It sure is weird that the United States supports so much suffering and strife throughout the worldGuess I just gotta vote harder in four yearsHitler 2 is on the ballot this year. Should I organize a meaningful resistance or wait in line for 5 hours to vote?
So in this election you have 99% Hitler on the ballot. If he wins, that might convince 99% 99% Hitler that he has a shot. Just keep on like that, and in a short 60 voting cycles (only 240 years!), Hitler levels will have decayed by almost 50%. That’s the power of incrementalism.
But if I don’t vote for Hitler 2 then Hitler 3 will be on the ballot in 2028. By voting for Hitler 2 in 2024 he will run as an incumbent in 2028 and by 2032 the progressive faction of the party will run Hitler 1.5
This is how we win. Don’t let no Hitler be the enemy of some Hitler. That’s how you get Maximum Hitler.
Gonna go formulate a central theorem of democratic genocidal calculus to determine an equation to minimize the first order Hitler differential.
POSIWID is one of the most important concepts when discussing the state of the world on basically any topic. You will still run into people who insist on believing things that aren’t true at all, but it’s a good starting point with someone who acknowledges the reality of a situation but can’t get over the idea that “there must be something wrong with the system, it’s not supposed to do that.”
No, it’s not supposed to do that, but it is, and it will continue to do so unless we do something about it.
No, it’s not supposed to do that,
The U.S. system was designed to keep the oligarchy in power, it is still functioning as designed.>
The utility in POSIWID is that you don’t have to get lost in the discussion about what a system is supposed to do or was originally designed to do. If you’re telling someone “the US was intended to be a property-owning oligarchy from the beginning” then you are correct, but they can argue with you about intention and changes over time and blah blah blah. If you start from describing it a as it currently exists, then you don’t need to talk about intention or political parties or the current SCOTUS judges or whatever. You can point out that it is a property-owning oligarchy, and the various processes that make up the system are producing that outcome.
It’s a way to short-circuit normative arguments and jump to the descriptive. It’s important sometimes to point out the history and context of a given system so that it’s clear why there’s a disconnect between what a system does vs what people think it’s supposed to do, but other times you just want to get to the point that a system isn’t doing what people think it should do because it’s not designed to do it, no matter what changes you make to the variables or who you designate to run the system. A lot of people like to talk about broken systems vs bad systems vs “this system just needs the right people running it” and POSIWID is a way to cut through all that and talk about the fact that the system is the system. If it’s doing a thing, it’s because that’s what it does.
To me, the point of this is that what the U.S. was designed to do isn’t nearly as important as what it actually does. We don’t need to argue about intentions if the results are clear enough.
headed to the POSIWID database to read materially grounded and logically sound trip reports
For some reason all the reports are about nightmare encounters with the machine elves. Weird, huh?
cybernetics gang stay winning
For me, it’s important to point out that this is utility and not purpose. Very few systems, especially in biology, have an ontological ‘purpose’ that they are going to fulfill. There is no purpose in biological systems, only natural selection and neutral evolution randomly developing changes and culling the less advantageous, A hand is not for grasping; it is advantageous that a hand grasps.
I think you’re projecting unintended meaning onto the word ‘purpose’. The point is exactly the one you’re making: systems do not have a metaphysical purpose. The only thing that we can say for certain about a system’s purpose is that it generates the results it generates. It is what it does. Anything else is ideology.
Regardless that kind of clarification is still useful. If you can make an explanation more precise, its good to do so. Not everyone will need it. But, never underestimate how varied people’s interpretations are. Besides, expanding the scope of discussion to biological systems is interesting anyway.
It’s not clarifying, though. What Beer is referring to isn’t utility, because utility is relative and implies that we’re ascribing normative value to the outputs of a system, not to mention that utility doesn’t account for all of the results that a system generates. The point of the exercise is to view a system purely in descriptive, material terms. Once we properly describe the system, we can then apply a normative lens and judge on those terms whether or not the system is working as intended or expected.
Utility does account for all the outputs of a system. Thinking about this in terms of utility is essential. Only by assessing what a system does from the perspective of the people it effects can we gauge it. There is no way to judge a system without some concept of utility.
Sure, there is a brief moment where we need to look at a system in simple terms like taking in X resource and outputting Y service and Z externality. But we don’t know what any of those things actually do until we asses how they effect people.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. No human system operates without effecting humans. Judging something without considering utility is like judging a house by looking at the blueprint instead of visiting the house for tea and speaking to the residents.
The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer,[1] who observed that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”[2] The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system’s side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.
The point of POSIWID is to properly evaluate utility, by pointing out that the intended purpose for something is irrelevant to its actual effect. We’re not disagreeing, but utility simply is not synonymous with purpose, because the phrase is meant to counter the assertion that the intended purpose of a system is relevant to its effects in the real world. If you replace it with “utility” then you’re basically saying “the utility of a system is what it does”, which is true, but also redundant and not the point of the phrase.
I wouldn’t replace purpose with utility. I would replace does with utility.
A system is what it does. The purpose of a system is its utility.
For me, it’s important to point out that this is utility and not purpose.
This is what we’re discussing in this thread.
This is true though the systems Beer was talking about so have claimed purposes. This is the cybersyn guy. His head was in the clouds of modeling complex dynamic systems such that you can place human control and intent in the loop. People often claim systems work that way but they do so by conflating (stated) intent with real-world function without bothering to verify the latter.
Example: the entire field of economics.
The definition of ‘purpose’ that I have internalized is ‘a subjective claim about what a system does and why it was built/evolved to function in that way.’ But I think the concept of purpose being used here is ‘the function the system performs.’ Capitalism is so horrible because it reduces the ‘purpose’ to all human life down to ‘that which makes profit’; a car isn’t ‘for moving’ it is ‘for making profit’, a hospital isn’t ‘for healing the sick’ it’s ‘for making profit.’
Problem is, libs don’t see the problems as real, and think the system is solving everything because the bombs we sent to Israel had rainbow flags on them. We just can’t agree on what constitutes a failure, and therefore can’t agree on reality. It’s why they dismiss theory, evidence/proof you link them to or any other way to express your view. If you even get them to take a gander at your information, they just call you unhinged or whatever current lib insult there is. Personally, the one that kills me the most is “you are an unserious person”. Is that the lib/reddit version of circumventing content rules like on other platforms where people use “unalived”?
Anyway, trying to explain what we are objecting to is basically
Like, how do they square the circle of “kids in cages” and “the border wall is racist” with the fact that Biden is worse on the border than trump was somehow?
I know they just move on and pretend to care about whatever issue they can turn into a Marvel movie, but you can scroll back through their twitters and what have you and find consistently bad takes that they pretend never happened. Like, how do we beat that? We can’t just keep waiting for the old, shitty generation to die off.
Easy, they would just say that if Trump was elected twice instead of Biden, his 2nd year’s immigration policy would be way worse than Biden’s 1st year immigration policy. It doesn’t matter that Biden is worse than Trump on immigration, Trump would have been even more worse than Trump.
“I’m writing in Hitler to stop trump” will unironically be said by someone in the next six months
I’ve seen Beer and management theory in general cited by a number of lefty philosophers, is he worth reading or all nonsense? In particular is he worthwhile if I explicitly don’t have an interest in economic rationalization?
Yes! He’s well worth reading imo, but be ready for confusion and re-reading parts several times to understand it. Designing Freedom is easy to get ahold of, and an easier read. The Brain of the Firm is difficult to get a copy cheap (ebook versions are all crappy PDFs), and it’s a bit of a slog to read through, but it’s very interesting. It’s organizational theory that’s very dense and often difficult to grasp at first, but still worth the trouble of reading and trying to make sense of. I do have a physical copy I had to pay way too much for, and awhile back I tried started a project to make a proper ebook version of it, but abandoned it because I didn’t think many people would be interested. I scanned one of the crappy PDF copies and transcribed it with software, but there are a lot of errors so much of what I did was manually reviewing it and fixing issues I find. At some point I’d also need to scan all the figures/charts separately and include those somewhere, and then somehow correctly convert it all to HTML. Might be quicker using chatGPT, but I’d have to go back and look at what is all left. Maybe it’s worth revisiting?
This video is potato quality but a good short intro to Cybersyn and his ideas generally, and there’s more in the playlist: https://youtu.be/e_bXlEvygHg?list=PLJIs9OvcbZKvyDwr6267Kw9iB3cxitt5U
Also General Intellect Unit podcast has a pretty in depth 45 part series on Brain of the Firm. This is the first episode: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/b01-brain-of-the-firm-chapter-1/
how does paul cockshotts work figure into this? his name was also associated with cybersyn.
appreciate the resources!
No problem! To my knowledge, I don’t think Cockshott was associated with the Cybersyn project, but his name is associated with socialist cybernetics generally. I’d say the difference between them is that Beer’s work is more concerned with broad ideas of system design and how systems work (especially the Viable System Model), while Cockshott’s work is more of a grab bag of ideas to implement in a hypothetical socialist society. I haven’t listened to or read everything of Cockshott though so maybe I’m not giving him a fair shake, but that’s my impression based on what I have seen of his so far.
Oh also, while it’s not as in depth as Beer’s stuff and is a little lib in some parts, The People’s Republic of Walmart is a great book imo as an introduction to socialist economic planning and how it could work with modern tech. I’d definitely recommend it if you’re looking for good intro material about the topic.
Could I ask, how verbose or technical is Beer’s stuff? I am more a natural sciences rather than a math/cs kinda person. Do you think for someone with a passing understanding there would be much to get out of it?
It is technical and uses a lot of unfamiliar terminology, but I would think a background in natural sciences would lend itself well to his work considering it’s based around systems and how they interact, and often uses natural systems as a reference. This is also I think where the name “Brain of the Firm” comes from. From the “viable system model” Wikipedia page:
The model is derived from the architecture of the brain and nervous system. Systems 3-2-1 are identified with the ancient brain or autonomic nervous system. System 4 embodies cognition and conversation. System 5, the higher brain functions, include introspection and decision making.
You’ve given me some calm, ok, I’ll definitely try to go through at least some of it :3
It is the thing and the whole of the thing.
It is what it is.
It do be like that.
It is what it do.
Its like that and thats the way it is.Edit: The purpose of Stafford Beer is to get drunk lmao goofy ass name
I remember a large number of political conversations where someone has responded “ah, but the system was to do X” without that person assessing whether it actually successfully does X.
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do
By that definition, the purpose of a computer is to get hot. It of course does get hot, but a purpose is more than simply a side-effect.
Purpose, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is “why you do something or why something exist”. A side-effect wouldn’t pose any cause, therefore it’s NOT its purpose.
there is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system (computer) is what it consistently fails to do (overheat)
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Yeah but the point of a cooling system isn’t e.g. “making noise” even though that’ also something that it does.
The purpose of a computer that overheats is to stay broken until discarded or acted upon and repaired, the purpose of a computer that can manage heat is to compute, really simple concept
No amount of good intentions or willpower can make a system act contrary to its actual processes and outcomes
The point of POSIWID is to challenge magical thinking in the context of political system’s analysis
the purpose of a computer that can manage heat is to compute,
Exactly. Its purpose isn’t “generating heat”, although it sure does that. Likewise, the purpose of cars isn’t “crashing”, although some do crash. That doesn’t make it htier purpose though.
Again, unless it’s broken in which case its purpose is just “generating heat” seems like you’re just tripped up by some semantic understanding of the word purpose. Also what is the purpose of a car that has already crashed, do you think the purpose of a wrecked car is to drive it?
You do realize there’s an entire concept surrounding the word “purpose” that you’re just willfully missing
Who told you that the purpose of a computer is to be cold?
It is not. The purpose of it is neither to be cold nor to be hot.
Cool so then your point was irrelevant, wasn’t it?
It is not. The purpose of it is neither to be cold nor to be hot.
By that definition, the purpose of a computer is to get hot. It of course does get hot, but a purpose is more than simply a side-effect.
Generating heat is part of how a computer operates. If some standard-model computer isn’t producing heat, it probably isn’t functioning very well. That said, it also does several other things, things it does with much greater efficiency than its heat generation (which has some mitigation with cooling systems, depending on the machine), so those must also be considered part of its purpose.
What cannot be considered part of its purpose is what it does not do, such as, uh, reproducing, for example.
Would you say the purpose of you sleeping at night is “making noise”? Because it’s also something that you do whiel sleeping. I would say “no”. But if the purpose of a system is what it does, then making noise would also a purpose, right?
Any massive object existing in a medium (i.e. not a vacuum) if it moves at all by virtue of entering space occupied partially by particles of the medium. Does the purpose of sleep include continuing to exist and not halting movement on a molecular level? Sure, I think if I went to sleep and stopped existing, I failed to sleep. If I froze on a molecular level, I would just be dead and therefore also have failed to sleep.
It’s interesting how seamlessly you moved to an un-authored system from the technological and political context this was initially about. You’re missing the forest for the trees here, in any case. The real point of the statement is that when you aren’t talking about something trivial like molecular-level noise, but the massive and systemically enforced prison slavery system in the US (you know, just to pick an example), it is absurd to say that the production and maintenance of such conditions is somehow contrary to the purpose of the US Justice System, or just some sad incident of fate rather than a lifelong cornerstone of the US economic-political system.
I’ve put dough on top of my computer to rise while playing games before because of the extra warmth, purpose of a system is what is does
I burnt a toast in the toaster. But ruining my bread is not the purpose of the toaster.
Similarly, if a fire alarm goes off on a false positive, that doesn’t mean the purpose of the fire alarm was to waste the firefighters time. Not every effect of a system is also its purpose.
But if your toaster ALWAYS ruined your toast, and you kept putting bread in it for, say, seventy years, and every single time it made a burned mess you say “But the toaster is supposed to make toast, it was designed with the intention to make toast, this burned mess is just bad luck/an unintended side effect/the result of a few bad apples” - then your epistemological paradigm might be lacking.
Yeah just the effect that KEEPS HAPPENING over and over again. As another poster put it, if a toaster burns toast every single time, then yeah, that’s a toaster for burning bread. That’s all its useful for.
My puter keeps me warm :)
My quantum computer doesn’t, unfortunately. That liquid nitrogen judst keeps ruining everything :(
If you make your own liquid nitrogen in house you can heat it that way
you do realize that computers run like, way less hot than they used to, right? Like many people have worked towards computers running not so hot.
Assuming that were the case, what is the point you are trying to make? “Getting hot” is not the purpose of a computer. Rather, its a side effect (that people are trying to avoid).
See, the existence of the cooling bit of the system suggests a different purpose. You’re making progress. So what parts of the social systems around you are meant to avoid the bad “side effects” you’re suggesting. Might help to pick a specific example to talk about. Prison industrial complex and its purpose being to make things worse and traumatize people rather than rehabilitation would be my suggestion. But pick whatever you want.
Rather, its a side effect (that people are trying to avoid).
Yeah, now imagine if people weren’t doing that and the statement that a computers purpose is to run hot would stand.
Umm actually dummy, there are 2 counterpoints to your problem
First, computers technically include abascuses and calculators, and they don’t require electricity to power and thus heat up… (So specify it’s an electronic one)
2nd, if a device technically produces a side-effect, unwanted or not, in the future, the maker will either deal with it by:
a. publicly announce that error and patch it up (eg. glitches in game)
b. use that, for a different Purpose (eg. using a bakery good identifier to find cancer)
If it follows the latter reasoning, what it does WILL become its purpose… it will become a feature, not a bug…
Until then, it’s up in the air whether its maker intended it or not…
First, computers technically include abascuses and calculators, and they don’t require electricity to power and thus heat up… (So specify it’s an electronic one)
Its obvious I was talking about an electric one. However, abacuses technically produce heat while being used (from friction) and my electric calculator does too. So maybe you should have specified if you meant an electric calculator… ;)
If it follows the latter reasoning, what it does WILL become its purpose
But the claim was that what it does CURRENTLY IS its purpose. You are just saying that eventually, people will learn to take advantage of the side effects (which may or may not actually happen IMO).
Its obvious I was talking about an electric one. However, abacuses technically produce heat while being used (from friction) and my electric calculator does too. So maybe you should have specified if you meant an electric calculator… ;)
Obviously, I should’ve specified that, though it takes a lot of effort to produce noticeable one…
But the claim was that what it does CURRENTLY IS its purpose. You are just saying that eventually, people will learn to take advantage of the side effects (which may or may not actually happen IMO).
Well, as I said, the intention is up in the air, so as long as the creator would neither deny or confirm it, via updates, we might consider it as its secondary purpose, if it STILL produces those side-effects CLEARLY, according to the creator…
But for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just give up the argument for now.
Would you say it’s not a purpose anymore if the creator clarifies they didn’t have any intentions about it? Or would it still be a purpose?
POSIWID is about counteracting the human tendency to ignore reality while citing the system’s intended purpose. If you want to be overly technical about it, someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out that “utility” would have been a better word than “purpose”. Given the history of the phrase, we can look at how it’s used and see that the phrase is functionally equivalent.
Makes sense, thank you.
Who decides what a computer is for? The buyer? The manufacturer? The brand CEO? The government? The silicon chip in the CPU?
For the buyer a computer is a gambling and pornography viewer. For the manufacturer a computer is a series of parts assembled to the Brand’s spec so it gives them enough money to continue operations. For the Brand CEO a computer is a symbolic token that increases shareholder value. For the government a computer is a surveillance device. For a silicon wafer, a computer is a change in voltage within its molecular structure (but I’m sure it doesn’t think too much about that).
Can we say any one of these is objectively correct? If I attach rat neurons to a computer, is the rat a computer? Is the computer a rat? We inevitably arrive at the classic Heraclitus vs. Parmenides to ask whether existence is still or in motion.
If I step into the Mississippi river, and then return a year later to find that same shore is on an oxbow lake instead, am I stepping in the same river twice? If in another year it fills in with silt and is tilled into farmland, can I still step in the same river thrice? Certain US state borders would certainly have you believe so. They freeze old river courses in time to maintain purely ideological separations of physical space into discrete units. A line on a map can’t stop the flow of water and silt any more than an engineer’s drawing can stop tunneling quantum particles. Is that really a side-effect when quantum particles are meant to tunnel? Is heat generation really a side effect when heat itself is an effect of the chemical processes in MOSFET circuits? If they didn’t release energy, they wouldn’t work at all now, would they? Dissipation of energy is required to change the states of atoms and molecules. So how can we say a computer isn’t meant to produce heat when it very clearly is?
