This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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:
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:
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:
“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:
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.
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 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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link