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Notes -
Scott is an utilitarian. My mental model of him says that if you have a charity to rescue cats from trees, but it only rescues one cat from a tree per year despite having an annual 10M$ budget, then it is fair to conclude that their actual main purpose might be something different than rescuing cats. This is a standard critique of inefficient charities from an EA perspective.
Or take research towards fusion power. It has been going on for sixty years, and while we are making progress, we do not have fusion power plants yet. Now, you can take three stances.
Of course, if you take the last stance, then the next problem is alchemists who search for the philosopher's stone. In hindsight, we know that this was a fools errand, and only their lack of epistemic purity lead them to believe such a thing could exist at all. Their whole paradigm was -- not to put to fine a point to it -- dogshit, and if they had read the Sequences, they should have known. (Yes, I know about the woo aspect of alchemy -- but reaching enlightenment seems very much like a consolation prize if you fail to gain immortality et cetera. I am sure they did not emphasize the allegoric aspect to their funding agencies.)
On the other hand, hindsight is 20/20, and the ideas that form the basis of the scientific method would not be developed for centuries, so they were working with the mental tools which they got, and sometimes walking in a random direction is better than standing still until you exactly know which way to go.
Per POSIWID, the purpose of alchemy was to accidentally discover chemical reactions while denying that purpose.
We already have a perfectly good word for the relationship between alchemy and their accidental discoveries. That word is outcome.
Even more bluntly, consider a dog licking a TV screen which shows bacon being fried. The outcome is the dog licking an LCD. The purpose of the action is -- presumably -- that the dog wants to taste the bacon. Describing the system "dog" as a system which tries to taste bacon, but sometimes fails and tastes plastic instead gives us a much better model of reality than just saying "TPOSIWID, thus this dog likes to lick plastic".
And it's hard to imagine anyone sincerely believing the purpose of the dog-TV system is plastic licking. Maybe I'm sanewashing it, but ISTM there's a logical and useful way to understand POSIWID:
Let there be a system S, an agent with control authority over the system A, and some outcome X that A claims S is to produce
Observe that S falls short of ostensible goal X
Let B be an action that A can take to make S produce more of outcome X at positive ROI
Observe that A does not execute action B
Given the above, e must conclude based on A's failure to do B that A's purpose for S is not solely X. Maybe B is not actually positive ROI because we lack an understanding of its true costs. Maybe A is retarded and doesn't understand that B is available to him. But, if we assume B is positive ROI and that A is a competent actor, what alternative do we have to concluding that A is optimizing S for some unstated goal Y, not only X?
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