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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.
Scott comes off as cowardly and needlessly pretentious. Doesn’t everyone know that bureaucracy and bad laws are part of the issue?
Change the laws and departmental policy to make them overrule vibes, which is how most laws work. Do vibes overrule IRS laws?
You can trivially solve this by increasing the time of commitment according to infractions over time.
You build them. What kind of point even is this? You build buildings. They can be built. They are frequently built. Who does Scott think he is writing to that the reader would no longer support a cause because it requires a city to build buildings?
Vote for any of the millions of Americans who can, and do, competently build buildings.
A reasonable amount of time. What is a reasonable amount of time? Low enough that a person whose condition is manageable can get out soon, and high enough that a person whose condition is consistently unmanageable stays in longer. So an intuitive and “normal person able to think” solution is to increase it by infraction, and for the institution to gradually allow the patient freedom so as to check his capacity.
Most normal people thinking about this issue would be able to solve it. My personal take is that you go from full institutionalization to check-ups, and if you fail checkups you go back to the institution.
Etc. Nothing Scott wrote can justify his assertion that “it might be time to hit the books, learn about hexamethyldecawhatever, and make sure that what you’re demanding is possible, coherent, and doesn’t have so many tradeoffs that experts inevitably recoill”.
This is a category error. Public displays of psychosis are not found in the median ”transitionally” homeless person staying at a friend’s or relative’s.
The final point you touch on is something that really annoys me about the homeless argument. One side is complaining about the homeless (ie the person who has been living on the street for a long time, strung out, bad smelling, bad acting, drug addict). The side that simply wants to build more housing says “we can tackle housing by giving homeless shelter; don’t you know most homeless are only homeless for a few weeks.” The two are entirely different groups of people and the latter know it. They know it. But they choose to be dishonest because in reality they aren’t trying to solve the homeless problem. They are trying to solve a housing problem. And they will use homeless as a pawn.
What’s your evidence that they aren’t actually trying to solve the homeless problem?
For me, it's a classic example of the purpose of a system is what it does. California pours money into their homeless problem and the result is mostly that you have a bunch of well-funded NGOs that make it easier to be a homeless junkie. If they are genuinely trying to solve the problem, they're shockingly bad at it.
"the purpose of a system is what it does" is a bullshit argument, though (in any context). It only works if you assume that humans are perfect and achieve what they set out to do, but we know for a fact they aren't. Thus, imperfect humans will sometimes create a system that does something other than what they intended to begin with. It doesn't prove that their intent (i.e. the purpose of the system) was what they got.
The point of having the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to point out that intentions don't matter. Yes, someone intended X to be the outcome, but the system reliably does Y instead, and very quickly, other actors start relying on the Y-outcomes of the system because The Purpose of a System is What It Does, and rely on it to continue to do Y.
In this case, people intended for these NGOs to solve homelessness, but because of game theory and principal agent problems, it, uh, does other things. But those intentions are irrelevant because we now have a machine that redistributes funds for moral maze like reasons and a whole bunch of people who rely on this system to keep doing that.
That still fails as an argument, because it requires misusing the word "purpose" to mean the outcome instead of the intention. Also, WhiningCoil was explicitly drawing conclusions about the intentions of the people who made the system based on the outcome.
I reject the idea that purpose has connotations of intention, and suspect that a large part of contention around the obvious truism that "The Purpose of a System is What It Does" comes from this conflation. If I were to say "The purpose of the mitochondria is to generate ATP, which is then consumed by the rest of the cell to power it," this sentence is properly using 'purpose' by evaluating What The System Does, in a case where there could not be an intention.
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