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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   14175 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements

A response to Scott Alexander, with whom I largely agree

Last week, Scott Alexander published an article called “Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does” followed by “Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID” today. I recommend reading both first, but if you’d rather not I will attempt to summarise Scott’s thesis under the “POSIWID” section.

If you know what POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements mean, feel free to skip down to “POSIWID is a deepity” (spoiler alert for the meat of my argument), in which I offer my own analysis of the phrase.

POSIWID

POSIWID is an acronym standing for “The purpose of a system is what it does”, coined by the management consultant Stafford Beer. As near as I understand it, Beer was hired by companies to audit their existing business processes and suggest improvements. When he pointed out that a given business process or system was producing undesirable results, the C-suite executives would sometimes defend the process by pointing to the desirable purpose the system was intended to accomplish. Beer would retort “the purpose of a system is what it does”: in other words, regardless of what purpose the system was intended to accomplish, the executives must take ownership of what the system is actually doing and what results it is actually producing.

Scott’s recent posts concerned his disagreement with how the phrase is often used in political discussions, such as by progressives who assert that the real purpose of police services is to oppress, imprison and murder black people (and stopping crime is just an incidental positive externality); or conversely, by conservatives who assert that the real purpose of non-profits designed to combat homelessness is actually to exacerbate homelessness: if homelessness were to end, they’d be out of a job! Scott argues that this framing is needlessly hostile, cynical and paranoid; instead, it is more productive to model organisations as having goals that they are trying to accomplish in earnest, but pursuing these goals sometimes incurs undesirable but unavoidable side effects (e.g. carbon emissions, medical mistakes); or the organisation is prevented from accomplishing their goals to their full extent due to factors outside of their control (e.g. budgetary limitations, competing organisations).

Deepities

“Deepity” is a term coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, referring to phrases which have the unique property wherein they convey two meanings at once: one meaning is true, but trivial, while the other meaning is false, but would be profound if it was true. The dual meaning allows the deficiencies in one to be shored up by the strengths of the other (and vice versa) which makes them invaluable as rhetorical devices: when the listener notices that the former meaning is trivial, they are reassured by the fact that the latter meaning is profound, and when one notices that the latter meaning is false, one is reassured by the fact that the former meaning is true. The concept is best illustrated by examples, all of which are taken from Coleman Hughes’s excellent article on the concept:

  • Everything happens for a reason: It is trivially true that “everything happens for a reason”, in the banal sense that every event has an immediate preceding cause (if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street). However, the clear implication of “everything happens for a reason” is that every event has a deeper, spiritual purpose in God/Allah/Jehovah/Xenu/the universe’s plan - which is obviously nonsense, but would be profound and insightful if it was true.
  • No human being is illegal: It is trivially true that human beings cannot be “illegal”, because legality or lack thereof is a property of actions (theft, murder, fraud), not individuals. “But the second reading of this deepity asserts something extremely controversial: everyone should be able to go anywhere on Earth with no legal or procedural barriers; every border should be fully permeable; strangers should be able to occupy your property—after all, no human being is illegal, and strangers are still human beings when they’re on your property. Needless to say, even advocates of open borders would not endorse this view in full. But if the view were ethically correct, then it would have profound implications for property law, the existence of nation-states, and the very concept of personal space.”

Scissor statements

Scott Alexander wrote a wonderful short story called “Sort by Controversial”, which concerns a tech startup whose employees inadvertently develop a piece of software that generates what the team calls “scissor statements”: statements (and later, events) which are maximally controversial, in the sense that one half of a particular community would enthusiastically endorse them and the other half would vociferously deny them. “Scissor statements”, it is explained, can tear communities apart merely in the fact of being spoken or having taken place: to one half of a community they seem so obviously true/good as to be hardly even worth stating, to the other half so obviously false/wrong as to be hardly even worth rebutting.

Examples from the original story:

To the canonical examples from the short story, I might add “A black gay actor is the victim of a racist, homophobic hate crime perpetrated by two Donald Trump supporters, and is later accused of having staged the attack to further his career”.

“POSIWID” is a deepity

“The purpose of a system is what it does” seems very reminiscent of my first example of a deepity, “everything happens for a reason”. Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs. If a particular business process is meant to boost profits by 10%, but consistently fails to achieve that goal, the process must be assessed first and foremost on the basis of the latter fact, not the former. All of this is straightforward and uncontroversial: indeed, true but trivial.1

But the secondary meaning imparted by the phrase implies something far more profound and controversial: that the designers of a given system are fully cognizant of all of its outputs (positive and negative); that all of said outputs were fully intended and desired by the designers; that if the designers are made aware of a negative output thereof and refuse to immediately change it, the only reasonable interpretation is that this negative output is affirmatively sought by the deisgners; and that this is equally true regardless of to what resolution the phrase is applied (whether looking at an individual business process within a company, the company itself, an entire industry, an entire country, or a multi-national economic structure). This interpretation seems to me just as obviously wrong as the secondary meaning of “everything happens for a reason”, in which there is an underlying cosmic purpose to every event, no matter how small or terrible.

Per his second article, Scott seems to recognise this:

When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge.

Certain people in the comments of Scott’s first article argued that the phrase was meaningful in its original context as used by Stafford Beer, but has been misused by political commentators who misunderstood it as implying its second meaning, to which Scott had a witty rejoinder:

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with criticism of my recent POSIWID post. If I understand you all correctly, you think that Stafford Beer had good intentions when he invented the phrase, and that's more important than how it gets misused in real life. Enlightening!

“POSIWID” is a scissor statement

Scott seems to have been legitimately taken aback by what a fervent response his first article inspired, with a lot of commenters enthusiastically agreeing with it and many others insisting that he’d missed the point entirely. He admits to being confused by the latter group:

Why are people defending this inane statement so hard? This reminds me of the old atheism-religion debates, where some atheist would bring up an awkwardly-phrased Bible statement, and the religious people would contort themselves to say that nooooooo, it’s totally true that the world was created in seven days, as long as you define day to mean “any time period of an indeterminate length”. But at least their motives make sense to me; lots of other things depend on whether Bible verses are true or false. POSIWID was first coined in 2001. Why should people contort themselves to defend this extremely poorly-phrased thing?

In a forum in which I saw Scott’s article being discussed2, the same pattern was visible: a significant number of people enthusiastically agreeing with him, and a second group accusing him of engaging in an elaborate trolling effort, or wasting time on a pedantic argument about semantics instead of acknowledging the penetrating insight the phrase contains. This suggests to me that “the purpose of a system is what it does” is a scissor statement: a maximally-controversial phrase which one half of a community finds so obviously true as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses it out of hand, and finds it baffling as to how anyone could think it was true for even a moment.

Perhaps many deepities are also scissor statements?

Deepities, as discussed above, have two meanings: one which is true but trivial, the other which is false, but which would be profound if it was true. Scissor statements, meanwhile, are maximally-controversial statements which tear communities apart because half of the community finds them so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses them as obviously false.

Thus in both cases we see a bifurcation in how a statement is interpreted. Perhaps this is not a coincidence?3

For some number of people looking at a Necker cube (the first figure in the illustration below), they will initially interpret the ambiguous shape according to the second figure; for others, the third figure (both of which are equally valid interpretations of the shape). With some effort, we can force ourselves to see the alternative interpretation, but whichever one first jumps out at us feels like the “correct” one. I don’t have any studies backing this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the split of these two groups is roughly fifty-fifty: in other words, if the configuration of cubes was something we cared about, Necker cubes would make for a perfect scissor statement.

Illustrations in original post

Perhaps deepities work in the same way? Maybe if you looked at a group of people encountering the phrase “everything happens for a reason” for the first time, for roughly half of them, the true-but-trivial meaning would jump out at them instantly, and they would completely overlook the false-but-profound meaning; whereas for the other half, they’d immediately notice the false-but-profound meaning and overlook the true-but-trivial meaning. (Or perhaps the first group would only notice the true-but-trivial meaning, while the second group would notice the false-but-profound meaning in addition to the true-but-trivial one.)

Before long, the two groups are talking past each other: the first group cannot understand why the second group is getting so worked up about an observation which, while true, strikes them as trite and unremarkable; and the second group cannot understand why the first group is ignoring the (allegedly) penetrating insight and instead making glib dismissals like “if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street”. The first group thinks the second group are intellectual lightweights for getting so bent out of shape about such a trite observation; the second group feels condescended to by the first, and thinks the first group are overly literal-minded pedants who are missing the wood for the trees. Hence, a classic scissor statement: merely in the act of being spoken, it generates outrage and tears communities asunder.

__

1 Admittedly, we might perhaps benefit from reading the phrase backwards: perhaps at the time of its coining, the idea that a business process should be judged primarily (or solely) on the basis of its actual outputs (as opposed to its creator’s intentions for it) was a legitimately novel insight, and only seems trite and obvious to us now because we’ve fully internalised it. Hard to say.

2 I'm sure you know the forum I mean.

3 Because nothing is ever a coincidence.

To me I think the entire debate has missed the point altogether. While it might be a "deepity", that's not the source of cross-purposes!

Let me make a useful analogy, and honestly this really should have been Scott's approach. In statistics and machine learning, you have something called a "confusion matrix": you are trying to classify something, and you are either correct or incorrect. In each cell, you have the true positives, false positives, false negatives, and true negatives. You need all of them to correctly decide if your classification has acceptable tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs are problem-dependent. Also, some measures don't tell the full story - a classification can be highly "accurate", but if you didn't have many of one class to begin with, this number is deceiving, because you're essentially just juicing your numbers with the "easy" cases (simple but common example). You need to dig deeper.

In the case of police, as an illustration, "what the system does" could plausibly focus on any of these cells: action that is justified that cops should do and do successfully (true positive) vs action that is unjustified and causes bad things to happen (false positive) vs stuff the police ignore but should have done something about (false negative) vs stuff the police should ignore, and actually do ignore (this could be trivial stuff, or it could be declining to take action to protect broader civil or legal liberties). There are four cells of action/inaction and justified/unjustified, each meaningful on their own, but not only that, there are like, at least eight different ratios (see here) you can compute that all mean something different, and have distinct and important real-world implications. For example, we might say "policing is racially biased" but that statement alone needs substantial clarification. Arguably, you can't actually contain it within a single phrase, you might need a full sentence if not two. Because "bias" could mean a lot of things, and have different causalities on top! Do you mean white people get pulled over more? That white people get let off with warnings more? That identical crimes get different punishments? Do we care more about the ratio, of given being pulled over, does the cop find a crime? Or do we care more about, given someone is guilty, how often do the police catch them? What about innocent victims, wrongly convicted, how high do we weight that? What about police response times, what about geography, we can go on. Do proportions matter more, or absolute numbers? When talking about systems, a simple conversation is almost inherently impossible. So yes, POSIWID is doomed from the start there.

LOTS of politics is like this, people quite often get stuck and make judgements based on just one or two pieces of information from the matrix, or a single computed ratio. To use Scott's example, police beating a suspect is obviously a false positive in a loose sense - action the police took, which was bad, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. If we're talking about the system as a whole, you can't just look at that. You need to make an argument that the balance of all the cells is way off - and even then, abolition of the system often isn't the answer, especially if the "true positive" cell still has significant value for society.

In my opinion, everything stems from a values disagreement, over how strongly to weight "false positives", i.e. actions taken by an institution, often a hot-button one, that result in negative consequences. In theory, a POSIWID advocate is saying that "the ratio of false positives and true positives" (i.e. all affirmative actions a system takes and the associated results, good and bad) is "out of whack". That's fine to say. That's an important conversation to have. You don't even need to talk about intent there (though you probably should) to have a good conversation based on facts and weighted by personal values, even a few opinions. In practice, however, many POSIWID advocates (that Scott skewers) focus entirely on the "false positives", and obviously that is both illogical and potentially bad faith. I'm inclined, however, to say that these dynamics have more to do with people not being thoughtful and considered enough in their takes, plus internet dynamics, than they do genuine stupidity, for lack of a better term. I still think the underlying disconnect is one of values (after all, we have to subjectively weight each cell and ratio differently, and this is compounded and made messy by the news and political environment), but the vocabulary is genuinely difficult.

No wonder that Twitter especially has a problem with this? As I explained, exploring the tradeoffs in even a simple system's "confusion matrix" requires full English sentences.

Edit: I'm conflicted on the proper use of bolding. Reverting to minimal

In stating examples of scissor statements, your post will recieve dismissive comments. But, I loved it. It articulated why I felt a strong discomfort while reading scotts post.

I thought, ofc no one takes POSWID literally. Then Scott wrote a takedown of the literal implication. It felt oddly tonedeaf for him. Turns out, people do care about the shallow claim.

To me, POSWID accusations are veiled versions of "sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice". This is especially relevant in American meritocracy, where incompetence may be seen as worse than malice.

If American police keep killing black people without sufficient body cam footage and police are good people, then maybe theyre stupid. After spending a year in SF, maybe social workers combating homelessness are incompetent. American defense, healthcare, etc. Stupid or evil. Pick one.

Calling people stupid is a social faux pas. POSWID claims are a socially acceptable way to call people stupid.

I don't think most of the people on Twitter using the strong form of this phrase would have any aversion to calling American police officers stupid, evil or both.

However, the clear implication of “everything happens for a reason” is that every event has a deeper, spiritual purpose in God/Allah/Jehovah/Xenu/the universe’s plan - which is obviously nonsense, but would be profound and insightful if it was true.

This is... a very bad example to choose here. One man's "obvious nonsense" is another man's treasure. I do, in fact, believe that everything happens for a reason.

Daniel Dennett was part of the New Atheists, and coined the term "deepity" to puncture what he saw as the pseudo-profound bullshit being promoted by theologians or apologists for various faiths. In this, I agree with him. The idea that every event is part of some grand cosmic spiritual plan is, to my mind, one of the more transparent copes bestowed on the human race by religious/spiritual people.

It doesn't have to be "grand" necessarily, but if you believe the universe is filled with purpose by God, I think it's one of the only ways you can see the world as a religious person. You may not understand the religious worldview as well as you think.

Probably I don't understand the religious worldview terribly well, but I think I know it well enough to know it's not worth pursuing.

Perhaps before you publicly denounce other worldviews, you should make an effort to steelman them instead of fighting against caricatures.

I was raised Catholic, I've read significant chunks of the Bible (probably significantly more than most self-identified Christians I've known personally), I've studied the arguments for and against the existence of a personal God for years at a university level. To reiterate - I think I know the worldview well enough to be able to denounce it from a place of knowledge. Your defense of your worldview, frankly, has not persuaded me that there are any massive gaps in my knowledge.

What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.

These are all basically the problem of theodicy written over and over. Nature's Wrath has a long history in Jewish lore of being God's wrath. God created nature, remember.

As to the reason - I don't know! Nobody truly knows the answer to theodicy. Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it. Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good. Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.

There are many answers. All I know is that I believe that God allows evil in the world for a reason.

Yes, I know what theodicy is. I’ve thought a lot about it too, and I’ve looked into many of the various answers which sincere Christians have offered as solutions. Maybe, though, the fact that over the course of 2,000+ years of Christianity (and, of course, centuries of Judaism before that) so many people have had to come up with so many different answers points to something: None of their answers have been very good! None of them have made much sense, or satisfactorily answered the problem at hand without highlighting important contradictions within the logic of the faith.

The core dilemma here is that Christianity is very explicitly dedicated to, among others, two key claims about God: 1. He is benevolent, loving, and invested not only in the future of humanity as a whole, but in the well-being and spiritual life of each individual living human. 2. He intervenes, at least subtly, in the lives of individuals, to effectuate positive life outcomes for them.Those two claims are what make theodicy so incredibly difficult for Christianity specifically to deal with.

Paganism has no problem explaining why something like a natural disaster happens. The various gods and supernatural entities are capricious, they’re in competition with each other, they frequently act wrathful or even tyrannical, and humans’ primary relationship with them is transactional. We propitiate the gods by offering them praise and things of value, so that we can remain in their favor and persuade them to intervene helpfully on our behalf, and to not curse us or slaughter us. This view of the order of the world leaves much to be desired emotionally; it offers little in the way of a message of hope, love, inspiration, and salvation. But if nothing else, it makes it very easy to explain the wanton suffering which so many humans experience — and not always at the hands of each other — without producing any cracks at the heart of the religion.

Judaism, too, famously has a certain fatalism and moral ambivalence about God. The Old Testament, as you note, features many episodes in which God acts wrathfully and in a way which, if a human ruler acted the same way, we would recognize as tyrannical or even monstrous. (Of course, Judaism also offers an explanation: We deserved it then, and we’ll probably deserve it again in the future. God doesn’t especially love the Jews, even if they are his chosen people, and he’ll gladly throw any individual Jews into a shredder if they disappoint him — and that’s to say nothing of what he will do, or instruct the Jews to do on his behalf, to the gentiles!)

In contrast, I think Christianity is really at a loss when dealing with natural disasters of this nature, though. Theodicy is uniquely corrosive to the doctrines of Christianity, which is why so many of its theologians have obsessed about it, and why they’ve reached for such contradictory answers. Of the three explanations you put forward, at least two of them are wildly insufficient to deal with a problem of the magnitude of the example I offered. In fact, one of them —

Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.

— doesn’t address natural disasters at all! Sure, I can totally understand and appreciate the idea that a world in which humans have free will is necessarily a world in which humans have the power to murder each other, to make war on each other, to firebomb each other’s cities, etc. That has nothing to do with a natural disaster, though. Whether or not humans have free will would have made no difference in the outcome of an earthquake or tsunami; again, the only “free will” any human exercised was the “choice” to happen to be in its path. (Not a choice at all, of course, since nobody could have predicted it nor seen it coming.) It isn’t even a “problem of evil”, since “evil” implies intention, and a tsunami has none. Any supernatural entity which did intentionally send that tsunami toward blameless human habitation would indeed be evil, and any supposedly benevolent supernatural entity which could have prevented it but chose otherwise is, at best, ineffectual.

As for one of your other proposed explanations —

Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good.

— you must recognize why non-Christians find this answer so exasperating. Suppose I’m a child, and I break some sort of rule. To punish me and to teach me a lesson, my father strangles one of my siblings to death in front of me. Obviously if a human father did this, we would universally recognize it as psychopathic. No benevolent person acting out of love would do so. So, if the Christian God did indeed intentionally make the tsunami happen, in order to teach people a lesson, what does it actually mean to say that this same God “loves us”?

That leaves your third explanation — the one you put first, which may be seen as implying you lean toward it:

Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it.

I mean, isn’t this getting pretty dangerously close to paganism, or at best Henotheism? There are many powerful supernatural entities at work in the world, and God is, at best, only arguably the strongest? He can intervene in people’s lives sometimes, to help with relatively quotidian issues — you can pray to him before an important job interview, and maybe he’ll subtly help that interview go well for you — but he can’t reliably do anything about the really big stuff if there’s some other entity, like Satan, who’s directly working against him. This is, again, satisfactory to me as a plausible explanation for how the world actually works, but it seems to be in contradiction with some of Christianity’s stronger claims about God’s omnipotence.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying any of this because I hate Christianity. I’m not some fire-breathing atheist like I was when I was younger. I would like very much if Christianity were true, and if someone could provide to me an answer to these questions which I could psychologically wrap my head around. I’ve prayed to God myself, and even explicitly to Jesus Christ. I’ve no idea if any of these prayers produced a tangible effect on the world, although I do know that they produced some level of internal comfort within me.

Still, though, the 2004 tsunami, and then Hurricane Katrina the very next year, made a very profound effect on me. Seeing that level of wanton suffering (some of the footage of people being swallowed by the floods is still seared into my brain) delivered to people who had done nothing particularly wrong, while so many individuals who were so much more blameworthy continued to prosper unharmed, put theodicy at the very front of my mind at the very point in my life in which I was first starting to ponder these religious questions. Christians seem two-faced about the issue. When confronted directly about it they’ll claim that God isn’t as omnipotent as we think, and therefore he simply can’t be expected to step in and save people from things like this; in their own lives, though, they routinely pray for God to intervene on their behalf in issues which have, comparatively, so much less importance.

@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death, but this is directly belied by Christians’ actions. God can help you get a raise at work, but he can’t help you not get hit by a car? Christians pray for each others’ safety and health all the time. They pray before surgeries, before flights, before risky endeavors, etc. If they don’t expect these prayers to do anything, then is God no more than a therapist? Just there to be a sounding board for whatever’s making us anxious, to help us order our internal lives and soothe ourselves? This seems highly unsatisfactory compared to the loftier claims which the Bible seems, to me, to make about God’s capabilities.

What do you make of Scott's answer in God's Answer To Job, out of curiosity? It's the only one that's ever really convinced me, though it hasn't made me a believer.

@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death...

I claimed that prayer doesn't make one's hour of death predictable, and I think the difference between the two formulations is substantive.

First off, I’m not worried about getting “dangerously close” to Henotheism or other issues. I’m Orthodox, we have a pretty relaxed view about the omnipotence of God compared to Catholics, or really the ability for us to know much about God beyond what Christ directly told us at all.

In regards to a God of love allowing evil - yes! That’s the fundamental paradox of the world! The thing is, this idea that God is love comes from direct mystical experience, and of course the revelation of Christ & the apostles.

It’s not even limited to Christianity. Many sects of Buddhism also posit a sort of “loving kindness” quality inherent to the Tao, or the Ground of Being. Yes it’s confusing as to why a God of Love would allow evil.

My personal answer is something like - suffering is inherently voluntary, whether we understand that or not. With the right mindset or view, this world would be Paradise, despite all the limitations. You see this in the great mystics and Saints who take the worst outcomes like torture, martyrdom, etc with a smile on their faces.

Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it.

Even this interpretation implies that bad things don't happen for "a reason" in a cosmic sense, but just because demons want to fuck shit up out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

To a widow, I can't imagine that "the reason your husband died is because demons were fucking shit up in the south Pacific for their own amusement and God was powerless too intervene" would be much warmer comfort than "the reason your husband died is because he got shot by a mugger and the EMTs didn't get there in time to save him".

It is indeed a reason, there are active agents in the world that are evil, and want to hurt us. That's a reason even if you don't think it's a good, or comforting one.

But what advantage does this worldview have over a secular one? You're just adding in extra epicycles that have zero impact on the bottom line.

Secularists: "Your child died of cancer because the universe is random and indifferent to our suffering."

Religionists: "Your child died of cancer because there are demons out there trying to fuck shit up for their own amusement. There is a God who cares very deeply about your child's welfare, but even though he definitely exists, is benevolent and is powerful enough that 'omnipotent' might be a reasonable characterisation - he nevertheless allowed the demons to cause your child to develop terminal cancer, or was unable to prevent them from doing so. I appreciate that, in practical terms, this looks indistinguishable from a universe which is cold, uncaring and absent of God."

I really, really do not understand why "your child died of cancer because there are demons out there who want to hurt you for no reason" is meant to be comforting (in the "everything happens for a reason" sense), but "your child died of cancer because the universe is cold and indifferent and sometimes bad things happen to innocent people for literally no reason" isn't. The former just sounds like a poetic framing of the latter.

Epicycles are good, actually.

There have always been atheists. There has never been a long-lasting atheist society. Maybe some of us are able to productively deal with a cold, uncaring universe that grinds us to dust for having the temerity to exist, but it seems that most can't, and epicycles give their minds something useful to work with; help them function.

You could use that to justify anything.

I think models with epicycles are strictly inferior to models which don’t need them.

I guess this is that "postmodern religion" thing I've heard so much about. "Religion is a pack of lies - believe it anyway"?

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All humans die. None know the day or the hour when death will arrive for them. Christian prayer does not change this, and Christians do not expect it to.

I’m very confident that Christians pray that, for example, their children with leukemia are delivered from it, or that their child survives an impending major/risky surgery. This seems flatly incompatible with the claim that Christians don’t expect prayer to change the hour when death will arrive.

I’m very confident that Christians pray that, for example, their children with leukemia are delivered from it, or that their child survives an impending major/risky surgery.

They do.

This seems flatly incompatible with the claim that Christians don’t expect prayer to change the hour when death will arrive.

I disagree. Most of the responses I'm getting seem to be modeling (petitionary) Christian prayer as a way to gain leverage over the material world. Is that correct? If they pray for their child to survive and the child dies, should they interpret this as evidence against the validity of their faith? Under this model, presumably Christians are simply leaning on cognitive biases to fail to notice that prayer doesn't actually work?

My kids are healthy. I routinely pray that they will stay healthy. If they don't stay healthy, and in fact if they were to die of a sudden illness, I would not expect this to damage my faith, because I do not "expect" my prayer to ensure their health. I do not view my prayers as a way to gain leverage over the material world, and I don't think doing so is the correct way to practice Christian prayer. Observably, in some times and places, communities of Christians have seen everyone they know and love die in eruptions of horror and agony. I do not think this happened because they did not pray hard enough.

In short, it seems to me that Christians, generally speaking, have all the same data you do. Speaking generally, we draw different conclusions because we are operating off different axioms, not because we are ignorant of the facts in evidence. No doubt there are individual exceptions, even numerous ones. I don't think that changes the analysis of the central case: The more seriously a person takes their Christianity, the less your argument is going to persuade them, because it will not be new information to them. Even if you think Christians are fundamentally deluded, it probably should still matter to you if your model of them results in less-accurate predictions.

My kids are healthy. I routinely pray that they will stay healthy. If they don't stay healthy, and in fact if they were to die of a sudden illness, I would not expect this to damage my faith, because I do not "expect" my prayer to ensure their health. I do not view my prayers as a way to gain leverage over the material world, and I don't think doing so is the correct way to practice Christian prayer.

Then what are prayers for? What do you expect them to “do”? Do you expect them to produce any outcome, either in this life or the next, that’s more tangible than simply a lessening of your own internal anxiety? Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?

In short, it seems to me that Christians, generally speaking, have all the same data you do. Speaking generally, we draw different conclusions because we are operating off different axioms, not because we are ignorant of the facts in evidence.

Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion. Some of those epicycles are fairly persuasive and do a pretty good job of repelling certain criticisms — clearly there are many poor arguments against Christianity, and against other religions as well — but some of the epicycles (and again, I think the ones dealing with theodicy are the chief example here) are genuinely pretty unpersuasive in the eyes of those who have not already taken to heart the centra faith-based axiom that Christianity, despite its myriad apparent contradictions, is true.

Then what are prayers for?

They are for building a relationship with God. The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us, to a limited but significant extent in this life, and to the maximal extent in the next.

Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?

Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.

Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion.

That's one way to frame it, sure. It's also an isolated demand for rigor.

It is routinely argued here that humans are deterministic machines. All forms of this argument that resulted in falsifiable predictions resulted in those predictions being consistently falsified over more than a century of dedicated testing across the globe, and the current popular form of the argument is very clearly unfalsifiable. Likewise for bedrock Materialist claims about the Material being all that exists: by their own standards, it is very clear that things definitely exist that we cannot observe or interact with even in principle; to the extent that we can in principle observe the chain of cause and effect, we arrive at an effect with no observable cause. And yet even those materialists who recognize this fact are not disturbed by it, because their Materialism is axiomatic, the origin of their reasoning rather than its destination. And that is perfectly appropriate, because this is the only way anyone can reason in any way at all.

Axioms that make bad predictions are selected against. Axioms that fit as much of the available evidence as possible are selected for. It should not be surprising that a set of axioms that have lasted thousands of years fit the available evidence pretty well, and both Christianity and Atheism have existed for thousands of years.

Our disagreement, it seems to me, is not over the facts, but over their interpretation, and specifically over the moral significance of pain and death. You seem to argue as though death were avoidable, but it evidently is not, and everyone does in fact die. You seem to argue as though suffering is much more real and more significant than I understand it to be. I observe that death and pain do not necessitate some uniform amount of suffering, that suffering expands and contracts by orders of magnitude based on a variety of factors, the state of one's own mind being predominant among them.

From a previous discussion:

If God's design hinges on some outcome, you have no idea what that outcome is or why it is necessary, and certainly no reason to believe that it coincides neatly with your worldly preferences for ease or glory or the defeat of your enemies. Maybe it serves his purpose for you and all you know and love to die in pain and horror and darkness. It was so for the Japanese Christians, and for many others, and he has promised to wipe the tears from every eye.

...And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.

We observe the same pain and death, and draw different conclusions, because our axioms are different, and because axioms drive interpretation of evidence much more than evidence drives adoption of axioms. Reason is fundamentally an act of the Will; neither of us is being "forced" by evidence anywhere we do not want to go. But it is not clear to me why I should consider your axioms better than mine; your moral anguish over evident pain and death does not actually serve to reduce the pain and death more than my moral accommodation of it, and arguably has resulted in worse pain and death in the long-term as attempts at Utopia collapse into harsh reality. My accommodation of pain and death prevents neither buckling seat-belts nor attempting cancer cures; I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.

What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?

The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us…

I want to interrogate what the word trust means in this sentence. When we talk about “trust” in the context of human relationships, we recognize that trust is something which can be broken. We recognize that there are degrees of trust — that some people are more trustworthy than others, and that when determining how much trust to extend to another person, one consideration is usually a probabilistic determination of how likely that person is to behave in the way I’m trusting him or her to behave. As I gather more data about that person’s actions, I can decide to upgrade or downgrade my level of trust in that person. Obviously a healthy marriage, for example, necessarily involves a great degree of trust; however, if one spouse commits proven adultery, that necessarily alters the level of trust the other spouse can extend to that person moving forward. Trust isn’t independent of evidence and observation, in other words.

If I pray to God every day to keep me and my family safe and healthy, and then one of my children contracts leukemia and dies, I’m struggling to understand what you think that event should do for my level of “trust” in the proposition that God will “care for us and preserve us”. If leukemia was just something that happened to people all the time, like stubbing a toe, then I agree that it would make little sense to downgrade one’s trust in God based on that occurrence. But since so few children die of leukemia, the fact that it happened to my child specifically, despite my daily prayers to God for the opposite outcome, may very well have some import.

And particularly, if the children of devout Christians who pray daily for their family’s health are, upon observation of data, no less likely to die of leukemia than the children of atheists, then an outsider may begin to wonder what the “relationship” is actually for. What level of “trust” can there be in a relationship if one party is committed to total indifference about whether the other party fails at doing what that party has been “entrusted” to do? It’s an idiosyncratic definition of “trust” indeed if one commits to loving another party with the exact same level of devotion whether that other party behaves well or badly. “Trust” divorced from any expectation of outcomes, and any judgment on those outcomes, seems not to be trust at all.

Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.

It’s a specific type of relationship, though. It’s a relationship in which the purpose of the therapist is, ultimately, to just be a sounding board to which one can vent one’s problems. The therapist has no power to materially affect the situations about which you’re complaining to him. At best, he can offer helpful advice on how you should psychologically frame those situations. He’s just there to help you better order one’s internal life. Not to actually change it, except to the extent that one’s outlook and emotional state can change one’s problem-solving approach. A valuable contribution, to be sure, but one very different from what one would expect from a God to whom many great miracles and divine interventions are attributed.

And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.

In the sense that a Christian martyr’s death might serve as a useful example to other Christians, sure. “That man bore his persecution with dignity and stuck to his principles. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.” I just really struggle to understand what positive message or example you expect us to glean from the instantaneous, terrifying death of several hundred thousand people from a freak natural disaster. Those people didn’t have the option to choose otherwise, as, for example, a Christian martyr might choose to recant his faith to avoid suffering. They didn’t even have time, in the fleeting moments between normalcy and calamity, to reflect on Goodness and to make peace with it. It just doesn’t seem to carry within it any positive, hopeful, or moral message. Maybe there’s just some fundamental psychologically dismally between you and me — either cultivated or innate — which explains why I cannot glean a message of hope, and of a confirmation of trust in God as my shepherd, in the way you can.

I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.

This seems directly in contradiction to your statement that the Bible teaches that suffering and death are admirable “and desirable even.” If the message of the Bible is that one should be indifferent to one’s suffering, then why bother to buckle your children’s seatbelts, let alone your own? God wills what he wills, and your child’s death could be desirable per God’s plan! I don’t really understand the purpose here of taking actions to forestall the potentially grisly fate God may — for reasons which you’re content to allow to remain inscrutable — have in store for you and/or your loved ones. If God wills it, it will be, and an ostensibly “bad” outcome actually isn’t any worse than an ostensibly “good” outcome! It’s all a matter of outlook!

What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?

“If we can’t entirely eradicate pain, then we should actually be fine with infinite pain, and actually a God who causes us infinite pain is no worse than a God who causes us no pain at all.”

There are obviously degrees of pain and suffering. If I stub my toe, or have a mildly unpleasant interaction with a stranger, it does not produce within me an existential crisis or cause me to curse God. But if I developed a terribly painful disease, through no fault or action of my own, which led me to suffer daily, and a Christian told me that this is good, actually, and that the God who either willed this or failed to prevent it is benevolent and that his actions toward me are rooted in love — that I should trust such a God — then, again, I have to wonder what the words “love” and “trust” mean in this worldview. I would like to be able to “trust” that a God of immense power and benevolence could proffer to his adherents — those with whom he has a “relationship” — at least some degree less suffering and pain than that which is meted out to those with whom he doesn’t have a relationship. Otherwise God really is nothing more than a therapist — valuable, but not the King of Kings.

I guess all those Christians who always pray to be delivered from this or that kind of trouble/danger on any given day are just not true Christians, then.

Humans want good things and don’t want bad things, there’s no point blaming them (us) for that. But the correct prayer is ‘thy will be done’. One hopes that deliverance from a particular tribulation is God’s will but doesn’t demand that it be so.

Being a Christian requires believing that the grand plan on this world and the other is good, regardless of whether one happens to enjoy the role that we are given to play right here and now.

Sounds like a strict downgrade from the pagan gods whose favor could actually be won.

So thought (and think) many pagans.

One could make arguments around more complex society leading to less agentic beliefs perhaps (implying Christianity is a religion for bureaucrats and managers?) or just that while medieval Christian societies tended to be pretty brutal they were a lot less brutal than the pagans. I have no idea really.

One point that might be relevant is that it was really easy to lose the favour of pagan gods. Maybe you were stingy with the sacrifices, or the other side were more generous, or you get fucked despite doing nothing wrong because Zeus fucked his milkmaid and now Hera hates you.

One point that might be relevant is that it was really easy to lose the favour of pagan gods. Maybe you were stingy with the sacrifices, or the other side were more generous, or you get fucked despite doing nothing wrong because Zeus fucked his milkmaid and now Hera hates you.

If anything, that seems like it's easier to believe in. The idea that the intelligences behind your weal and woe are multiple, capricious and far from omnibenevolent has more explaining, and dare I say coping power to me than "I promise God loves loves loves you very much, but he's taking that baby away now because God's plans etc etc".

Christians do not expect it to.

Well, some and some.

Everything happens for a reason?

Speak plainly. Make your objections clear.

There’s nothing wrong with including a link to support an argument, but you actually have to make the argument first.

It seems worth noting that I usually hear this argument being made by comfortable people living relatively easy lives (e.g. webcomic artists). People actually experiencing the kind of calamity people are talking about (earthquakes, war, disease) tend to find meaning in these events. See for example that famous book by an Auswitz survivor about the necessity of meaning for sustaining life.

Now, this is obviously an ad hominem argument about psychology propensities rather than whether God actually has a plan, but it does rather colour the conversation for me that arguments based on suffering are mostly deployed cynically by those who are basically ok rather than the sufferers themselves.

Yeah, and arguments about the sanctity of poverty are usually deployed by the well off too. It's just cope.

I can understand that people that experience calamity can find meaning, but most of them would still not wish calamity upon their children. Moreover, it certainly doesn't mean that there is a sensible reason for it.

@netstack @FtttG

What I meant by

Now, this is obviously an ad hominem argument about psychology propensities rather than whether God actually has a plan

is that obviously suffering people trying to find meaning in their suffering doesn’t make them correct. What it does do is make me less inclined to take people who tell me variations on, “say that to a child dying of leukaemia, asshole!” seriously.

And I notice that I usually hear the “prosperity gospel” argument made by people living extremely comfortable lives. Does this mean people who actually experience good things tend to find meaning in them?

Conversely, dead nonbelievers can’t really write books.

I don’t believe that the existence of traumatized converts says much about the rate of conversion. It definitely doesn’t show that they were right.

There seems an obvious selection effect. The only people who need to find a way to rationalise away immeasurable (and random) suffering are people who have undergone said suffering - if they didn't rationalise it away, they'd promptly sink into despair. People who haven't underwent immeasurable suffering look at the knots the former group are tying themselves in to persuade themselves that the completely random suffering they underwent is actually meaningful and significant, and not unreasonably conclude that this is all an elaborate cope. Which is not to say they themselves wouldn't be tying themselves in knots if they underwent a horrifically traumatic experience - there but for the grace of God go I, so to speak.

Maybe it's true that there are no atheists in foxholes, but that doesn't actually tell us anything about whether the atheists are right or wrong. If you only find yourself believing in God when you're in a life-or-death scenario, to me that actually sounds like strong evidence against the existence of God, rather than in favour of it.

I don't see how it's cynical to, of all things, want there to be less random suffering for random innocent people. I mean, you could spin it around to "you actually want it because that would also mean less chance of bad things happening to you, specifically", but still a rather non-central use of the word "cynical".

The cynicism is in comfortable people deploying the actual suffering of others to bash Christians, often ignoring the sufferers’ own feelings on the matter and without displaying any interest in said suffering except as a handy cudgel.

I don’t mean that as an accusation of anyone here necessarily but it’s definitely something I’ve seen and it prejudices me against this form of argument.

There's also a broader points of rejecting axioms of expectations and substituting their own.

The Abrahamic theological promise is that genuine faith promises safety and comfort in the next life, not the current. The nature of discomfort in this life varies- the old testament has more than a few example of God allowing collective punishments / humblings of worshippers for collective failures- but even New Testament Jesus was more 'give up your worldly wealth (and by extension the comforts it brings) for the time before you die.' The reward of heaven after death is premised on death after a virtuous- but not ideally comfortable- life.

By contrast, nearly each and every scenario in anon's comic ends and begins... at the worldly death. This rests on an implicit understanding / expectation that 'reason' / God's Plan should result in good things / not-having bad things in life, including not dying.

It doesn't address the requirement to live a good life before death. It doesn't address the premise of judgement after death. It doesn't address the rewards (or lack of rewards) afterwards. In a four-stage process- live a good life, die, judgement, afterlife- the comic treats stage 2 as some sort of ironic commentary or disproof.

A structural parallel would be a comic mocking advice that overweight people should work out - lose weight - feel better by depicting fat people struggling and being uncomfortable at the gym.

This rests on an implicit understanding / expectation that 'reason' / God's Plan should result in good things / not-having bad things in life, including not dying.

I think this is a common if not universal understanding, yes. It’s a corollary to giving Him credit whenever those good things happen.

I understand that there’s a theological motte where the praise is for His goodness in designing the world that included such temporal happiness, or that He only chooses such interventions insofar as they bring glory to His Church. I don’t believe this is what the average, lay Christian thinks when he wins a lottery ticket. You raise people on an entire Old Testament of transactional worship, a New Testament of miracles benefiting Christians, and two millennia of Whig history? They’re going to see God’s hand in worldly matters.

Really? Does an earthquake come and devastate Lisbon on a feast day for a reason? Do people get horrible, agonizing diseases for a reason? Why should the grand spiritual plan of a perfect, benevolent being involve kidneystones? There are all kinds of ways people can grow without getting cut down by forces far beyond their control, no especially apparent reasons why so many people should get destroyed in painful ways.

I guess an uncaring deity might say 'it's sink or swim, I gave you access to the tools. Now pick them up or suffer' but that isn't what most people who believe in a plan conceptualize it being.

Does an earthquake come and devastate Lisbon on a feast day for a reason? Do people get horrible, agonizing diseases for a reason?

Yes and yes. There are literally thousands of years of writing on theodicy (i.e. trying to answer the question "Why does God let bad things happen?"). You can disagree with the many proposed answers and explanations, but it's obnoxious when you ask those questions like they're some sort of irrefutable gotcha.

For me personally, amongst the many reasons for why God allows bad things to happen, the biggest one for me is that this life is just a tiny moment in our eternal existence and as awful as it seems within that moment in the long run all that happens in our mortal life will have been less than a blink of an eye in eternity. And the suffering and pain we experience in this life serves a very important purpose in our eternal existence.

There are literally thousands of years of writing on theodicy

I know, I'm well aware. A thousand years of cope is just that, a lot of cope. It's like how the Muslims will have thousands of years worth of discussion about djinns and various spirits, human-djinn halfbreeds, exorcisms and possessions. I'm sure lots of time was spent on this but it's still nonsense. No, you cannot have an omnipotent all loving god in this universe.

this life is just a tiny moment in our eternal existence and as awful as it seems within that moment in the long run all that happens in our mortal life will have been less than a blink of an eye in eternity. And the suffering and pain we experience in this life serves a very important purpose in our eternal existence.

This is exactly what I'm talking about, it's undiluted cope. Communists explained all their suffering as necessary to build socialism. But you can't even explain it at all! Where is the benefit in getting your head dashed in by falling rocks at the age of 9 or being left a crippled, mentally retarded zombie drooling and raging at phantoms because of a twisted gene? There is no benefit whatsoever.

As I said to @Hoffmeister25

These are all basically the problem of theodicy written over and over. Nature's Wrath has a long history in Jewish lore of being God's wrath. God created nature, remember.

As to the reason - I don't know! Nobody truly knows the answer to theodicy. Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it. Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good. Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.

There are many answers. All I know is that I believe that God allows evil in the world for a reason.

You are basically just restating the problem of theodicy. The fact that you think it's a slam dunk against faith shows that you have not really looked into the history of the Christian church, or frankly almost any other religion, more than at a surface level. Theodicy or the problem of evil is the obvious issue with all religious faith. Religious people don't just brush it under the rug and pretend evil doesn't exist. Of course we have thought about this issue deeply, and come up with various answers to it.

Christian church, or frankly almost any other religion, more than at a surface level

No, the problem is that Christians do not understand the universe beyond a surface level. They don't come up with any good answers to theodicy, only cope like 'it's all part of the plan which is totally incomprehensible to us' or 'somehow free will requires this'. Sensible religions don't try to declare the existence of a omnibenevolent, all-powerful deity and then grapple with how dumb that is when it's a ridiculously silly thing to believe. Of course the universe is not run by such a being, that is immediately obvious from all the random torments and trouble dished out. Coming up with a million philosophical epicycles to justify this bizarre doctrine doesn't help at all.

Here’s an anecdote: I was 80% of the way through writing a giant post on the Abrego Garcia kerfuffle. I stopped when I realized that the absurd straw premise that I was arguing against — the idea that the core function of the US-Mexico border wall, Customs and Border Patrol, ICE, etc. is to be a gigantic obstacle course that weeds out the weaklings and ensures that only the strongest and most determined migrants survive to enter the heartland of The United States — is actually literally true. The extant US immigration system makes absolutely no sense unless you accept that the purpose of it is not to do any of the things people say it is for, but instead is the thing that it actually does.

I think context you are assuming is fully baked in, is in fact not baked in at all, so I think it's perfect you bring this up. What you probably realized mentally, maybe took for granted, but didn't actually state (causing confusion), is that the current immigration system is also accompanied by a lack of effort to reform said system. As an illustration, Trump claims that he's pro-legal immigration, but the proof is in the pudding: have Republicans introduced a better legal immigration system? No. They haven't even tried. They also almost never talk about it (or at least the leaders don't). You need to explicitly state something to this effect, rather than just say "it's an obstacle course" and rest your case, because "the immigration system is an obstacle course" might be true but is not enough to actually end up with POSIWID.

Some Republicans could easily say "no no, we still want to fix the legal immigration system, any inaction is just " and so we're right back to the importance of intent, where we started. They might say "the system is broken due to too many band-aids" and we dodge the intent discussion overtly, but it's still lurking around because inaction also betrays intent (albeit much more loosely, so I acknowledge this leap might be logical but is potentially weaker).

Or, maybe there was some other latent assumption and I misidentified it. Either way, while POSIWID is what I'd term an occasionally-useful psychological re-framing tool (thus, worth talking about in the loosest sense) it's not actually an argument.

Reading through Scott, and the replies here and there to Scott, it seems that POSIWID is primarily a meme, or perhaps it has even attained the status of a minor shibboleth. The argument is becoming less intellectual and more and more personal. I'm not sure what that indicates.

I've found that the main objections to POSIWID is from people who are, to be frank, heavily invested in institutions where POSIWID is a very valid criticism. Typically bureaucracies and government or government-adjacent systems. If you are a person who thinks, at your core, public schools are good POSIWID is going to upset you because it is going to be deployed to (IMO Accurately) claim the purpose of public schools is the enrichment of lazy, over-schooled, adults. If you are a person who likes Givewell and other similar charities you are going to hate POSIWID because, again, what those charities do is keep Africans alive for the purpose of them having children that the charity then has to keep alive, on and on into eternity. They are a self licking ice cream cone and POSIWID makes that clear, if in an offensive way to those that think such charities are doing good.

I assure you: I sometimes find the abuse of this heuristic smug and annoying, but I am not a Dallas Cowboys fan.

You're probably right that it's a deepity, but Scott was still wrong by arguing that it is false. Arguing that "bLACK lIVES mATTER" is false is not really going to get you anywhere, but you can argue that the people saying it are retarded.

Scott is correct that there are a bunch of retards throwing around an inane phrase in a nearly meaningless way, but his argument is a jumbled mess and goes too far into the weeds trying to argue that the phrase itself is false, rather than simply arguing that the logic after retards contorted the phrase is wrong.

Perhaps many deepities are also scissor statements?

Perhaps, but I don't believe the statement itself is a scissor. The entirety of the scissoring is from the community and context around the statement. If you asked people about "bLACK lIVES mATTER" in 2001, very few people would consider it divisive, but the fact that the enemy has turned it into a slogan and oath of loyalty has made it that.

I think actual scissor statements encode their scissoring in their meaning. Something like "Trans should/shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's sports" is something that would be durable through rephrasing, and also something that someone without cultural context can still form a strong opinion either way about.

Mod hat off, but I really wish that Tumblr-style sneering by typing "in bRoKeN Case To MeAn THiS iZ St00P1D" would die.

Would you consider the slogan "black lives matter" (confused by your odd capitalisation) a deepity? To me it comes off more as a motte-and-bailey argument. I can't see any interpretation of the slogan "black lives matter" which is factually untrue, but which would be profound if it was true.

I agree it is not a deepity, or at least not a central example of one. The bailey of BLM is "black lives should matter, but in fact they do not matter to the police who gets away with killing black men at random".

This is a bit more distance than saying "Everything happens for a reason, and the true reasons for things happening are non-mundane woo." Or "beauty is only skin deep, so people who care about beauty are shallow".

The bailey of BLM is "black lives should matter, but in fact they do not matter to the police who gets away with killing black men at random".

I haven't run the numbers myself, but I would be thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the large spike in murders starting mid 2020, which is IMO at least partially attributable to "BLM," actually caused an increase in the total number of murdered black lives. Uncharitably, "The purpose of BLM is to secure sinecures for friendly academics" seems a POSIWID-framing of the situation, which I'm partially inclined to believe as someone who actually wants to care about (all) lives.

I haven't run the numbers myself, but I would be thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the large spike in murders starting mid 2020, which is IMO at least partially attributable to "BLM," actually caused an increase in the total number of murdered black lives.

You are correct.

You want black people to stop murdering each other? How dare you judge their culture by your colonial White values.

I jest, I jest. But the truth is that BLM was never about the big picture outcome. They were zooming in on a small part of police conduct and deciding that this was the real purpose of the police, and that they would be better off if there were no cops.

I think a model of their movement would have to recognize different kinds of actors. The people who are genuinely disgusted by police misconduct. Rioters who are happy for whatever reason to riot. Dogmatic wokes who believe that skin color indicates how righteous a cause is. Then you had the covid lockdown situation.

Some systems are clearly build for a purpose, either their stated purpose or an unstated one. Think government agencies.

BLM does not seem to be such a system to me. Asking what its purpose is would be like asking what the purpose of a coral reef or Ganymede or an arms race is. Of course, this should not stop us from analyzing the outcomes of such systems.

System aiming to solve a problem actually concentrates power and money for its advocates, while making its key issue significantly worse.

Many such cases.

So the natural question that raises is, what system can we create to solve this problem of systems that aim to solve problems actually concentrating power and money for its advocates? And as one of its advocates, how can I secure some of that power and money for myself?

The most important thing is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

cross-posting from ACX comments:

I think that there are four positions for modelling the behavior of systems.

(A) Strict Non-POSIWID: you are only allowed to look at the mission statement

(B) Sane position: you are allowed at the mission statements, the incentives of individual actors, and the outcomes.

(C) Strict POSIWID: you are only allowed to look at the outcomes

(D) Insane POSIWID: Like (C), but you get to cherry pick one particular aspect of the outcomes ("the justice system exists to let rapists walk free")

Nobody is arguing for the (A). Few people argue for (C) in good faith (even though some ACX commentators have picked "the relevant Iranian intelligence agency does not have the purpose of avoiding Israeli infiltration" as their hill to die on). (B) allows you to look at the outcomes, the incentives and then wonder if a particular aspect of the outcome might be intended or not. The disagreement is mostly over the semantics of POSIWID, with some people claiming that POSIWID implies (C) and others claiming that Non-POSIWID implies (A). It is People's Front of Judea vs Judean People's Front -- all semantics. (Also, Scott is right on POSIWID meaning (C). Long live the PFJ!)

I agree that POSIWID is a deepity. To the degree that it is true but trite, it is pointing at (B) -- outcomes matter. To the degree that it is used to point at (C) or (D), it is big if true (but obviously false).

What I don't understand yet is why it is a scissor statement, though. (Note that this is the a typical case for victims of a scissor statement, though.) I mean, if it is a deepity, then we should obviously reject it.

Charitably, I guess that a lot of people feel they are surrounded by (A) thinking, and have decided that POSIWID is the best way to advocate for (B). Less charitably, some people like that phrasing because it it is a deepity which lets them argue for (D).

I'd personally endorse (B), although I could see an argument for (C) in some cases. I think the novel claim of "POSIWID" is that under the analysis of (B), some systems are revealed to have a "purpose" that contraindicates it's mission statement under (A). The idea that systems are complex and efforts to push a given indicator in direction Y might actually move the needle the other direction should be taken seriously: eliminating phonics instruction "to improve literacy" has quite possibly worsened outcomes. Just because a system exists "to fix Z" doesn't mean it's actually helping.

The steelman for (C) is that looking at anything other than outcomes risks endorsing systems that are actively counterproductive but happen to "sound nice" and have "good vibes" on paper: "The purpose of NEPA is to heavily curtail new construction," or "The purpose of the NRC is to prevent new nuclear reactors from being built" (literally the NRC had never approved the construction of a new nuclear plant from its 1975 inception until Vogtle Unit 3 began construction in 2009).

It just sounds crazy that anyone would endorse anything other than B... like, motives clearly matter, and outcomes clearly matter, why do we need to be all dogmatic about it and only care about one or the other? We aren't (presumably) mostly all children discovering "realpolitick" for the very first time. Plans backfire. People lie and misrepresent. Both happen often enough that neither polar view "works" by itself. I'd argue that both are actively detrimental.

To me it's like Communism - like, literally the ideal form of government. But, spoiler alert: people are too consistently flawed to make it work. Heaven? Sure. Jesus' favorite society is plainly something similar. Still, turns out badly. On the other end... Anarcho-capitalism? Actually, turns out people are too consistently order-loving to make it work. Even prisons with minimal supervision don't internally develop into that fully, gangs show up fast and make informal rules and shit.

So C's weakness is that people are too consistently emotional. No system of governance, for example, is immune. The best systems manage this, the worst ignore it, and the merely bad indulge it.

I think C is highly defensible, as long as you think about how each of the outcomes affect the people involved in feeding the system. Though maybe that becomes B in fact because those are incentives.

I would argue that it depends. Taken literally, you could not distinguish a hospital aiming to save a fixed fraction of cancer patients and one who tries to save as many of them as possible, given other constraints. An advocate of (C) should default to the fixed fraction model, because it avoids having to ascribe intent to people (which might not even be directly tied to direct financial incentives of individual actors) and the alternative requires a lot of assumptions on what fraction of cancer patients can be saved at a given tech level.

And it is clear that this leads to wrong predictions about what would happen if the hospital got some new tech which saved an additional ten percent. (C) would predict that the survival rate would not increase, because the fixed rate is the goal. Perhaps the doctors all stop working Friday afternoon to compensate, instead, people preferring free time to work is a well supported finding.

My (B) like model of the hospital can take into account the fundamental motivations of people who work in health care as well as the outcomes and direct incentives of the actors. It is much more complex and relies on a lot of assumptions, but I would argue that it is likely to outperform (C) models.

To make C defensible I think you have to at least define "outcomes" as "the differences between the state of the world with the system and the counterfactual state of the world without the system" (call this (C1)), whereas it often instead seems to be implicitly defined as "the state of the world with the system" (call this (C2)).

Consider the claim that "the relevant Iranian intelligence agency does not have the purpose of avoiding Israeli infiltration", to use the example above. Under (C1) this would be a claim that Iranian intelligence is actually not reducing Israeli infiltration at all (almost certainly false in this case, but it would be very interesting if it were true), and under (C2) this would just be a claim that some Israeli infiltration still happens despite efforts to reduce it (almost certainly true, but not very interesting).

C is highly defensible, but it's far more common for D to masquerade as C. Not even necessarily intentionally/in bad faith - people have their personal hobby horses they fixate on and most of the systems they're complaining about are very complex.

I just want throw you a kudos for introducing me to the concept of a "deepity", I think it has a lot of utility for me in all aspects of my life: professional, personal, political, etc. I thought actually writing this "kudos" out would be more meaningful / bring more visibility than simply upvoting you as I'd like to specifically encourage this type of introduction of novel concepts that people may not be familiar with.

A rhetorical device I've been using with coworkers is a solution simply stated is not a problem simply solved, basically just to draw attention to the fact that if you're a middle manager and you can describe a solution in a few words it doesn't mean your underlings can quickly implement it and solve the problem. Unsure if that passes the threshold for "deepity", but I may be more careful with what I say in the future as to not use "deepities" as a crutch.

Thank you very much. I don't think your example is a deepity: it has exactly one meaning, which is true, and not vacuously so. It's a useful observation.

"POSIWID" is meaningful, but

  1. the "different" definitions that people have been proferring are on a range of severities of basically the same thing and

  2. Scott is being autistically literal about it not being exactly what it literally says because clearly there are some cases where it doesn't apply.

Also, if you read carefully, Scott actually concedes that it can have some meaning, but these meanings are not something he likes to use the phrase for, which is a much weaker argument. Such as:

I agree this is a useful thing to talk about, I just don’t think “purpose” is the right word for it. I’m not even sure “system” is the right word for it.

I'll agree about it apparently being a scissor statement, given the responses so far, but...

Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs.

This is not at all obviously true. This is the crux of the entire conversation.

I guess it really is a scissor statement, because to me, the use of the statement, as rhetoric, seems extremely obviously, and Scott entirely whiffs it. And I don't think it's about giving in to cynicism. It's about naming that different groups of people having different amounts of power in systems, as well as different values and worldviews, that this shapes their rhetoric in complicated ways, and participants in some of those groups can be protected from the rhetoric of other, more powerful groups if they can be taught to think about what systems are actually doing, rather than living in other people's rhetoric about what those systems are supposed to be doing.

Say that my wife and I participate in telling our kids about Santa and giving them gifts from Santa, and it's a happy ritual, connecting their experience to our our own experiences from our childhood. We have a lot of power in the relationship compared to our kids, we can get away with bending the truth if we think there's some cultural good to it all, and if they asked about whether Santa was real when they're small, we would probably fudge the truth about it to keep the happy ritual going, and we could get away with it. But there's absolutely no need for cynicism here - it's much more complicated than saying we were lying to them, because we would be inclined to think that "is Santa real" isn't even asking the right questions about that tradition, we would likely recognize that a 5 year old isn't even really in the right position to understand why we participate in the rituals we do, and we would expect that later, when they're older, they'll understand what we were doing and probably keep the tradition going.

A radical child activist (?) who came along and looked at this system might try to shake my kids out of their Santa belief, if that activist thought the entire enterprise was bad for my kids and needed to be radically overthrown, by adopting a "the purpose of a system is what it does" stance. Because that paragraph that I just wrote, which is something like a functional / sociological description of the Santa ritual, is a really strong inoculation against literally believing in Santa; the sociological explanation of why we do the Santa ritual sounds pretty compelling, and it makes belief in literal Santa much more difficult, or least plausibly it does (except we're talking about 5 year olds here, so my just so story is hitting its limits).

Now, this example is a toy one and likely (to most readers) pretty benign. But arguably, this sort of situation comes up constantly in society between different groups of people with different amounts of power and different beliefs about the broader good in the world and how to achieve those goods. I mean, it's no hard to change my Santa story just a bit, swapping parents with intellectuals, kids with normal people, and Santa with socialism, and you've described much of the 20th century. It's the core idea of Plato's noble lie, too. Or of Steve Jobs standing around on a stage, making all sorts of charismatic proclamations that somehow become true enough by people believing them and changing their expectations and how they act when it came to adopting new technology that went on to impact the social world. It's why faith is stressed in certain major religious traditions, too. The cultural scripts that people load up in their heads change how they experience the world and how they behave, and clean mapping to empirical reality is not the main driver here.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" is in the same skeptical tradition as open source programmers saying "I don't need to see your advertising or design doc - please show me the running code instead". Or the tradition of Marx saying he's a materialist and has no use for idealism or ideology. Or sociology tabling the truth claims of religion and instead theorizing about how different religions function in the world (and thus wrecking their foundations in the process). It's economists examining how people actually behave, in aggregate, in the face of incentives, ignoring questions of how they ought to behave. It's the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Bulverism, ignoring someone's argument and psychoanalyzing what forces caused them to make that argument instead. (And I'm not saying any of these are good or bad, for that matter).

To me, that's the obvious rhetorical use of POSIWID, especially on the dissident right. It's primary use is to shake certain people free from inhabiting the rhetorical frames of other powerful, status quo groups of people.

Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs.

This is not at all obviously true. This is the crux of the entire conversation.

This. Only modelling the world on realized, actual outputs leads to very sub-optimal models.

You observe A asking B out for a date and getting rejected. You conclude that A likes to get rejected.

You observe C playing the lottery, and losing. You conclude that C just has a strict preference for having less money.

You observe D playing a round of Russian roulette, and surviving. You conclude that D is showing no signs of self-harming behavior since the outcome was harmless.

It is generally better to model agents (humans, armies, chess programs, dogs, ASIs, ...) as have their own world view and a utility function, and ascribe intent to their actions. If your system is larger, than game theory and Moloch enter the picture. And outcomes remain highly relevant, of course.

You want to be able to say "this non-effective charity is trying to do X, but only accomplishing that k times per 1M$ of donations, while that charity is accomplishing X n times per 1M$ of donations, so we should raise the question if there is some incongruity between their stated mission and their actual behavior, or if they operate under additional constraints". Perhaps after further investigation you will conclude that the charity is actually just a business selling the warm fuzzy feeling of doing good to their donors, and their agents are either cynical or in denial about that.

Or take my alchemist searching for the philosopher's stone while inhaling a lot of mercury vapor. You want to point at the fact that he is not succeeding in finding the stone. It could be that he is really into inhaling mercury, or that searching for the stone is just a high status occupation, but it is also possible that he is genuinely trying to find it as hard as he can, and simply operates under a different world model.

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