the 80s.
Whatever reason the world's two strongest powers decided to bog down there for extended and expensive campaigns, it definitely wasn't to gain money or resources.
Ukrainian forces are able to do the same things for the same reason that the Taliban could hold down stronger powers. Ukraine just needs a bigger and more advanced military to do that, given fewer structural advantages from terrain and geography.
The problem with quoting aphorisms like this is that it misses the context - specifically the context of a management consultant (viz. Stafford Beer) who spends his entire life being told about systems his clients have put in place, with some stated purpose in mind. Those systems do not achieve their stated purposes, but can be continually defended against change by re-stating the purpose - this shouldn't work, but in practice it often does, because most people aren't great at decoupling intent from outcome. "The purpose of a system is what it does" is a good rhetorical counter, because it acknowledges that, in practice, any continuation of a system with known outcomes is a tacit acceptance of those outcomes as the system's real purpose. You don't get to claim some other "real" purpose once you know what the outcomes are.
My interpretation has always been in the spirit of this tweet: https://x.com/primawesome/status/1178671690261286918?lang=en
> My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying.
Well said.
Another good quote to illustrate the dynamic is Pournelle's Iron Law:
"
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
"
Which, after a certain length of time, makes it increasingly true to say about a given organization that "the purpose of organization X is to enforce it's rules and control it's promotions, in service to what the organization actually DOES, which is Y, and not particularly in accordance to what the organization was ESTABLISHED to do, which is Z."
Edit:
The military version is "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept", which basically means, if it's not important enough to instantly stop what you're doing and address it, then you're basically accepting that it's within the range of acceptable behavior. You can define what an organization actually DOES by watching all the things that officers DON'T stop their walk past when they see it.
If soldiers gambling with dice or cards while allegedly stationed on watch is something an officer will just walk past , then the organization is more of a gambling organization than it is a standing-on-watch organization.
Which explains SO MANY problems with Russian or North Korean or Afghani or other dysfunctional alleged militaries....
I always thought of it as a way to make it clear that many ideas just work poorly no matter the intention, and so, one should look exclusively at the consequences.
The classical example being communism, which keeps being defended on the basis of "actually it's all about ending poverty and giving prosperity to all, what do you mean you're against that?".
But the people in your screenshots are using it to accuse other people of actually being evil and having bad intentions instead, which interestingly is kind of the opposite.
So, I don't know. I guess that, whatever the intention of the phrase, it's not working. (Q.E.D.???)
Come on. The purpose of a sentence is not how it is used. Yes, Stafford Beer introduced POSIWID to emphasize that the true purpose of any system should be understood through its actions and outcomes, not just its stated objectives or intentions. But he was interested in how systems sustain themselves and which feedback loops (!) in them were working to maintain themselves. Not purely results. People being people on X are of course going to misunderstand this more complex principle or abuse for their own purposes (I wonder what POSIWID says about that).
In the hospital example, Beer might look at the feedback mechanisms and find that the hospital is actively working against cancer growth but fails for benign reasons.
To use an example where Beer might find feedback mechanisms that differ from the stated goals, one might consider a broken education system: It still claims to educate students, but looking at the feedback mechanisms, it might be more accurate to describe it as actually trying to reduce costs, serve minorities, or promote propaganda (depending on the case).
This reminds me of Efficient Market Hypothesis.
Obviously markets are not so efficient that they never have significant swings or that no one ever manages to get rich. They are efficient only in a trivial sense that beating a market is hard and if you managed to do it, then this only improves the efficiency of the markets. So if you think that you are beating the market, you are probably not.
Likewise, yes sure, the purpose of the system isn't literally what it does. But if some system keeps existing the way it is and keeps doing the things that it's doing, then it really might be the case that the things we consider unintended side effects are, in fact, features, not bugs.
A market being efficient in no way means it shouldn't have significant swings. New information comes to light over time!
The fact that the meme has not, to my knowledge, successfully or widely diffused into a close language like french could be a clue of its vacuousness. That's not an absolute rule, sometimes stupid things get viral in a second everywhere thanks (or not) to social media, however, it is unlikely that a really smart idea do not pass a (moderate) language barrier.
Ive never heard this pseudo-wisdom before, thank you for arming me with sarcastic rebuttals to it.
The purpose of the Ukranian military isn't and shouldn't be to win wars: https://x.com/tailcalled/status/1910671933902897519
> To deter Russian aggression? Maybe, but this assumes Russia wants to aggress, but why would they do that? To prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?
> Me? I live in a European country, I don't want Ukraine to suddenly start expanding out in a war against the rest of Europe, that seems like it could get my society in danger.
Oh come on. So Russia is a totally peaceful country, and all its neighbors who got attacked they totally brought it on themselves. And Ukraine is the true aggressor who attacked Russia first, and if succeeds, will attack EU next. Do you really believe this?
What about other conflicts: Is Transnistria also Russia's desperate attempt to prevent Moldova from conquering Europe? What about Chechnya? Georgia?
I don't live in Russia, my point is winning wars-plural-nonspecifically is not best done by defending against Russia, it's best done bullying weaker countries. I don't think Ukraine would actually do this which is part of why I say the purpose of the Ukrainian military isn't to win wars.
This strikes me as a particularly low effort post for you, but maybe the obvious “what it does” didn’t occur to you: it makes people money. Let me rephrase some of your examples and see if you still think the purpose is so obvious:
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to recoup investment in cancer research.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is a make-work program for the global defense industry.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to sell four billion tons of carbon dioxide worth of fuel.
I’d like to propose an equally non-specific but novel rephrasing: *Plausible deniability eventually loses its plausibility.*
Even gesturing at the plausible part and saying “oh come on, surely you see that it’s plausible!” (like you’re doing here) eventually stops working.
The purpose of the bus system is not to sell fuel, they are buyers rather than sellers.
You’re joking right? The buyers are the taxpayers. “They” is the sellers.
No, oil companies are the sellers. The bus system are consumers.
Government and oil producers are effectively the same they. We’ll literally go to war to maintain their access to (privatized) oil profits, you don’t think we would create the world’s most bloated public transit system?
No, they aren't the same they. For a long time the US was a net oil importer, now it is a net oil exporter. The nature of the US government didn't radically change via that.
Thank you! This phrase always seemed to awkward to me. Obviously systems often do things they weren't intended to do. You have to use a different definition of "purpose" than common understanding to make the statement remotely true. And the definition of "purpose" you have to use is... "what something does", which makes it a tautology.
I like how the phrase inspires people to think beyond what a system is supposed to do and look at the actual end results when judging a system. But to inspire that analysis without being unnecessarily confusing, you could just say "The value of a system is determined by what it does, not it's purpose."
I think the Catholic principle of double effect is helpful here. This often comes up in the case of eg delivering a baby pre-viability because the mom has an infection that will progress to sepsis and death if she and the baby aren’t separated.
The three criteria are:
-the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral;
-the agent intends the good effect and does not intend the bad effect, either as a means to the good or as an end in itself;
-the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect and the agent exercises due diligence to minimize the harm
And I think it’s the second that’s most relevant to POSIWID. If the system could switch to doing the good without the bad, would it happily make the switch?
For the cancer hospital: yes!
For NEPA: I think not.
> If the system could switch to doing the good without the bad, would it happily make the switch?
This. Some systems resist hard all attempts to reduce their "unintended side effects".
POSIWID means "The actions of organizations frequently reveal higher purposes than their purported purposes".
Not "everything a system does is its purpose", but "whatever a system prioritizes above its purported purpose is its revealed higher purpose".
For example, the California public school system's purported purpose is to educate children, but their actions reveal that their higher purpose is to provide good jobs and good retirements for teachers and administrators without regard for actual educational performance. POSIWID.
If there's any insight to be gained from POSIWID (and yes, it's minimal), it's that revealed preferences beat stated preferences.
You linked the Wikipedia article, and one of the tweets you quoted also includes an extra sentence from the person who originally coined the phrase:
"There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.", which can be traced back to:
Stafford Beer (1985) Diagnosing the system for organizations Wiley, p. 99.
Unfortunately Internet Archive won't let me borrow it.
I'm not expecting the source material to be that much better, but with the extra quote it's a little clearer what he's talking about. A hospital doesn't constantly fail to cure cancer and so can claim to in fact have that purpose. A homeopathic clinic cannot.
Does a cancer hospital cure anyone at all?
Not an expert in this area, but I've heard from people who are that oncologists very deliberately do not use the term "cure" in their practice. They speak of cancer being "in remission," which means "we can't see the cancer active in your body at the moment," but they know all too well that this doesn't necessarily mean it's gone. In far too many cases, it ends up coming back within a few years. Some people get their cancer driven into remission and then have it return multiple times, in fact.
https://xkcd.com/931
But there comes a point at which they conclude that you were cured, because it gets a little absurd after a few decades.
Good point.
POSIWID is fundamentally amoral—it encourages you to see what is actually happening, not what you or the people involved wish were happening. There is also an element of consistency to it: if a system only occasionally falls short of its stated purpose, or if it is getting closer to that purpose every day, that is different than a system that has consistently failed to achieve said purpose for 250 years.
I found it odd you never included Stafford Beer's quote "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do". Think about that in terms of your examples. Was it constantly the case that 2/3 of cancer patients die while 1/3 survive? No, my understanding is that the survival rate used to be lower. However, you could say it's a constant that SOME cancer patients die, so the purpose of cancer possible can be to cure some people and manage the deaths of others. In a war, the success of one side's military means failure to the other, so success vs failure isn't a constant for them (even within a war, often even the losing side will have some successes). The British government's policies don't constantly fail, some get passed. And the emissions of the NY bus system aren't constant either.
I see it as a rhetorically helpful way of saying “skill issue”, even if theoretically vacuous. Basically, when you see something poorly designed, consider that it wasn’t designed for you.
Two sub-points: (a) drawing attention to purposeful selection effects and (b) redirecting blame/agency from the system to the user.
(a) “Man I wish it were so much easier to send a message to my congressman” POSIWID—no they don’t want to make it easier to get messages from you
(b) “Hmm I keep getting ripped off because I don’t know Corporate Speak” POSIWID—investing in learning Corporate Speak or hiring an agent is a credible signal that you won’t be rip-off-able
A couple of attempts at a steelman explanation:
1. The phrase is a bit hyperbolic and tongue-in-cheek, using the language of teleology to defend pure naturalism. In Aristotelian philosophy one of the four causes was the telos, the end towards which the thing was arranged. This end could be natural or designed, but the telos of an acorn was to become an oak tree, even if other conditions conspired to not make that happen. This is largely rejected once modern science comes about; scientists don't say that the potentiality to become an oak tree is inherent to every acorn. If the acorn's physical status and the conditions surrounding it support the grown of an oak tree out of the acorn, that's what happens, but that is describable entirely in terms of its efficient and material causes, and a teleological cause is unnecessary.
So while someone may have an intended purpose (set of outcomes) for a system when they build it, the system as it actually exists is what it is and does not have that telos baked into it; it's describable entirely in terms of efficient and material causes, so whatever language of "purpose" you want to use shouldn't extend beyond that; the system's "purpose" is what it does.
In fact, I suspect even Aristotle would agree that the expressed purpose for a thing by the creator isn't necessarily its telos if the creator sucked at making the thing badly enough, though I'd have to revisit the text to remember for sure.
2. Maybe the guy was so fed up with people dismissing logical explanations of mechanical things with "but that's not what it's supposed to do!" he decided leaning really hard in the other direction was valuable. The wikipedia article for the phrase quotes him as saying it's a good "starting point". So again, perhaps some slight hyperbole to say "a system does what it does, not necessarily what the creator wanted it to do".
Amusingly, insofar as it's causing confusion by people saying e.g. the creator's purpose for a system is what it does (which is obviously wrong as it implies infallibility in all system creation) it's a poorly designed phrase by its own judgement as it is doing something contrary to the purpose of its creator.
All four of the examples provided at the top can be debated. Let me make a point regarding the Ukraine, probably the one I know most about all four: "The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia."
This has been openly stated by various members of the US government over the last three years ("bleed Russia white" has been a particularly popular phrase). The calculation is that the mass killing of Russians and the crippling of their country is in the US’ benefit, given that it's understood (by those who know) that you can't actually defeat the world's foremost nuclear power, at least not without a nuclear Armageddon.
This not my opinion. It's what President Biden told adviser Jake Sullivan: that Russia’s credible nuclear threat put the US in the conundrum from which the years-long stalemate with Russia has emerged. This is Biden, quoted in Robert Woodward's recent book on the topic:
“If we do not expel Russia completely from Ukraine, then to some extent we will allow Putin to achieve what he wants. And if we manage to kick them out, we risk nuclear war. Putin will not allow himself to be driven out of here without the use of nuclear weapons. So we're stuck. Too much success - nuclear, too little - incomprehensible long-term consequences.”
But what about the famous anti-corruption police force of Sovietistan? The one that vowed to root out corruption—only to discover that all the corruption was systematically located in the only credible opposition to their glorious leader?
And what about their national statistics bureau, whose mission was to deliver accurate data on the economy, yet somehow always managed to prove that the glorious leader’s unhinged economic policies were a roaring success.
I agree with Scott that in well-functioning democracies, this heuristic doesn’t yield much groundbreaking wisdom. But most governments aren’t Scandinavia or Vermont. Many are corrupt, authoritarian, and often both—and in those cases, "the purpose of a system is what it does" doesn’t strike me as nearly so dumb.
The point of this saying is to identify what Yarvin would call "power leak".
Any system with power is initially set up to accomplish some legitimate goal. Then, because it has power, bad actors who want power for other reasons are attracted to the system. They become part of the system and gradually, partially, corrupt it.
The list of "things systems do" is not just "work toward goal", "unintended consequences" and "mistakes". It also includes "get more power" and "redirect power to members".
People look at a system that's been corrupted, see that some of the system's power is directed not to the initial legitimate goal, but toward the members' personal (or political or social or whatever) goals, and they say The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does.
So, yes, taking it at its explicit meaning, it's usually wrong. But if you interpret it as a kind of immune response to power leak, it's almost always correctly applied.
David Cane wrote:
"As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.
"But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work."
https://thoughtcatalog.com/david-cain/2013/01/your-lifestyle-has-already-been-designed/
I think this is a case for using the POSIWID rhetoric - or anything where agents can be said to be after the side effects more than the notional purpose.
How do the companies overcome the free-rider problem?
If one company decided to reduce the workday to e.g. 6 hours, it would have practically no effect on their sales (unless they mostly sell to their own employees), and it could make them wildly popular, so they could choose among the best potential employees.
I agree with this post, but it feels at odds with rationalist consequentialism, which measures the value of an act by what it does. If you combine that with the point someone made earlier about consistency—that if a system keeps on doing the same thing even if it doesn’t actually achieve its stated purpose, what it does is its _real_ purpose—then you end up kinda at POSIWID.
As lots of people have pointed out here, POSIWID is the doctrine of revealed preferences, only for institutions/systems rather than individuals.
I can't see above that anyone has really tried to tease out what the differences are between these two levels - and I think that these differences are the most important, because they drive lots of (bad) political thinking. So I'll try to do that.
An individual can have preferences for doing certain things, and the doctrine of revealed preferences says that we know what those preferences are by observing their actions. Individuals also have explicit commitments, which will in general imperfectly match their revealed preferences.
An institution, properly speaking, doesn't have preferences. It can have institutional objectives, which we assume will be explicitly stated; and it will also have unintended outcomes. Some unintended outcomes are simple, obvious, and innocuous results of their operations (e.g. a shop takes up space - this is not a stated objective, but is an inevitable effect of its business operations). Some unintended consequences will be more socially salient (e.g. gentrifying); and others may contradict or subvert their explicit goals (e.g. Google declared it wouldn't be evil, but occasionally was evil).
When an individual has socially salient impacts, we hold that individual responsible for them. E.g., if you smell, you're responsible for it, and you're expected to be able to read the social signs around you. So there's a natural mechanism of accountability that comes from you being a competent social actor. If an individual's actions have impacts that run contrary to their stated goals, we see them as a hypocrite or a loser. In some cases, as in addiction, we see them as ill.
When an institution has socially salient impacts, there may not be any direct feedback. An institution is not a person; it's not expected to know what it's doing. And even if it does know, there may be no mechanism to change what it does. The institution of the limited company may be responsible for the ongoing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Companies can be expected to be aware of this social impact, because Piketty has told them. But the institution of the company is not a conscious actor. Even if it accepts the critique, it can't act to change itself.
When an institution's actions run contrary to its stated intentions, there should be some kind of legalistic way to intervene in the institution (assuming it is a legal entity, not a more nebulous social convention). But the process is slow and difficult. So again, you can't expect a fast response. When you point out to a vegan that they're wearing leather shoes, they might take the shoes off right there in front of them, throw them away, and never buy leather again. If you point out to Walmart that it is immiserating local communities that it professes to enrich, the execs in the company might not have the tools to change its actions, even if they believe you.
That said... people have pointed out above lots of cases where an institution has some really obvious impacts that are bad/contrary to its stated goals, and could be changed, and yet are not changed by informed decision makers. In those cases, it seems that the revealed preferences vs stated commitments model can in fact be transferred onto these institutions, and offers some insight.
This was fun! It is a version of cynicism being mistaken for wisdom, because it's much easier to appear cynical than do the work of figuring things out.
There is some truth in the idea, certainly. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital my whole career, and Pournelle's Iron Law was a good reminder that not everyone was on the same page. But even then, during the worst of budget cuts and infighting everyone was at least devoted to SOME aspect of what the overall goal was supposed to be. The bureaucracy wishes to perpetuate itself, yes, and bends rather inexorably in that direction. Yet it also brings in fresh new people every year who are there because they want to fix/make/deliver what it says on the masthead.
I think you could steelman it as "the purpose of retaining a system is to continue to obtain its effects" -- that is, it's a statement about the kind of systems that continue to exist over time, not the instantaneous performance of a particular action.
I think it should always be in quotations because it's clearly not meant as a general logical proposition. It seems to me the idea is to consider the systems inputs/outputs and discern it's unstated purposes.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to bill patients as much as possible and create prestige for the doctors/employees. Hmmm? How could we change this structure if we wanted this system to cure more cancer patients?
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to extract US and international support and aid. Hmmm? If our purpose is to defend Ukrain and defeat it's enemies, is this structure/gambit the best option?
The purpose of the British government is to make tea or whatever happens in Britain. Hmmm? Isn't coffee better than tea?
The purpose of the New York bus system is to fund a pension scheme and create municpal jobs. Hmmm? How could we change this structure if we wanted this system to provide better/cheaper public transport?
The hospital example actually strikes as exactly the point of the expression. One might naively (by, say, looking at a mission statement) that the point of a cancer hospital is to cure all the patients.
But, if you looked more closely, you'd quickly discover that losing patients at a cancer hospital does not create a sense of organizational crisis in the same way that, say, planes crashing into one another does for the aircraft control system. There's not an investigation into why a given patient died. Staff are not disciplined. Managers are not replaced. And so, a pretty fair characterization of what a cancer hospital is trying to do is cure patients at about the same rate as comparable hospitals cure comparable patients (I assume 2/3 stands in for this above). This is how the organization is actually defining its own goal in practice, and a sense of crisis or failure would only come if the cure rate started to drop well below this benchmark.
Similarly, a lot of militaries *do* exist to lose or stalemate wars but to do so in a way that tends towards positive political results. If you're facing down a far superior enemy, you're not hoping for a battlefield victory. You're hoping to do something else like hold out long enough to secure outside intervention, lose in a way that attracts public support, or stalemate things long enough that circumstances eventually change. But "your job is to die in a way that buys time and may eventually produce a shift in public opinion favorable to our cause" is not a good slogan for motivating soldiers and so organizations rarely publicly talk in those terms.
I think there are too many systems that fail to take into account the incentives the system creates, and then after some time, people figure out how to hack the system and just play the incentives. And then the system is sort of ruined. How is that controversial?
There are also a lot of systems that aren't created so much as they just emerge, and these systems can have all sorts of problems.
I think this is an over-reduction of what the phrase is supposed to mean and how it is most meaningfully used.
I mean first of all, I agree with you that the phrase is used stupidly - as most phrases are by the public that wants to say clever things. But I also believe there's plenty of baby in the bathwater, as there usually is. The public uses everything stupidly, which means unfortunately conversations like this are necessary.
Here are two examples I can think of, where the phrase most certainly applies in my opinion.
We all know at this point that Instagram and TikTok seem to hook young kids on endless short-form content. It has been long enough, and things have gotten bad enough, and people like Mark Zuckerberg have been informed enough by now, for us to just admit to ourselves: the purpose of Instagram/TikTok is literally and factually to make kids addicted to their screens. It's utterly naive to pretend otherwise at this point. Zuckerberg knows it and so do we. And further, that has always been his intention. He has made it totally clear with his reckless abandon of any systematic principles other than "higher screen time."
We all know at this point that American consumers spend utterly obscene prices for pills/medications in this country. And we also know that doctors have been incentivized for the last couple of decades to continue prescribing pills instead of holisitic, lifestyle, or alternative approaches to medical problem solving. Therefore, we can safely say that the purpose of this system is what it does: to make the American public not only addicted to pills, but to overcharge for those pills. In other words, to enslave the American public to a medical-pharmaceutical system that does not care, at all, whether their problems are solved, and in fact wants them not to be. Are there still doctors who care? Yes, of course. Are there still clinics that approach medicine holistically? Yes, of course. But the "system," as it is currently designed, is the complete opposite when taken as a whole.
Not everything is a conspiracy or a corrupt system. I agree with your point. But some things are. And those are the cases that this phrase is for. People have just ruined the phrase by using it for things they don't like - same way they've done with the word "gaslighting."
The two losing armies: my husband when he was little occasionally accompanied his grandfather on his rural food delivery route.
They pulled over one time, and got out of the truck, as a long funeral procession went by. The custom then.
Why are we doing this? the little boy asked.
To show respect because someone’s passed, the grandfather answered.
What if there are two funerals? wondered the little boy, which question the grandfather filed away in the things kids say file, which is how I heard of it.
But of course, the child really did imagine that things would come to a halt.
the "they're evil bastards" principle
Maybe the dissonance is in the interpretation of what we talk about when we talk about "what it does." The interpretation in this article seems to be something like "the observed behavior of a system directly defines it" -- i.e. how you say if an army is losing wars, its purpose is to lose wars (which I agree is how POSIWID is written).
But in the systems thinking/cybernetics community, it's used more to mean "observed behaviors of a system (what it does) tell us more about the goals and incentives in the system (its purpose) more than its explicit mission statement." Kind of a shorthand for "work backwards from what you observe if you want to understand the incentives"
Speaking of the purpose of a hospital, an example that always comes to mind for me:
I have a friend with chronic kidney issues (true story, not a thought experiment hypothetical). He had already had a transplant, but his body had rejected the initial kidney. He managed to match with a program for another donation, and it happened to be the program with the highest success rate for kidney transplants in the country. But after several appointments he was rejected from the program for "high risk of non-compliance" -- even though he had a perfect record of compliance from his first transplant. After talking to some others, he learned this hospital had an incredibly high rejection rate for reasons that usually didn't match the facts. Essentially, in order to be the program with the highest success rate, they rejected any patient that had even a moderately risky surgery.
The program's stated mission said something about helping everyone with kidney issues improve their lives, but that mission statement was clearly a lie. The purpose of the program was to accumulate prestige, so what it did was to condemn people with kidney issues to lead worse lives, in order to maintain their prestige.
I wouldn't say "the purpose of the program was to condemn people with kidney disease"
I agree strongly with this, but need to point out it's yet another entry in the "Scott, who used to be so good at applying the principle of charity, paints an argument he doesn't like in the worst possible light" genre. That's quickly becoming the number one purpose of this blog.
My idiot friends who use this phrase genuinely believe that not only is the system failing to do things, it's not even attempting to do those things. The correct analogy would be a hospital that has "cure cancer" as its mission statement, but all patients are given infinite paperwork to ensure they'll never be admitted. At that point you can at least assume that the system has purposes other than its stated mission.
I think it's important to push back on this! Governments are inefficient by design but that inefficiency is in place to support government's mission, not undermine it. More importantly, government does attempt to do these things, makes gradual progress towards them, and provides a host of benefits to its constituents. Unfortunately, the human mind's tendency to ignore victories and seek out failures is amplified a million times by social media's corrosive lens. As a result there is appetite on both left and right for doing away with checks and balances, throwing out entire successful parts of society, vesting power in one or two trusted individuals, and letting them have free rein to accomplish group goals. This is less likely to work out well than the current system.
If I wanted to push back, though, I couldn't send them this article that calls them an idiot and mischaracterizes their position.
But if the government is inefficient by design, wouldn't that mean it's designed to not do things? If the problem is that the government is failing to provide ample benefits, perhaps it would be better if the government was designed to actually be able to do things.
No. To be fair I was using the term "inefficient" provocatively. A better way to phrase it might be:
People hate the fact that government works procedurally, instead of based on achieving its ends, but the only way government has the legitimacy to act is by working procedurally.
This is a broader issue, but a narrow example might be a court case where you saw the defendant shoot and kill someone and have asked the state to bring charges against him. You saw the crime happen, so from the inside view the "efficient" solution is that the police put him in jail for 30 years or whatever you think the correct punishment is. In fact, let's assume the dude is obviously guilty, and everyone knows it. So there's no reason not to put him in jail for 30 years.
Instead, the police take him to the police station, and ask you to repeat all the stuff you just told them at your house. They then take that statement to a magistrate, who writes out an arrest warrant, and put the defendant in jail temporarily.
A bail hearing is held and the defendant gets a lawyer. You have to come back to court and repeat the same stuff you already said. It's been months, and nobody has yet put the obviously guilty defendant in jail.
Let's say that instead of all that, we get rid of process and let the judge pursue this legitimate government goal in the manner he sees fit. This frees up a lot of bandwidth for quickly and efficiently accomplishing government goals.
The police just call the judge, the judge writes out a 30-year sentence on the grounds of "oh come on" and the defendant goes to jail.
But then that judge retires and the next judge doesn't like his conclusions, so he just releases all the folks that judge imprisoned. Or the guards at the jail happen to know the dude, have no set process they must follow, so they let him go. Or this judge gets one super wrong, it goes viral, and there's a huge protest demanding all his inmates get released.
Because democratic government relies on the consent of the governed, we need a method for checking that we have that consent. Which means using inefficient "process-based" methods instead of efficient "results-based" methods. Those process-based methods can still be the most effective way of getting results.
You can certainly take this idea too far, and in fact I think we definitely do in the U.S. But the people I'm critiquing don't get the idea at all. They think that if we are not taking the most direct route to their specific policy goals, government is in some way corrupt. That's untrue and will harm our ability to do things in the long run.
But what even is the purpose of the justice system if the public does not feel that justice is being served? That's the entire point of having one in the first place! As far as public perception is concerned, what's important is not that the system is objectively fair, but that those perceived as having sinned are appropriately punished. If it fails to do that in an efficient matter, people are going to take matters into their own hands, either by dispensing justice themselves or by changing the system.
And the system is being changed as we speak. We'll get to see first-hand whether or not this new order is more sustainable than liberal democracy.
Well I'd distinguish between the point of the justice system being "giving the public the perception that justice is being served" and "serving justice," but I'm the one arguing that legitimacy is a problem.
I guess what I'm saying is that in an anything goes system, I foresee a lot more progress being undone than in a slow and steady proceduralist one, as the whims of the public and public officials shift and churn. I don't really see North Korea or Russia as having robust, successful public works programs. I guess China does, but China is also somewhat proceduralist, just less answerable to the public.
I mostly use it to mean "it doesn't matter if your system's nominal purpose is good things if its actual effect is bad things".
I think the problem is with the word purpose (interpreted as intent or goal) and should be replaced with something like construction.
I applied the principle to a case I am familiar with:
The purpose of [a computer code I wrote to solve some equation] is to crash with a segmentation fault/start diverging/converge to a wrong number.
- no, the purpose is to solve the equation correctly, but the current construction does not fulfill the purpose
Or a similar sentiment from psychology:
"You are what you do, not what you say you'll do."
Again, the purpose (motive, intent, goal) of a person who is a lazy bum despite talking productivity mantras is not be a lazy bum, the person is just failing at the stated goals.
Could the phrase have been intended differently but became what it is now due to the ambiguity of the word purpose?
Leading me to this meta:
The meaning of a quote is not what was intended by the original author but what it is quoted to support.
Here's an example that is "sort of" POASIWID: regulatory capture. Strictly speaking, only individuals have purposes, which they might hold in common with some other individuals. If some set up a government regulatory agency (a system) to accomplish something, say, regulate an industry, and then other individuals take over the system and use it to benefit the industry with protection and market power, I suppose that's an example of POASIWID. "Regulatory capture" is a far more precise and clear name, though, and as POASIWID seems entirely confused, for the reasons ACT gives.
I think POSIWID applies when the system consistently performs contrary to its stated goals. No hospital can save every patient; some will die due to limited resources, human error, complexity of disease, and other factors. A well-run hospital would promote doctors with superior track records, optimize its supply chain, invest into medical research, etc. But a hospital that keeps losing patients while promoting doctors based solely on their fundraising ability and spending the bulk of its money on PR and investment opportunities -- such a hospital is subject to POSIWID.
I'm confused. It IS the purpose of the cancer hospital to cure 2/3 of the patients. They know that they can't cure them all and they are doubtlessly making long term plans with this information in mind, no?
The question is, are they even trying to improve the number of people they can cure? Because there doesn't seem to be any meaningful incentive to do so.
If the cancer hospital invests in cancer research too then they cure 2/3 of patients while investing money into research. That is their purpose and the thing they do. The fact that this is their purpose might become relevant if there were an expensive new miracle treatment on the market that could cure 5/6 of their patients but it using it would cost them their whole research budget.
"I had hoped that X/Twitter would show me something better" is one of the funniest things I've read in the last few days!
I think one way of putting it is that the outputs of the system have explanatory power over and above just being "side effects" of a system supposedly "optimised" for its explicit purpose.
In the case of the (presumed USA) cancer-hospital system, "what it does" includes, among other things:
- Curing 2/3 of patients
- Compensating oncologists and other medical staff highly
- Accruing a bunch of money for a company or charitable institution
- Managing legal risks by (among other things) declining to try to treat at least some marginal patients that they could otherwise treat
- Conveying social status to staff
It's not wrong per se to describe this all as "trying to cure cancer patients but doing so is difficult", but I see POSIWID as making the testable claim that you see a different equilibrium that biases further towards the other outcomes you see in practice, as compared to a hypothetical system purely optimised for its nominal main goal.
(In this case, it could mean something like: maybe the cancer hospital could actually cure slightly more than 2/3 of patients overall by posting the less urgent ones off to a different country with lower medical costs or more capacity, and then focusing their resources on the most urgent ones; yet they don't do that, why?)
In the same way that YOLO is basically just carpe diem for stupid people, I feel like POSWID is just the uneducated shorthand for Public Choice Theory. You lose all the good insights when you dumb it down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice?wprov=sfla1
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is a way of momentarily ignoring what people /say/ the purpose of a system is, and instead focusing on what it actually achieves. It's not the /only/ lens worth using, but it's an important one. Because Purpose as "socially agreed reason for existence" can often drift from the actual perpetuation and consequence of a system.
You should know this, you've written on it.
"The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to win wars" vs "Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!"
"The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide." vs "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!"
I would suggest that X/Twitter are not the best space to learn this, as the phrase is /also/ a snappy sazen and some people only understood the snappyness without understanding the lesson it encapsulates.
I had never looked into it but I always assumed it was an engineering phrase. Like if you have a widget that was designed to do floating point bend straws but in doing so it heats up to 500 degrees you can also use it to heat up the drinks that the straws are being prepared for. It's purpose is now to do both, kind of like a death of the artist analysis.
Thermodynamic systems "want" to maximize entropy.
Evolution's "goal" is to maximize inclusive fitness.
The "purpose" of a system is what it does.
Some statements are contradictory. How can the purpose of evolution simultaneously be maximizing inclusive fitness and making most species go extinct (which is what it does)?
Why would those things be mutually exclusive? The chaff needs to be uprooted to make room for the wheat. Competition breeds progress.
Very nice. Seems like the same could also apply to "if you're reading it, it's for you".
Eh, some people read things to screen for witches, and go in and demand changes to reflect their political views.
This is a minor amendment, but I think the examples are bad in that it should be "the purpose of a system is what it does compared to its nonexistence". So I think e.g. "the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get caught in a bloody stallate with the Russians instead of the Russians conquering the country" or "the purpose of cancer wards is to cure two thirds of cancer patients" are reasonable takes. That's effectively what they're there to do.
Of course it would be nice if they could do better, but we've accepted that's not doable and it's largely out of bounds - like how airlines' purposes is to fly people places over several hours (and not instantly teleport them).
Where this gets spicy is when we disagree over what the alternative world is. For example, the New York MTA spends 10-20x more to build subways than other countries. Is the alternative "no MTA exists" (so the purpose of the MTA is to provide public transit) or "an average-competency by global standards transit agency exists" (in which case the purpose of the MTA is to make transit worse and more expensive while giving kickbacks to unions and comfy jobs to political insiders).
Or to make an example more sympathetic to the second interpretation: let's assume your local hospital has a cancer ward that randomly poisons half the patients it saves. The first interpretation (the alternative is no cancer ward) would say its purpose is to save one third of cancer patients (clearly good!). The second interpretation (the alternative is a normal non murdery cancer ward) would say its purpose is to kill random cancer patients. For this case the second interpretation seems more reasonable.
I prefer the formulation: "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it is getting." That does not mean the system is "functioning as intended"—and to be fair, it abuses the term "designed."
But the key insight is that the system's "accidental" design produces precisely the results we are getting. If we want to change the results, we need to rethink the design.
To your example, there's a pretty strong case that Biden explicitly designed the Ukrainian military to ensure that Ukriane would not lose -- but neither would Russia -- so he could preserve the status quo...
I came here to say the same thing about Ukraine.
Here it exactly pays rent, especially if you draw the system broader as Ukraine + military aid (possibly even Russia).
The heuristic predicts that isolated interventions that would lead to one side being able to break the stalemate lead to compensation elsewhere. It’s plausible that this is happening in practice imo. Eg America withdrawing support, leading to Europe trying to fill the hole. If the intent was to help Ukraine win outright they could have offered that additional aid before.
Exactly. The question we should ask -- if we are unhappy with the result of a system -- is *whose* purpose is being protected by what *we* perceive as an unintended consequence.
This is a concept from cybernetics, right? My understanding of that field is that it tries to analyze "self regulated systems" (in the most general sense, from biological organisms to large scale industrial societies) using a common set of concepts and models.
If you're trying to define a notion of "purpose" in a way that applies equally well to models of thermostats, organelles in a cell, and large scale societies then the definition seems fine. It comes from a purely descriptive discourse - frame, where you're not importing any sense of agency or external teleology
When you're in a prescriptive discourse - frame the concept is usually going to be misapplied, but the fact that motivated reasoners (as social scientists so often are) misuse concepts as cudgels doesn't mean the concepts are stupid.
This is an article that literally has the quote you're trashing, but uses it in an appropriate context (chemical systems) and actually explains it a bit. I'd recommend reading at least until the mathematical model, it's probably fine if you lose it there. It does a good job explaining the cybernetic concept of an "objective purpose" of a system in terms of dynamic stability / autopoesis
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8395005/#:~:text=Cybernetics%20later%20extended%20its%20reach,be%20said%20to%20exhibit%20agency.
Profound sounding bullshit is still bullshit. The inverse version is that conventional wisdom is still wisdom.
This criticism is at the level of "We call ourselves the Anti-Bad Guy Squad and we label our opponents the Bad Guys. How can people not understand this? We can never be terrorists because we're fighting the Bad Guys. It's so simple to understand. Everything we do is justified because of our name."
To try to steelman a bit, the phrase is definitely a rhetorical tool, but at it's most pro-social best it's a rhetorical tool that is one of the few attacks that work for attacking sympathetic things that have intentionally or emergently drifted into ineffectualness or even counter-productiveness that have concentrated interests fighting against their reform. In particular it focuses discussion away from the question of the sympathetic thing by focusing on outcomes rather then intent by using equivalence.
The intent of NEPA/CEQA for example is laudable and it's hard to argue against environmental protection, but if the effect is to prevent apartment building from going up on unused parking lots till various rent seeking groups are "heard" [bribed] and reform is often stymied by the efforts of same groups a reframing of the argument away from environmental protection and towards outcomes is helpful.
It is not literally saying the purpose of NEPA/CEQA is to give BANANAs and rent seeking NGOs vetoes over all construction, only that (with somewhat hyperbolic affect) the situation is indistinguishable from that being it's purpose (and potentially by extension that it's much better at that purpose then it's stated purpose).
Other incisive uses I've seen: Homelessness Charities in CA (lot of government money disappears into the ether with not a lot of visible improvement), rent control, some types of farm subsidies and quotas (eg. ethanol which is supposed to help the environment [but probably doesn't] and raises prices for the consumer two fold [on corn and fuel]), whole language instruction (purpose isn't to make kids stupid, but ...), Corporate DEI training (studies seem pretty uniform in actual effect being neutral to counter-productive) and Black Lives Matter charities, sugar quotas, Jones Act, the growth of the administrative payroll in schools/colleges, various public choice issues, the ACLU's evolution, and lots more.
It of course does get miss-used and often encourages an conspiratorially intent view when incentive driven emergent behavior is probably a more accurate lens, and like most rhetorical tools over simplifies but it can drive action in cases that otherwise hard to coordinate.
Scott is falling into the opposite naive error. The purpose of a system isn't (everything) that it does, but we also shouldn't assume that the purpose of a system is what the system leaders say it is
I think it depends on how distant what the system does from what it claims to do is.
e.g. if a system claims to be democratic and yet consistently ignores the express wishes of voters, then you are probably verging into the system's real purpose being what it does and not what it claims to do.
You can certainly forgive a thing failing to do what it claims to do - there is surely some play here - but a thing consistently faililng to do what it claims to do, and even consistently doing the opposite of what it claims to do, well that's either really unusual incompetence or malice.
Trying to think of a snappy slogan that's a little more honest. Maybe "Predictable unintended consequenses aren't unintended"?
I like it!
I take this phrase to simply be asserting a sort of behaviorist (ie apposed to psycoanalytic) position applied to generic systems. This seems like a reasonable take to me. The word 'purpose' is being used intentionally provocatively and shouldn't be taken literally. I also chafe at this kind of communication style, but I don't see anything especially wrong with the claim.
Are there any actual system engineers among the commentariat? This phrase has a specific meaning within the discipline it came from. The fact that a wider public has taken it from there and has been applying stupidly (on xitter! what's the world coming to!) doesn't in any way detract from its usefulness within the intended context.
This is the kind of low effort confusion that a late and lamented blog called Slate Star Codex used to eviscerate. I miss that blog, anyone know what happened with the author?
I think he just ran out of interesting things to talk about that he was actually knowledgeable enough to write interesting posts on. Can't blame him, seeing as he's been blogging for so long. But with the culture war coming to an end soon, there ain't much to talk about there either. I wonder what he's going to do after that.
None of your examples are of the form "The purpose of a system is what it does". Rather, all of them are of the form "The purpose of a system is one specific thing that it does among many other things", which is obviously non-sense. This also applies to the examples you posted from X, so there are clearly a lot of people who like the phrase but also misuse it like that.
What I believe the phrase is actually trying to convey is that the objective function for the evaluation of a system should be the totality of its outcomes and not just the intended outcome.
The purpose of the Ukrainian army is to defend against an invader
And how does Scott (or anyone here) feel about "The Definition of Insanity is Repeatedly Doing the Same Thing and Expecting a Different Outcome"?
A fun example is the Baltimore Public School System.
We can even compare it to the Cancer Hospital!
Let's say that there is a cancer hospital that heals about 2 out of 3 of each of its patients (and the last third dies).
Imagine someone saying "we need to improve these numbers". What are the counter-arguments?
"We're doing everything we can."
"This is really complicated."
"We could improve the numbers with more funding."
Now look at those twenty-something schools in Baltimore that don't have a single student that is proficient in math or reading.
Imagine someone saying "we need to improve these numbers". What are the counter-arguments?
"We're doing everything we can."
"This is really complicated."
"We could improve the numbers with more funding."
The same thing, right?
Right?
Well, this was mean-spirited. Let's start with your strawmen:
> The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The fault here is the weird specificity in the goal. Why 2/3? You even argue further down that sometimes systems just fail. If we ask the question at issue, the answer is "They cure cancer." Sure, they have 67% success rate, but it's reasonable to say the system is designed to cure cancer.
> The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
This is just spiteful. That's not even what the system is doing, that's just a consequence of what it is doing. What it is doing is "Fighting the Russians to keep them from over-running the country."
> The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
Again, weirdly and bitterly specific. You even had to add in multiple goals just to make any sense at all.
> The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide.
What even is this example? You don't really think that anyone refers to this, this seems a deliberate bad-faith reading of the phrase. To the point where I almost wrote you off entirely and just unsubbed. Then I reread the below question and decided to hold out hope.
> Maybe I’m still missing some genuinely good and useful insight that POSIWID can be used for?
Imagine a hospital that declares loudly that it is a cancer hospital. When patients are admitted to the hospital, they and their families are given a whole bunch of material about how donating significant portions of an estate to a charity can both protect against certain tax consequences and a set of recommendations for charities to donate to that are actually all different facets of the same organization. And the hospital's performance is only 15% that of comparable hospitals. POSIWID: the purpose of the hospital is collecting donations, not treating cancer.
Or take a psychiatrist's office where every patient gets a Prozac prescription no matter what issues they walk in with. POSIWID: What is the motivation for just writing Prozac scripts? Is he getting a kickback? Is he lazy and processing patients for insurance payouts?
Let's take a military shipbuilder that builds surface combatants with engines that regularly break and systems that embrace the John Deere approach of locking out critical systems after maintenance until a technician code is entered. It also has basically no weapons because they didn't work. The ships are still actively being built. Why? POSIWID: The system is protecting a bad shipbuilder for largely politically corrupt, but some marginal military-industry, reasons.
POSIWID is one of those base assumptions to start with when analyzing a system. We're talking about Sun Tzu "Don't fight while standing in a river" level of insight here. It seems brick-simple when said but also a lot of people miss it. It's explicitly a pushback against things like the legislative trick of naming a bill "Supporting Puppies and Kittens Act of 2025" while the bill funds an organization dedicated to killing puppies and kittens instead.
The core element here is that one should evaluate a system by the results it produces, not the goals it claims.
Good breakdown, it is dispiriting to see both the Scott's weirdly off-the-mark post and the commentary it generated.
Yeah
I don't like the way people are defending the phrase. It's like if someone stated "All food is red", someone else countered with "No, blueberries are blue", but a third person came up and said, "Actually, the correct interpretation of the phrase 'All food is red' is 'Some food is red', and since apples are red, the phrase is a useful heuristic when describing food". Yes, it's true that some food is red, but it's not true that some food is red is the correct interpretation of the statement all food is red, or that the statement all food is red is true or useful
Systems have a lot of possible outcomes. Some are intended and stated, some are intended and not stated, and some are neither stated nor intended. POSWID ignores the third class of statements entirely, and for the second class of statements, I prefer the phrase, "It's a feature, not a bug", because it acknowledges the existence of bugs and doesn't pretend somehow that all bugs are features.
I had an argument with a friend once that had us circling around this idea one time. I don't think he used the exact phrase POSWID but I was trying to come up with examples of systems that inherently have trade-offs and unintended consequences but he kept coming back to the idea that a system working imperfectly means someone doesn't want it to work perfectly.
There seems to be a very common strain of thought that if the world is not perfect it must mean someone has conspired to make it imperfect for nefarious reasons. It was surprising to hear it from this friend because he is a professional programmer, and I know programmers are familiar with the idea of bugs.
Except, when people are thinking of using this phrase, there is often a nefarious force. Usually a public sector union. A prominent example would be schools. The purpose of schools is paying teachers. That is what schools do. Everything else is extraneous to paying teachers.
If I say that I'm constantly hearing people complain about the weather, it isn't a good rebuttal to say "you aren't hearing it 24 hours a day, and besides, what if you covered your ears?" That's just being autistically hyperliteral.
Likewise, if someone said "food is cheap", it would not make sense to reply "caviar is food, and it isn't cheap".
People don't talk the way you think they do.
To me the classic example of "the purpose of a system is what it does" is Patrick McKenzie's dictum (can't find a non-Twitter reference at the moment but see e.g. https://x.com/patio11/status/1654988724353241088) that the purpose of many government agencies is to pay their employees. His evidence: rewrites of their horrible legacy payroll software fail and have to be rolled back even when following the specifications exactly, because if the agency's specifications and on-the-ground reality disagree about how much a particular employee is supposed to be paid _then the employee is right_.
This is a stronger form of evidence than the ones you discuss: not that systems fail in their goals or produce side effects, but that deliberate decisions made by those systems primarily produce results other than the system's stated purpose. Colloquially, the purpose of a system is what it does _at the margin_.
So often this past year I've felt like I'm reading an anthropologist's reports from some faraway place every time I read a blog. I don't think I've ever even heard the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does". I spend far too much time reading on the Internet, yet I barely even speak the lingo.
I think there is some kind of power play emerging, intentionally or not, in which the continual churning of political jargon transfers power to those who have enough free time to waste it in political debates. No one else can participate. Much like the development of jargon in academia, it serves as a barrier to entry.
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is obviously false if applied literally to everything. However, I think it can be valid in cases where (1) the problem in question is widely-known, and (2) the problem could easily be fixed without compromising the system's stated goals.
To take an example from real life.-- Once upon a time, Britain, like pretty much every other country in the world, exempted education from VAT (value-added tax, or sales tax to our transatlantic friends). Recently, however, the government decided to impose VAT on private schools -- not on any other kind of education, mind you, but only private schools. The stated purpose of this was to raise money, but plenty of people pointed out at the time that the tax rise was more likely to be a net cost, because it would cause a large number of children to move from private school (where their own parents bore the cost of educating them) to state school (where the government paid). And indeed, this turned out to be the case. However, the government didn't reverse course, but kept the tax increase, even though the policy clearly wasn't helping with its alleged goals.
Now, in this case, I think the conditions mentioned above both apply. It was widely predicted beforehand that charging VAT to private schools would be a let financial loss, and it's since become clear that those predictions were right. It would also be easy for the British government to not charge VAT without compromising its ability to raise money or to govern more generally. In this situation, therefore, I think it's quite reasonable to say, "TPOASIWID. Claims of 'revenue-raising' are obviously insincere; this tax rise is actually motivated by class warfare, and a desire to reduce the number of children being privately educated."
To the extent I ever thought of the phrase, I think I interpreted it as a cynical way of saying that a badly working system isn't fulfilling its stated goals because it has been co-opted by its leaders to do whatever *they* want it to do (fill their pockets, mess with the other, what have you), and damn the consequences.
Or to phrase it differently, "The people actually in control of a system will co-opt its purpose to their own end, no matter what the stated goals are."
The purpose of a system is why the system is needed.
I think of POSIWID in a similar sense as the "every gun is always loaded" rule of firearm safety. It's obviously not literally true in every case; it's a counter to lazy assumptions. "Always loaded" removes the ability to say "I didn't know it was loaded!" after an accidental discharge, and POSIWID removes the ability to say "well that's not what it's meant to be doing" when a system results in abuse.
(I apologise if somebody has already alerted you to this but I have not read all comments)
The phrase comes from management cybernetics and someone you may be aware of (a veteran blogger) called Dan Davies has recently published a great book that uses these ideas - The Unaccountability Machine - which might contain the genuinely useful insight you ask for.
Here is a little bit from a substack of his
"As I say in the book, it’s easy to mistake POSIWID for a much cruder, “it is what it is” kind of cynicism. It’s actually a much deeper concept in my view. The purpose of a system is exactly what is being worked out every day, as that system reproduces and maintains itself, decides what events it is going to react to and how it is going to balance present interests and future possibilities. And so the doing of things is, identically, the creation of purpose. A screwdriver which just lies around in a drawer doesn’t have any purpose at all"
Yes, this makes sense.
Another example: the purpose of a car is to burn fuel.
I absolutely agree with this criticism. If i was going to steelman POSIWID into something maybe worth considering, I would paraphrase it as "outcomes reflect incentives more than they reflect stated institutional intent." The purpose of the Russian Army wasn't to get bogged down in Ukraine, but the corruption which exists within its ranks is more explanatory of the observed bad performance of the army than the statement that the purpose of the army is to win wars.
POSIWID is still grossly uncharitable as stated, of course, ignores systemic limitations as a base assumption, and tends to not contribute to the effective development of solutions. And, as you mention, it is very motte and bailey-able and very Moloch-y in assigning a single intent to the product of multiple competing interests.
More generally, I predict that people use POSIWID not to diagnose or fix problems, but to attack groups when they both dislike an outcome and also distrust/dislike/feel they can't sufficiently control the institution involved. It is a more adult sounding version of the eight year old child, forced to do homework before playing, who screams "you don't want me to have any fun!"
Re: The New York City bus system
The purpose of the system is in fact what it does. The problem is as always “what does a system do”? New York’s buses are really slow - 8mph citywide and 6mph in Manhattan, which is only 50% faster than walking. This is often on lines where the bus parallels the subway and almost all trips would be faster by subway. So in practice, the buses are useless (and fail to recover >80% of costs). Instead, their purpose is to keep heavily unionized bus drivers employed, because they could go on strike and stop the subway, which would be an Actual Catastrophe
> So in practice, the buses are useless (and fail to recover >80% of costs).
Do you mean that they recover almost 80% of their costs, or that they don't even recover 20% of their costs?
Yeah I guess it would have been good to clarify this one lol. The buses don't even recover 20% of costs. >80% of the operations costs are lost.
> The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to fight cancer in as many patients as possible [as cost effectively as possible, within regulations [...]]
> The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to fight the russian military [and to inflict losses dissuading further conquest / retake occupied territories, while minimizing own losses and expenditure]
> The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
sure
> The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide.
the purpose of the new york bus system is to operationalize bus transport for citizens [only marginally minimize CO2 emissions [where politically desired and not too costly] ...]
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The purpose is written in the actions (does), you are mentioning outcomes (achieves)
It's a naive overreaction to the naive, obviously false, and very popular statement that the purpose of a system is the *declared* purpose of its supporters.
Further helping the situation is that everyone can think of situations where it is clearly true. Where people who purport to fix a problem actually do things that make it worse because their jobs are on the line if they succeed in their declared aim. Or where the zoning board's actual intention and purpose is to block competitors to the town's bigwigs.
I think you're failing to distinguish between two separate purposes to an organization: (1) the internal purpose, as defined by the people who join and lead the organization; and (2) the external purpose, which is why government/economics/society lets the organization exist at all. Stafford isn't saying that "people in a hospital are trying to leave 1/3 cancer cases uncured", corresponding to (1). He's saying "this organization hasn't been raided by the police/gone bankrupt/etc. because attorneys general/financiers/etc. know that closing down the hospital would lead to (insert many bad things here) and consider the 1/3 cancer cases acceptable losses", corresponding to (2).
Now, you might say: Medicare keeps telling hospitals to cure more patients. Zelenskyy and the Rada are frantically trying to develop a military that achieved more on the battlefield. The British people would vote for a more self-confident government, if they had the choice. And the mayor's office is slowly prodding the NYC bus system to crawl towards electric buses. So surely the effects each governing body is trying to reduce aren't part of the external purpose of the system.
To which Stafford would say: he's also trying to hint that "culture eats strategy for breakfast". Systems don't spontaneously start producing different observable results. To achieve different behavior, you need to change the internal nature of the system, with more than just a few policy papers at the head. You need different internal and external metrics and different lines of report. You might even need entirely people to internalize new Standard Operating Procedures.
Once you've made all those changes, you run into the Ship of Theseus effect. Is the system really the same organization anymore? Or is it just an entirely new organization that happens to share the same name as the old?
I think you'd say it's the same organization, but reformed. Stafford would say it's a new organization that ate the old from the inside out.
From your discussion of Twitter, I think you believe Stafford's perspective elides more than it elucidates. In particular, it hides the possibility and desirability of intermediate reform. You're right, *most of the time*. Stafford's perspective turns "Reform Cash Bail" into "Abolish the Criminal Justice System, so That we Might Replace It with a Virtually Identical System Except with a New Bail Policy", which, while mathematically identical, is not *practically* identical. But also, some people naively expect (e.g.) the hospital to stop missing cancer cases when a few spokespeople tell the press that "the hospital will do better now, I swear it". For them, Stafford is directionally correct.
As you yourself once wrote, all debates are bravery debates.
(I'll be honest: I haven't read all the comments and so someone might have written this but much more pithily.)
One valid example: if you notice that a major effect of bad Nimby zoning policies is to segregate housing by race and by wealth, it turns out that was one of the initial purposes of the policies, and in fact perhaps the main one at least at the start.
I agree the naive form of this phrase is often bad, but a weaker "If you notice a system consistently doing something, consider that perhaps that is one of the primary purposes of the system" is worth considering
It seems related to a general problem of people anthropomorphizing things. A nation, hospital, or justice system, taken as a whole, obviously doesn't have a conscious intent, because it doesn't have a consciousness. It's an amalgamation of the preferences, actions, and foibles of a very large number of people, many of whom have completely different and opposing intentions. You should not devote a lot of resources to categorizing outcomes that are outside the control of any individual as unintended consequences or malign intentions.
To say, "the justice system oppresses minorities because it wants their lives to be more difficult" is either meaningless or suggests that justice is thwarted by individual agents in the system with evil intent. This leads to conspiracy theories and paranoia, and is the opposite of considering the role of incentives.
The purpose of a system is what it does is the right way of thinking about a system when you want to reform it.
Nobody should care that affordable housing rules were made to help the poor when it completely fail about it. Moral and economic judment about something should be not on its ambition but on its réalisation.
When judging the fda, we shouldn t consider its stated goal but its met goal, and the purpose of a system is what it does is a way to shift to consequentialism from bad deontologism.
Sure, but that doesn't really warrant a pretentious phrase that misuses the word "purpose."
Well if it works it does haha
Regarding the UK disability system tweet, there have been claims that the system is set up to reject as many claims as possible for cost-cutting reasons, and that giving the benefits assessment work to private contractors means it is profit-driven to maximise returns on government contracts.
So there is some genuine dispute there about what the real purpose of the system is.
https://news.sky.com/story/government-unveils-benefit-crackdown-designed-to-save-5bn-13331362
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/dwp-tried-to-prevent-atos-winning-338m-assessment-contract-court-documents-suggest/
"If you want to predict the future effects a system will have on the world, you should be more inclined to look at the past effects that system has had on the world than at the statement of purpose of the people who established the system"
POSIWID was coined by a management consultant (Stafford Beer) to point out rhetoric like "well, that's not what I'M doing" spoken by each person in the system doesn't matter, because it's the totality of their actions in a system that cause results. Excerpts from Unaccountability Machine:
> The disquieting effect only emerges when you consider a particular case, where
the system under analysis is made up of human beings and the forces
operating on them are their own individual desires. We can all think of
cases where organisations systematically deliver outcomes that are wildly at
odds with their stated objectives. Stafford Beer’s cybernetics tells us that in
these cases, while people’s opinions are important, the facts of the
organisational outcomes are what we need to work with. In his most pithy
formulation of the principle, he expands the black box principle to a rather
more uncomfortable statement.
> It’s easy to mistake the POSIWID view of the world for a slightly
tiresome kind of cynicism. To say that the purpose of the system is what it
does isn’t to make any statement about the intentions of the people working
for it. The danger of confusing the properties of the system with those of its
members is one of the most important reasons for not opening up a black
box. Unfortunately, it’s a very common confusion; very few people are able
to take a step back, view their own organisation as if from outside, and
realise that they are structurally producing results which are exactly the
opposite of what they had intended.
It's about incentive structures, it's a point that all people participating who say "this is my intent - and this is the intent of the system' aren't the actual embodiment of the system, they're simply cogs in it and their 'wishes' don't magically become the purpose of the system thru some metaphysical democracy of purpose.
Repression, sour grapes, etc all contribute to the purpose of a person but are rarely acknowledged by him.
You could liken it to selection effects, the invisible hand, emergent order. Yes, it's very misused. It's also a rhetorical trick to cut the bullshit when people say "well, the NIH had the right intentions it just produced a bad result" for example.
"The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia." The point of posiwid is not to repeat reality and say "this is the purpose of reality".
> POSIWID is not just a glib piece of cynicism; it’s a description of how a system retains viability and identity
In short, the common quibble about posiwid 'purpose means metaphysical magic that I wish would happen, therefore the result produced is not the purpose' is not relevant, see the system as a black box whose purpose must be deducted from looking at inputs and outputs.
Your examples are a bit like "I stubbed my toe, therefore the purpose of the desk is to stub my toe" not "the purpose of the management structure is to evade responsibility" (which none CONSCIOUSLY do) "the purpose of the journal-publishing system is to lower threshold of articles for profits and suck in taxpayer funds" etc. This is too verbose maybe but here's a picture.
A different slant on this I find more helpful is: "the system is working exactly as it was designed". Instead of arguing that the unintended consequences or poor performance of a system shows the *intent* of the creators/operators, this focuses on their *accountability* to how the system performs. If the cops are beating suspects, then the police department's design doesn't have sufficient controls to prevent this. If the British government had a better process for gathering public sentiment before crafting policy, it wouldn't propose such unpopular sentencing changes.
I think there’s some confusion still here. Systems have multiple effects, and to think clearly about them, a few categories of effect seem reasonable:
- Ostensive vs non-ostensive: effects that are intended by the system’s architects and proclaimed in public by its advocates as the rationale for the system’s existence
- Intentional vs accidental: effects that are intended by actors within the system (whether or not they would admit it in public)
- Sustaining vs non-sustaining: effects that incentivize actors within the system to maintain the system itself (without which the system would not be sustained
I think the interesting insights that POSIWID can draw your attention towards all involve effects that are sustaining not non-ostensive.
Take medieval monarchies. Ostensibly, their purpose is to fulfill the mandate of god and protect vassals by maintaining castles and fielding knights and so forth. But on closer inspection of monarchy. you might notice that the nobility itself extracts a lot of wealth from the peasants, and if that if this wasn’t possible, knights would probably not to don their shining armor.
Or, for a modern example, take a police department. You might notice that some police conduct is cruel and corrupt, and while cruelty and corruption might not be the ostensive purpose of the police department. But some critics of the police department might assert that enabling corruption and cruelty is *sustaining* for the PD— if you ended cruelty and corruption, you’d have to find another way to get people to show up. If this is the case, there seems to be a sense in which the purpose of the PD is to give its members opportunities for corruption and abuse, and you would expect attempts to change t
Or take college. Ostensibly, the purpose is to educate students. But and many of my classmates met our romantic partners at college. Is the *purpose* of college to help pair off bright young adults? I don’t think many would say so, but it’s arguably an important part of the college package, and attempts to prevent dating within the student body would be met with stiff resistance.
I think the steel-man of POSIWID is that there are these effects that are not part of the justification for a system (and might even be in tension with its justification), but would nevertheless essential for the system’s persistence.
Perhaps a refinement would be: “a system’s purpose is what incentivizes its upkeep”.
>Am I being unfair here? Maybe the slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” was never meant to apply to situations like these?
The way you're being unfair here is translating 'The purpose of a system is what it does' into 'The purpose of a system is one particular short-term metric taken out of all context'. 'What it does' is much more holistic than that.
If everyone in a hospital is trying their best to cure ever cancer they come across and take as many patients as they can handle with no prejudice, then 'trying to cure as much cancer as possible' is an accurate summary of what the hospital does.
But for the police for example, if you can holistically look at everything they do and find that they punish crimes committed by the poor much more than the same or similar crimes committed by the rich, that they promptly respond to rich people's property being threatened by poor people but tell poor people to file a complaint and then ignore it, and that they are always fast to step us and brutalize protestors and activists speaking out against the dominant power system but not those who are favored by it, then yeah you can holistically say 'the purpose of the police is to enforce the existing power structures and protect the powerful against the oppressed'.
Yes, holistic judgements means there's a level of subjectivity and interpretation and cherry picking at play, and that makes it not a 'science'. But your examples of choosing specific narrow metrics and ignoring everything else the system does also employ a lot of subjectivity and interpretation and cherry picking!
Saying anything short and comprehensible about huge complex systems will always require interpretation and summation. No one-sentence description of something like 'the police' or 'hospitals' will ever be comprehensively accurate, it will always be a holistic summary of one specific facet or one specific insight about the whole.
'The purpose of the system is what it does' is just a heuristic to help you think about how systems work and notice/communicate a particular genre of true insights about them.
I get what you’re saying and mostly agree. But I think you might be taking this too literally. There are of course examples of systems that claim to do one thing while actually attempting and doing something else. I think these POSIWIM people are taking this concept and applying it far too widely. So for example the SPLC’s stated claim is to reduce injustice among the poor or whatever but really they end up fighting with a bunch of people whose views they don’t like. The reality is these people are just justifying their anger with a true concept applied far too widely and not looking too close at it.
If I understand it correctly, POSIWID was introduced to describe situations in which a system is stated to have one purpose, but in actuality does something else. A classic example is the Department of Defense. On 911 the US was infiltrated by agents of a polity who was at war with us. They carried out three successful attacks on military and economic targets causing the deaths of nearly 3000 Americans. It was the most devasting attack on the nation since the War of 1812.
The Defense Department failed to stop these attacks because *it was not their job to do so*. That is, it was not the job of the Department of Defense to defend the country in this situation. After 911 an entirely new department was created to perform this function.
What the DOD *does* is make war. According to POSIWID, the purpose of the Defense Department is to make war. Really it ought to be called the War Department. The funny thing is the DOD *used* to be called the War Department, in alignment with POSIWID.
POSIWID is not a stupid concept, but stupid (or dishonest) people can use it incorrectly. Stupid people use all sorts of tools improperly, that doesn't mean the tools are bad.
War Department was army-only, there was a separate Navy Department that was navy-only.
Defense Department was the name we picked when we decided to merge the two departments together. And then we added the Air Force as the third 'independent-sub-department' because reasons, and from there things rapidly got very complex.
This is true. Thel Secretary of War became the Secretary of the Army who reported to the cabinet-level Secretary of Defense.
Prior to 1947 the cabinet-level Secretary of War was responsible for the Army and the Army Air Corps (forerunner of the Air Force). The War Department was headquartered in the Pentagon.
The the cabinet-level Secretary of the Navy was (and still is) responsible for the Navy and the Marine Corps and had its headquarters in the Eisenhower Building.
The Secretary of War was second in the line of succession among the cabinet (after the Sec of State), the Secretary of the Navy was not.
The newly-created Secretary of Defense was established as a cabinet-level position occupying the position in the order of succession. The War Department headquarters in the Pentagon became the Defense Department headquarters. The Navy Headquarters moved into what had been the War Department Headquarters. Functionally what happened was the Navy was merged into the War Department. Both service secretaries were demoted from cabinet-level positions and the position of the Secretary of War in the cabinet taken over by a newly-created Secretary of Defense.
The only service branch with a primarily peacetime role is the US Coast Guard, which reports to Homeland Security. The other war-fighting branches (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines) are part of DOD. So based on the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does, it sure seems like what the DOD does is fight wars. Functionally it is the Department of Fighting Wars, or War Department for short, but they call it something else for political reasons.
POSWID is a partially correct observation that systems seem to have a mind of their own and can't be steered even if the main figurehead-dictator-ceo tries really hard. "Do X" "No, I will continue to do Y"
There is a strong desire to map the results to some origin source of intention or agency and then try to change the result by targeting the source
But it's really more that systems like DNA or memes have an emergent desire to spread. The agency of the system is ignored because it's a non-person. And the result is like trying to control a single bird to control the shape of a bird flock.
It's a cope that laments the absence of a single lever to pull or a single voldemort to kill. It increases the moral burden of the system and hopes that it concentrates into the stress points or leaders and "breaks" them.
What is the purpose of a biological system?
Take the eye. We can say the purpose of an eye is to allow us to see. But nobody designed an eye. Nobody sat down and gave it a purpose and designed it to execute that purpose. So where does its purpose come from?
"Revealed preferences are not the same as stated preferences" is much less catchy though.
To learn more about Stafford Beer, and why his theories might be more interesting than are presented here, I recommend this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinmunger/p/the-tragedy-of-stafford-beer
I haven’t actually read him myself, but it seems like Beer was trying to tackle the same sort of Moloch-esque system’s failure that Scott would be most interested in. His mad-scientist solution was a sort of techno, decentralized-centralization that somehow avoided that whole “Boot stomping on your face forever” issue of many centralized solutions to collective action problems. He was actually pretty close to implementing his theories in Chile in the 70’s, but didn’t get the chance due to political revolutions outside his control.
I read it myself so you don't have to.
In brief, he wasn't close to implementing his theories; he did implement them. From his book Brain of the Firm:
"it is still April 1973.
If what we wanted to do was to meet the objectives listed for Cyberstride and Project Cybersyn, then we have succeeded. Those were technical objectives, and meeting them may count as success to some people.
If what we wanted to do was to display that technical achievement in management action, then we may yet succeed. This is the technocratic objective, and meeting it may count as success to some people."
Notice that April 1973 is five months before the coup. Technical objectives were met. Not "displaying that technical achievement" is his way of saying the project was a failure.
Earlier, in January 1973, Beer was ready to announce to the world that the system was working:
"Returning once again to January 10th and the Operations Room, it was clear that the ‘propitious time’ for announcements to the larger public was drawing nigh. These announcements stood to be radically perverted by the opposition‐dominated media...On Sunday, January 7th, the science correspondent of the British Observer newspaper, Nigel Hawkes, published an article entitled ‘Chile run by computer’...Nothing, not even the most expensive public relations programme, can generate the requisite variety needed to regulate the media worldwide. All such attempts have fortunately always failed, and will continue to do so as long as free speech is anywhere allowed. Our plans had gone wrong. I gave very strong advice that the government should immediately make a full‐scale and high‐level press presentation of Cybersyn, with a televised tour of the Operations Room, in order to amplify the government side of the variety equation to the full."
Maybe we could get both sides to agree on "the punishment is the point."
Obviously deterrence also matters. But the idea that criminals should be punished (as long as we properly identify the criminals!) is a pretty popular one. The idea that people can do evil and just get away with it really angers people, across many dimensions of political disagreement.
>When people do list a specific example, it’s almost always a claim that, if you’re unhappy with any result of a system, the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you, and so you should become really paranoid and hate everyone involved.
At least two of these examples seem good though?
Various interests groups, some business and some activist, *do* use the EPA approval process to slow down and prevent building projects that they dislike, and lobby to make the system more onerous so that they have more veto power over development projects.
The UK has been on an explicit policy of austerity and privatization for decades, and more recently an intense crusade against 'benefit scroungers'. Reducing the number of paid benefit claims is 100% in-line with stated political goals by teh government and at the agency, and refusing to make accommodations that would allow people to apply for and receive their proper benefits accomplishes that goal. If the goal of the government and the agency was 'make absolutely sure everyone who qualifies for benefits in the nation is receiving them promptly and conveniently,' the policy regarding accommodations for appointments would probably have changed; noticing that this refusal to accommodate is a symptom of an ethos of 'shrink benefits and push austerity' is not wrong.
I think you're putting too much pressure on this idea of intelligent design. A system doesn't have to be intentionally designed to do X by its creators form the start, in order for X to become its purpose. For the EPA, it seems clear that giving veto power over projects that don't hurt the environment to special interests wasn't the initial intent of the people founding the agency, just an unintended consequence of how they wrote the regulations; but once people noticed that phenomenon, they utilized it and fed into it and built infrastructure around it and lobbied to enhance it until that's a major part of its actual function in the world.
You literally made a post explaining this a few months ago in "backscratcher clubs". You didn't use this phrase, but that's basically what this is referring to. You have an "orphan support club" that says nice things about orphans, takes people's money, and then leverages its position to promote its own members. The stated purpose of the club is "to help orphans", but what the club actually does is backscratch. Basically this is a claim that you should treat organizations using consequentialism: it spends most of its time backscratching, not helping orphans, therefore its "real" purpose is to backscratch. The founder is not an incompetent orphan lover, they are a lying backscratcher who is happy with the way things are.
Obviously in practice this is not literally always true, and is sometimes applied inappropriately. There are cases where an organization legitimately tries to do something and fails because it's hard. But there are cases where an organization consistently and obviously "fails" to do something because its incentives are aligned in a different direction and it's not even trying. Principle Agent Problems 101. You already know this, you criticize this sort of thing all the time, so I'm not even sure why you're confused here.
Though distorted, the kernel of the adage has value. Purpose is determined by intent, but true intentions are fundamentally opaque, so the most reliable way to determine purpose is to look at outcomes.
The issue is when relatively minor outcomes are used to assume the majority of the purpose, such as with any of the listed examples.
The purpose of the national lottery system is to win 1 of every 1e10 lottery tickets
You are not being fair. Take the bus example. Is emitting CO2 ALL the bus system does? No. What is the bus system SUPPOSED to do? Provide public transportation. Is this one of the things it does? Yes. So that is one if its purposes, and I would argue its primary purpose.
POSIWID is most usefully applied when a system that is supposed to do X is not doing X. One then sees what is actually is doing and concluded this is probably what it's purpose is.
I have applied this concept to the "neoliberal" economic policies made after 1980. chiefly lower tax rates. Presumably the purpose of these changes was to create an economy that workers better than alternatives such as the policy suite in place over 1941-71, which one might call "New Deal economics". My conclusion was that New Deal economics produces a superior outcome for the bottom 90% of households than the Neoliberal economics, but is both harder to use for the operators AND produces an inferior economic result to the operators.
Applying POSIWID I conclude that the purpose of the shift to neoliberal economics (what was called Reaganomics) was to provide an easier operating experience and better outcome for system operators. The system was *sold* politically as one that would produce a better outcome for everyone, rather than just the operators and people like them.
So, like the DOD (see my previous post) it is built on deception.