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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.
__
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.
To me I think the entire debate has missed the point altogether. While it might be a "deepity", that's not the source of cross-purposes!
Let me make a useful analogy, and honestly this really should have been Scott's approach. In statistics and machine learning, you have something called a "confusion matrix": you are trying to classify something, and you are either correct or incorrect. In each cell, you have the true positives, false positives, false negatives, and true negatives. You need all of them to correctly decide if your classification has acceptable tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs are problem-dependent. Also, some measures don't tell the full story - a classification can be highly "accurate", but if you didn't have many of one class to begin with, this number is deceiving, because you're essentially just juicing your numbers with the "easy" cases (simple but common example). You need to dig deeper.
In the case of police, as an illustration, "what the system does" could plausibly focus on any of these cells: action that is justified that cops should do and do successfully (true positive) vs action that is unjustified and causes bad things to happen (false positive) vs stuff the police ignore but should have done something about (false negative) vs stuff the police should ignore, and actually do ignore (this could be trivial stuff, or it could be declining to take action to protect broader civil or legal liberties). There are four cells of action/inaction and justified/unjustified, each meaningful on their own, but not only that, there are like, at least eight different ratios (see here) you can compute that all mean something different, and have distinct and important real-world implications. For example, we might say "policing is racially biased" but that statement alone needs substantial clarification. Arguably, you can't actually contain it within a single phrase, you might need a full sentence if not two. Because "bias" could mean a lot of things, and have different causalities on top! Do you mean white people get pulled over more? That white people get let off with warnings more? That identical crimes get different punishments? Do we care more about the ratio, of given being pulled over, does the cop find a crime? Or do we care more about, given someone is guilty, how often do the police catch them? What about innocent victims, wrongly convicted, how high do we weight that? What about police response times, what about geography, we can go on. Do proportions matter more, or absolute numbers? When talking about systems, a simple conversation is almost inherently impossible. So yes, POSIWID is doomed from the start there.
LOTS of politics is like this, people quite often get stuck and make judgements based on just one or two pieces of information from the matrix, or a single computed ratio. To use Scott's example, police beating a suspect is obviously a false positive in a loose sense - action the police took, which was bad, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. If we're talking about the system as a whole, you can't just look at that. You need to make an argument that the balance of all the cells is way off - and even then, abolition of the system often isn't the answer, especially if the "true positive" cell still has significant value for society.
In my opinion, everything stems from a values disagreement, over how strongly to weight "false positives", i.e. actions taken by an institution, often a hot-button one, that result in negative consequences. In theory, a POSIWID advocate is saying that "the ratio of false positives and true positives" (i.e. all affirmative actions a system takes and the associated results, good and bad) is "out of whack". That's fine to say. That's an important conversation to have. You don't even need to talk about intent there (though you probably should) to have a good conversation based on facts and weighted by personal values, even a few opinions. In practice, however, many POSIWID advocates (that Scott skewers) focus entirely on the "false positives", and obviously that is both illogical and potentially bad faith. I'm inclined, however, to say that these dynamics have more to do with people not being thoughtful and considered enough in their takes, plus internet dynamics, than they do genuine stupidity, for lack of a better term. I still think the underlying disconnect is one of values (after all, we have to subjectively weight each cell and ratio differently, and this is compounded and made messy by the news and political environment), but the vocabulary is genuinely difficult.
No wonder that Twitter especially has a problem with this? As I explained, exploring the tradeoffs in even a simple system's "confusion matrix" requires full English sentences.
Edit: I'm conflicted on the proper use of bolding. Reverting to minimal
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