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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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