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From the pen of Scott: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
Scott offers several examples of why TPOASINWID results in absurd analysis. His examples are selected for maximal absurdity, so it's amusing that three out of four directly undermine his case, and the fourth is still a pretty good argument against his position.
This is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure cancer", because numerous considerations mitigate against curing cancer, things like economic considerations, bureaucratic constraints, and the work/life balance of the staff. And even when all these align such that curing this specific cancer is the system's goal, "curing cancer" might not mean what you think. I was especially amused by this exchange in the comments:
...written in the comment section of the author of Who By Very Slow Decay. Yes, very much like Chemo. This example, by itself, is probably the one I'd like Scott to address specifically.
It seems to me that this is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to defend Ukraine from hostile military action." America and NATO are very specifically and very openly throttling aide to keep Ukraine from being defeated outright, but also from being able to hit back too hard. Stalemate appears to be the deliberate objective, and certainly has been the openly-stated objective of many Ukraine supporters in this very forum.
One could make a similar statement about the Russian military as well. Any description of the Russian military that doesn't account for the realities of coup-proofing and endemic corruption is not going to make accurate predictions about the real world.
His intention here is to achieve absurdity by narrowing the scope to one specific result, rather than the sum of results, and in fairness, he provides examples of X randos arguing in this fashion. "The purpose of the British Government is to keep a lid on the British People while pursuing goals orthogonal to their interests" seems a more parsimonious description, but even Scott's version seems more accurate than something like "the purpose of the British Government is to execute the will of the British people as expressed through democratic elections".
Again with the absurdity through inappropriate narrowing of scope. But even with a framing as uncharitable as this, it's worth noting that all systems have costs, and that description of a system that ignores the costs and how those costs are managed is a worse description than one that centers those costs. This is true even for descriptions that only consists of one significant cost, because the benefits of systems are generally far more obvious than the costs and thus the missing information is easier to find.
This is a bad article, and Scott should feel bad.
I always interpreted POSIWID as meaning that sustained normalized deviance is no deviance at all. If, say, a big tech OS project fails to ship year after year and company leadership fails to replace the project's management, then we have to conclude that either 1) the company-system is not under the control of agents with the ability to modify the world to achieve their goals or 2) the purpose of the OS project is not to produce an OS.
Otherwise, why wouldn't the OS project management been nuked from orbit after the fourth or fifth annual failure?
POSIWID doesn't mean, as Scott strawmans, that any side effect of a system is desirable or a failure of a system to fully achieve that goal reveals that goal as a lie. Total nonsense. If a cancer ward were curing only half its patients and despite having funding and expertise refused to install a new radiation machine that would increase the cure rate to 2/3, and if hospital administration tolerated this state of affairs, then we would be forced to conclude that THAT SPECIFIC cancer ward's purpose was not to cure cancer.
POSIWID only works in negation
Are you saying that he cherry-picked the tweets he screenshotted, and the median usage of POSIWID is much more nuanced?
One might argue he cherrypicked for stupid usages the moment he chose to get his example from tweets.
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