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sockpuppet2  6d ago (astralcodexten.com)   2409 thread views

Scott: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does

astralcodexten.com

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: I think it's a useful way of re-framing obviously dysfunctional systems, so as to analyze their dysfunction, but Scott is persuasive that it's not a good means of understanding systems, in general, so people should be more cautious about adopting this framing and using the phrase, rhetorically.

(Spoilers go between two sets of "||")

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I've always simply understood this aphorism as a demand to acknowledge the full consequences of policy without using intent as an excuse.

Criticism of this sentiment coming from someone with the connections he has to EA, utilitarianism and demands to notice piles of skulls is bordering on the absurd.

Variable geometry consequentialism is a monstrous ethic. Precisely because it is easy to hide behind the fact that the intent of communism wasn't to starve millions of people. But it indeed was its purpose.

It strikes me that any interpretation of the phrase that glib requires a specific definition of what "purpose" means to it's author. Because that's not a consensual term. Scott doesn't strike me here as a believer in things having an inherent nature, which makes statements from believers in such incomprehensible to him.

The purpose of the phrase "The purpose of a system is what it does" is what it does, which is insinuating your ideological opponents and their institutions do not actually want to do what they claim they want to do and are instead in a dark conspiracy to do evil.

insinuating your ideological opponents and their institutions do not actually want to do what they claim they want to do and are instead in a dark conspiracy to do evil.

This is similar to what Scott said in one of his last paragraphs in that essay, and I just haven't seen it. In practice, what I observe as being the upshot of this phrase is that these "ideological opponents and their institutions" are, despite all their honest good intentions, behaving in a way that causes harm just as much as if they were involved in a dark conspiracy to do evil. Which is to say, having honest good intentions isn't a good defense if it isn't paired with an honest good understanding of systems, since the consequences of doing things with good intentions is often the same as doing things with evil intentions if one lacks such understanding.

This is also functionally different from claiming a dark evil conspiracy, because a system that accomplishes evil through conscious intent will be responsive to different inputs than one that does so as a side-effect despite having food conscious intent.

Arguments are not systems. So Scott's pithy twitter trick falls on its own.

Words have intersubjectively defined meanings, and I disagree that this is the main purpose of the phrase either in our mouths or in those of right wing twitter.

Variable geometry consequentialism

This is a new term to me.

Precisely because it is easy to hide behind the fact that the intent of communism wasn't to starve millions of people. But it indeed was its purpose.

I think this is something that Scott could disagree on--or, rather, I personally think the counter here is that the intended purpose of Communism was to uplift, liberate, and equalize people. However, achieving this intent required destructive actions that led to mountains of skulls as a consequence, and the Communists were not at all shy about this being a necessary inevitability (by their lights, anyhow).

Quantumfreakonomics made a good point below that POSIWID is a useful antidote to "if only the Tsar/Comrade Stalin knew," because systems like Communism, oppressive police forces, environmentally-deleterious corporations, and so on naturally produce these externalities as a necessary result of their intention.

Similarly, there's Sunshine's comment, saying that a system naturally alters and optimizes itself to maximize its sustainment. In fact, if I try to apply these ideas to two of Scott's examples:

-The cancer hospital will maximize for getting as many patients as they can, both to genuinely try and cure them and to keep itself going as an established entity that attempts its stated purpose. Patients who lose their battles with cancer while under the hospital's care could simply be cases where the hospital couldn't save them, even with their best efforts.

-The NY bus system wants to maximize ridership, and thus, revenues, so it will naturally do as much as it can to maximize those, which will probably mean running as many buses as possible for as long as possible, which will inherently increase CO2 emissions.

I personally maintain that purpose is something that is not conferred by personal intent, but rather divine intent or any substitute for such an idea. Which is why we have the phrase "intended purpose" at all.

This is a new term to me.

TIL that the derogatory use of the aeronautical concept of variable geometry wing sweep as a descriptor of a two or multi faced doctrine is a mostly French thing and not that used in English (except funnily enough as a descriptor of EU policy).

Won't stop using it though. It's a cool image.

is a mostly French thing

Thats because French Aerospace engineers scoffed at things like the F-14 and the B-1 as needlessly complicated and would never fulfill their claimed potential and focused on sexy delta wings instead. (To be fair, in the case of the F-14 they had no way of knowing the sweep was automatically controlled by the air data computer, which just so happened to be the first practical implementation of the microprocessor in the world greatly simplifying the pilots workload, and kept very hush-hush). Given that both aircraft are widely regarded as among the best of their types, and pure delta wings are a thing of the past, history has rendered its silent verdict on the matter.

You forget they are both considered maintenance nightmares and are both outclassed by fixed wing designs in all their missions by now. And I say that as someone who loves the bone and the tomcat.

Oh no, I have not forgotten the maintenance nightmare aspect, but thats not exclusive to swing wings (ie the C-5 galaxy makes both the B-1 and F-14 look easy).

No, the original argument against variable geometry (aside from systems complexity) was that changing the sweep, chord length, and span mid-flight would result in an extremely taxing and dangerous variance of flight characteristics that would drive the pilot mad, and then into an undesirable air-ground interface. The claim was that this is designing the optimum plane on paper instead of paying attention to how they are actually flown, and to be fair this was entirely valid logic if you based it on a) the F-111s development and early flight testing and b) publically available info about variable geometry aircraft.

But of course the DoD and the MIC had actually learned a few things, and the Tomcat and Bone both turned out to be excellent performers with long service histories. If you look at the whole batch of variable geomtery aircraft all born around the same time, with the F-111, MiG-27, Tu-22M, and the Tornado the idea as a whole seems to actually have produced highly successful aircraft, despite their inherent complexity.

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