One Click Wikipedia Test
The proof is in the link
Continuing the series of articles about intellectual and scholarly standards. If you are looking for the first post in the series, it is here; please use buttons at the bottom of the page to navigate between the posts. And if you’d like to discuss the series, I also have a discord server.
In my previous article, I critiqued the idea of trying to derive anything “from first principles”. Today, let us take a look at someone trying to substitute his own fallible, mortal mind for basic research skills - and predictably fucking it up. His name is Scott Alexander Siskind.
The article we will be putting under our microscope is titled “Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does”. In it, Siskind is very confused by the meaning of the eponymous phrase, and rants about how people use it on twitter; see e.g.:
Consider the following claims
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
[Further claims omitted]
These are obviously false.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, but curing cancer is hard, so they only manage about two-thirds.
[Claims explanations omitted]
Am I being unfair here? Maybe the slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” was never meant to apply to situations like these?
[...]
Maybe I’m still missing some genuinely good and useful insight that POSIWID can be used for? I searched the phrase on X/Twitter to see how people were using it in the wild [...]
The man clearly read the phrase, invented a meaning for it within his own head, and did no research whatsoever before writing the blog post. And so he constructs hypotheticals, argues at length about the language, and all the while he cites no literature written about it, nothing.
(I hope I do not have to explain why opinions of twitter randos with less than ten likes are absolutely irrelevant and citing them as a “source” for anything is frankly an insult to the readers)
But how can I claim he did no research? Maybe there simply is no literature to be found, or it’s extremely obscure. Who am I to assert ignorance?
To prove that someone is utterly ignorant I use what I call the “one click wikipedia test”. It’s very simple: you open the wikipedia page for whatever topic is being discussed, and if their question is immediately answered (without clicking through to any of the sources! Remember, one click, the one to open the page!) then clearly they did pretty much no research whatsoever1.
Now, the keen-eyed among you will notice that Siskind’s article literally opens by linking to the wikipedia page of the same name in the very first sentence of the article. You would think that this would mean that he had at least read the page, now wouldn’t you? Since he is linking it?
Well, you’d be wrong. Let us do it for him. I won’t even bother to edit out the source numbers:
The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer,[1] who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”.[2] It is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate or promote it. When a system’s side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behaviour is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behaviour with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.
Beer coined POSIWID in his books and used it many times in public addresses.[3] Speaking to the University of Valladolid in October 2001, he said:[1]
According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.
This is very very transparent. But far be it for me to rely on wikipedia alone. Putting the words into google, the second result I got (right after wikipedia) was this article by the famously far-left news publication, Forbes. Here’s how the article concludes:
If anyone is calling out a gap between what your organization says and what it does, that’s a big opportunity for learning and improvement. And if most are declaring a significant gap, it’s time for a deeper examination into what’s going wrong.
The power of POSIWID is that it only calls for examination of two variables: words and deeds. Getting and holding those two variables in sync is a key to unlocking the full potential of your organization and its people.
Sure enough, it’s saying much the same things as wikipedia, because this isn’t a complex topic. POSIWID is a heuristic meant to re-focus the dialogue about a system onto its actual outcomes. That’s it, no more, no less.
It is, frankly, bizarre to me that Siskind did not manage to put this four-piece puzzle together, especially because he had written extensively about his struggles with getting a very minor medical study through an Institutional review board. It’s a perfect example of POSIWID: ethics boards are meant to safeguard patients, but in this case, the actual outcome is a waste of time and a lot of pointless bureaucracy. That’s it, hole in one. If someone is arguing that the board has to be kept around because it safeguards research standards, you apply POSIWID as a rhetorical strategy, and you are done.
This is really not complex stuff.
But even setting aside the fact that Siskind’s question is immediately clarified on the wikipedia page, can we take a closer look at his argument as a whole? He does not discuss what Stafford Beer meant by it, doesn’t try to go into the reasoning behind focusing the discussion on the actual results vs stated intentions, its potential benefits or downsides - no. Instead, he spends almost the entire article nitpicking the shit out of the phrase itself. He even proposes several “alternative phrasings”!
Now, Siskind clearly isn’t aware of this, but “The purpose of a system is what it does” is what is called a “slogan”. Bear with me here - a “slogan” is a short, memorable phrase that is used as a reference to some argument in a political or commercial context; you can chant it at a rally, you can put it on your presentation slide, you can use it in a speech - it’s a very versatile rhetorical tool.
Notably, the slogan isn’t the same thing as the argument itself. It physically cannot be, because it has to be short and punchy. It refers to an argument, but it cannot contain it; therefore, it is completely pointless to try and nitpick the exact phrasing. Imagine if you tried applying the same logic to other slogans - it would be a nightmare! Take “one person, one vote”, a classic of 20th century movements for universal suffrage; would Siskind try to argue the slogan means everyone only gets a singular vote in their entire life?
But here’s the real question. Why didn’t Siskind read a single thing about POSIWID before writing a whole article about it? He even linked wikipedia! How could this have happened?
Well, here’s my theory. I think that Siskind was rotting on twitter, as one does, and saw someone use a phrase he wasn’t familiar with. Then he got annoyed. It happens, it’s kind of the point of the whole website. Being a blogger, he quickly wrote a whole article complaining about it, but, just before he published it, figured - wait, what if his readers haven’t even heard of this phrase? Then the article wouldn’t make any sense. And so he found the wikipedia page and linked it just to explain what the phrase is, and didn’t even bother reading it.
Why didn’t he bother to read it? Because he didn’t think it was necessary. Because he felt confident. He has been writing articles for more than a decade, and has thousands of readers. He’s smart enough to intuit what the phrase means, right? I mean, it’s in plain english.
So why waste his time?
That’s what happens when you drink too deeply from the poisoned chalice of pure logic. You start to think that you being confused is the same thing as everyone else being wrong.
At that point, you might as well pluck your eyes out - they are of no use to you.
Notably, they do not have to have actually read Wikipedia specifically; as long as they got the same amount of information from any other source, I think it’s fine. Nor do they have to agree with what Wikipedia argues; there are well known cases where Wikipedia is misinformed, and many pages are stuck in the middle of editor wars, especially about recent politics. But as long as they can at least indicate what they are aware of the existence of the argument given by Wikipedia, I won’t object. That’s my baseline level.
"Imagine if you tried applying the same logic to other slogans - it would be a nightmare! Take “one person, one vote”, a classic of 20th century movements for universal suffrage; would Siskind try to argue the slogan means everyone only gets a singular vote in their entire life?"
I don't think this is a very fair comparison. "One person, one vote" is true given the clear and never forgotten clause "per election", whereas "The purpose of a system is what it does" is not so easy amended into "[Let's] re-focus the dialogue about a system onto its actual outcomes", and people don't amend it that way unless explicitly told. Therefore, the natural reading of "one person [should have] one vote" is true, whereas the natural reading of POSIWID is false. I think this matters, and that we shouldn't solemnly fling around slogans that are going to be naturally read as something that's false. The difference between the natural reading and the meaning you gave is large enough here that I think Twitter randos are kind of relevant, since the ubiquitous misuse of the term demonstrates its misleading construction. (Also, I think POSIWID's power as a piece of conversation re-centering rhetoric comes from its natural, incorrect reading, which is even more problematic. We shouldn't be misleading people, even if it's useful in refocusing discourse.)
I also don't think the case for your definition is as strong as you imply. The original quote, “[There is] no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”, really doesn't sound like a slogan at all to me, and sounds a lot like a statement that's trying to be propositionally true, or at least approximately true. Wikipedia calls POSIWID a heuristic, which is a metric POSIWID does poorly in. "The purpose of the New York bus system is to crush ants and emit CO2" is just not useful as an approximation. The Wikipedia quote doesn't really contradict the interpretation of POSIWID as an approximately correct heuristic, and in general the article doesn't give me the impression that it's about a propositionally false slogan. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote)