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Notes -
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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