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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

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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: 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 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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