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Scott comes off as cowardly and needlessly pretentious. Doesn’t everyone know that bureaucracy and bad laws are part of the issue?
Change the laws and departmental policy to make them overrule vibes, which is how most laws work. Do vibes overrule IRS laws?
You can trivially solve this by increasing the time of commitment according to infractions over time.
You build them. What kind of point even is this? You build buildings. They can be built. They are frequently built. Who does Scott think he is writing to that the reader would no longer support a cause because it requires a city to build buildings?
Vote for any of the millions of Americans who can, and do, competently build buildings.
A reasonable amount of time. What is a reasonable amount of time? Low enough that a person whose condition is manageable can get out soon, and high enough that a person whose condition is consistently unmanageable stays in longer. So an intuitive and “normal person able to think” solution is to increase it by infraction, and for the institution to gradually allow the patient freedom so as to check his capacity.
Most normal people thinking about this issue would be able to solve it. My personal take is that you go from full institutionalization to check-ups, and if you fail checkups you go back to the institution.
Etc. Nothing Scott wrote can justify his assertion that “it might be time to hit the books, learn about hexamethyldecawhatever, and make sure that what you’re demanding is possible, coherent, and doesn’t have so many tradeoffs that experts inevitably recoill”.
This is a category error. Public displays of psychosis are not found in the median ”transitionally” homeless person staying at a friend’s or relative’s.
I feel like you've just proved the point of the blog. The argument is that mentally-homelessness is a very complicated, multi-faceted problem that can't be solved just by doing one or two things, you have to accomplish a number of difficult things. For example
Come up with a new set of laws which can avoid human bias in a subjective setting
Come up with a law to do this. Also you'll need a solution for all the extra capacity this will require
Elect pro-construction politicians and solve nimbyism
Come up with a regulation determining time of stay that is "common sense", such that even a mediocre administrator is able to consistently apply it to all of the many patients that come through their halls.
Use your "common sense" approach again to solve an intractable issue that is bedevilling the vast apparatus of the state.
Your proposed solutions are difficult, time-consuming, and there are a ton of details to solve. This seems exactly the situation in which you would need to hit the books and consider trade-offs.
If all of the steps are easy for a political party to solve then there is nothing difficult about it. In fact, the steps are trivial just for a normal human being to determine. The problem is not implementation but the incredibly inept and disinterested political class in the cities. The voter has a right to demand things without “educating himself” when the steps are easy.
It’s obvious when a person who is suffering from severe psychosis, so the target population can be solved (psychotic). The existence of rare failure modes has never prevented a law being written. When you go to a dentist or a doctor they are going to perform things on you and you trust that they aren’t going to amputate the wrong leg or take out all your teeth. You do not need to do anything outlandish to prevent too many errors here.
That’s what your politicians are suppose to do… etc.
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How is that different from Scott’s proposal?
Not sure I understand your question?
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The final point you touch on is something that really annoys me about the homeless argument. One side is complaining about the homeless (ie the person who has been living on the street for a long time, strung out, bad smelling, bad acting, drug addict). The side that simply wants to build more housing says “we can tackle housing by giving homeless shelter; don’t you know most homeless are only homeless for a few weeks.” The two are entirely different groups of people and the latter know it. They know it. But they choose to be dishonest because in reality they aren’t trying to solve the homeless problem. They are trying to solve a housing problem. And they will use homeless as a pawn.
What’s your evidence that they aren’t actually trying to solve the homeless problem?
For me, it's a classic example of the purpose of a system is what it does. California pours money into their homeless problem and the result is mostly that you have a bunch of well-funded NGOs that make it easier to be a homeless junkie. If they are genuinely trying to solve the problem, they're shockingly bad at it.
"the purpose of a system is what it does" is a bullshit argument, though (in any context). It only works if you assume that humans are perfect and achieve what they set out to do, but we know for a fact they aren't. Thus, imperfect humans will sometimes create a system that does something other than what they intended to begin with. It doesn't prove that their intent (i.e. the purpose of the system) was what they got.
I disagree. I think the phrase is pretty clearly meant to apply to iterative or analytic situations, rather than a one-shot. Imperfect humans create systems with unintended consequences all the time - this is common knowledge, which means that, as an imperfect human, we are all aware that our systems will have unintended consequences. As such, we are all aware that, if there are any consequences we want to avoid, then it's not good enough merely to check what we want; we have to actually empirically check the system and see what it does. We also all know that empiricism is difficult, especially when it involves systems that we are ideologically partial to, and as such, we should be especially harsh in judging such systems. Someone who ignores all that and just goes along with a system is someone whose intentions are to accomplish what the system does. Or, more precisely, their intentions are to convince themselves that they're doing good while not bothering to put in the substantial and often difficult effort required to actually check if they're doing good.
Assuming the description of "California pours money into their homeless problem and the result is mostly that you have a bunch of well-funded NGOs that make it easier to be a homeless junkie" is accurate, the fact that politicians have seemingly decided not to check what results from the systems they put in place or to ignore the results and double down with just more money tells us that the intent of these politicians is not to solve the homeless problem. It's to convince themselves that they're genuinely well-meaning politicians who genuinely want to find a solution to the homeless problem, the solution which just so happens to be in-line with their own personal biases and flatters themselves, while disregarding/ignoring/denying the suffering caused by and to homeless people due to the system they support.
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That's exactly what I understand POSIWID to mean, though.
You may have intended to build a system that does X but actually it does Y. It's now time to be clear-eyed about that fact, and working from the assumption that you have a system built to do Y, decide what to do next. But saying "no, it's meant to do X" is not an option if you're trying to actually achieve X.
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The point of having the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to point out that intentions don't matter. Yes, someone intended X to be the outcome, but the system reliably does Y instead, and very quickly, other actors start relying on the Y-outcomes of the system because The Purpose of a System is What It Does, and rely on it to continue to do Y.
In this case, people intended for these NGOs to solve homelessness, but because of game theory and principal agent problems, it, uh, does other things. But those intentions are irrelevant because we now have a machine that redistributes funds for moral maze like reasons and a whole bunch of people who rely on this system to keep doing that.
That still fails as an argument, because it requires misusing the word "purpose" to mean the outcome instead of the intention. Also, WhiningCoil was explicitly drawing conclusions about the intentions of the people who made the system based on the outcome.
I reject the idea that purpose has connotations of intention, and suspect that a large part of contention around the obvious truism that "The Purpose of a System is What It Does" comes from this conflation. If I were to say "The purpose of the mitochondria is to generate ATP, which is then consumed by the rest of the cell to power it," this sentence is properly using 'purpose' by evaluating What The System Does, in a case where there could not be an intention.
There is an intention when mitochondria generate ATP. The intention is generated by evolution (indirectly, but that applies to human purposes too), but it's very clearly goal-oriented; its complication is a backpropagation of selection on simple effects, not a consequence of simple causes.
Imagine instead that we were to say "One purpose of the mitochondria in [this person with Kearns-Sayre] is to cause pigmentary retinopathy and progressive vision degradation." That no longer sounds right, does it? From a non-intentional definition of purpose, it's just as correct as "to generate AGP"; it's What The System Does! But it's clearly an exception to the "purposeful" workings of evolution, not a central case, and so describing it as a "purpose" anyway feels wrong.
(And also, yeah, what @SubstantialFrivolity said; I just wanted to point out that that's even applicable to your example.)
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It's not a connotation. That's what purpose means, by definition.
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Because of everything talked about above. That is, there are two problems of homelessness — the functional poor and the nonfunctional poor. The conversation is about the latter but the proponents of housing clearly are talking about the former.
Since these people are smart enough to understand the above, I conclude they don’t really want to solve the problem the people are talking about. Sure they want to help the functional poor (I’m sure) but…I think it is really about YIMBYism
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Finally a productive socially net positive use for the lumpenproles!
You jest (maybe) but it really is gross. They take the mantle of caring without actually caring.
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