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This made me reflect that I hadn't actually thought critically about the phrase (at least, commensurate to how often it's used). For fun, if you think the purpose of a system is what it does, write what you think that means, before reading Scott's critique, then write if you've updated your opinion. For example:
(Spoilers go between two sets of "||")
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Notes -
Before reading:I think the term's a useful framework: considering systems solely as what their claimed goals are runs face-first into environments where systems have failed to achieve their goals for years or decades, sometimes without even seriously attempting to achieve those claimed goals. There's some fair arguments that this isn't the right understanding of 'purpose' rather than something like 'telos', and where the failure to work toward goals is due to black swan events I'm even sympathetic, but those environments are by definition short-lived. That said, I understand this take is a little more inspired by lambda functions than by Beer's actual formal definition.
Having read: I don't think Scott's made much of a change in my take.
Some of that's because his examples are horrible. Yes, I absolutely do believe that at least some police orgs exist to not solve crimes, because we've actually done a lot at a policy level to leave even 'easy' crimes unsolved and unprevented, not because they were 'designed' that way by evil people (uh... mostly), but because they were once-working-ish systems that had patch after patch thrown onto their ruleset to handle cases that were outside of the original design and which, in net, have worked to fail-silently. Even the more central example of curing 68% of cancers is, yes, meaningfully correct: if that's the result of 'every cancer we can', they are the same thing with slightly different phrasing.
The question of where these are useful insights is more meaningful, and I'll give him that. It's definitely a phrase that tempts the easy and flag-waving use -- 'the purpose of the longshoreman union is to keep their jobs and increase their pay no matter the cost' doesn't need some deep thought. Yet at the same time, it's a way to recognize things like the theoretical non-existent conspiracy behind the original Paranoid Rant. It doesn't matter if systems like Peer Review in academia were built by intentional hands or by molochian forces to enforce consensus rather than check for truth or even non-self-contradiction: it matters that these things have been around for a literal lifetime and do this.
That links are visible through the spoiler tags makes posts like this particularly fun, a little thrill of anticipation before seeing the context for the unredacted phrases.
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