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Notes -
cross-posting from ACX comments:
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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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