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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.
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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.
I'll agree about it apparently being a scissor statement, given the responses so far, but...
This is not at all obviously true. This is the crux of the entire conversation.
I guess it really is a scissor statement, because to me, the use of the statement, as rhetoric, seems extremely obviously, and Scott entirely whiffs it. And I don't think it's about giving in to cynicism. It's about naming that different groups of people having different amounts of power in systems, as well as different values and worldviews, that this shapes their rhetoric in complicated ways, and participants in some of those groups can be protected from the rhetoric of other, more powerful groups if they can be taught to think about what systems are actually doing, rather than living in other people's rhetoric about what those systems are supposed to be doing.
Say that my wife and I participate in telling our kids about Santa and giving them gifts from Santa, and it's a happy ritual, connecting their experience to our our own experiences from our childhood. We have a lot of power in the relationship compared to our kids, we can get away with bending the truth if we think there's some cultural good to it all, and if they asked about whether Santa was real when they're small, we would probably fudge the truth about it to keep the happy ritual going, and we could get away with it. But there's absolutely no need for cynicism here - it's much more complicated than saying we were lying to them, because we would be inclined to think that "is Santa real" isn't even asking the right questions about that tradition, we would likely recognize that a 5 year old isn't even really in the right position to understand why we participate in the rituals we do, and we would expect that later, when they're older, they'll understand what we were doing and probably keep the tradition going.
A radical child activist (?) who came along and looked at this system might try to shake my kids out of their Santa belief, if that activist thought the entire enterprise was bad for my kids and needed to be radically overthrown, by adopting a "the purpose of a system is what it does" stance. Because that paragraph that I just wrote, which is something like a functional / sociological description of the Santa ritual, is a really strong inoculation against literally believing in Santa; the sociological explanation of why we do the Santa ritual sounds pretty compelling, and it makes belief in literal Santa much more difficult, or least plausibly it does (except we're talking about 5 year olds here, so my just so story is hitting its limits).
Now, this example is a toy one and likely (to most readers) pretty benign. But arguably, this sort of situation comes up constantly in society between different groups of people with different amounts of power and different beliefs about the broader good in the world and how to achieve those goods. I mean, it's no hard to change my Santa story just a bit, swapping parents with intellectuals, kids with normal people, and Santa with socialism, and you've described much of the 20th century. It's the core idea of Plato's noble lie, too. Or of Steve Jobs standing around on a stage, making all sorts of charismatic proclamations that somehow become true enough by people believing them and changing their expectations and how they act when it came to adopting new technology that went on to impact the social world. It's why faith is stressed in certain major religious traditions, too. The cultural scripts that people load up in their heads change how they experience the world and how they behave, and clean mapping to empirical reality is not the main driver here.
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is in the same skeptical tradition as open source programmers saying "I don't need to see your advertising or design doc - please show me the running code instead". Or the tradition of Marx saying he's a materialist and has no use for idealism or ideology. Or sociology tabling the truth claims of religion and instead theorizing about how different religions function in the world (and thus wrecking their foundations in the process). It's economists examining how people actually behave, in aggregate, in the face of incentives, ignoring questions of how they ought to behave. It's the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Bulverism, ignoring someone's argument and psychoanalyzing what forces caused them to make that argument instead. (And I'm not saying any of these are good or bad, for that matter).
To me, that's the obvious rhetorical use of POSIWID, especially on the dissident right. It's primary use is to shake certain people free from inhabiting the rhetorical frames of other powerful, status quo groups of people.
This. Only modelling the world on realized, actual outputs leads to very sub-optimal models.
You observe A asking B out for a date and getting rejected. You conclude that A likes to get rejected.
You observe C playing the lottery, and losing. You conclude that C just has a strict preference for having less money.
You observe D playing a round of Russian roulette, and surviving. You conclude that D is showing no signs of self-harming behavior since the outcome was harmless.
It is generally better to model agents (humans, armies, chess programs, dogs, ASIs, ...) as have their own world view and a utility function, and ascribe intent to their actions. If your system is larger, than game theory and Moloch enter the picture. And outcomes remain highly relevant, of course.
You want to be able to say "this non-effective charity is trying to do X, but only accomplishing that k times per 1M$ of donations, while that charity is accomplishing X n times per 1M$ of donations, so we should raise the question if there is some incongruity between their stated mission and their actual behavior, or if they operate under additional constraints". Perhaps after further investigation you will conclude that the charity is actually just a business selling the warm fuzzy feeling of doing good to their donors, and their agents are either cynical or in denial about that.
Or take my alchemist searching for the philosopher's stone while inhaling a lot of mercury vapor. You want to point at the fact that he is not succeeding in finding the stone. It could be that he is really into inhaling mercury, or that searching for the stone is just a high status occupation, but it is also possible that he is genuinely trying to find it as hard as he can, and simply operates under a different world model.
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