"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)
"per election" is not a part of the slogan, this is entirely your own addition; the phrase is not even present in the wikipedia article you are citing. And of course a literal reading of "one person, one vote, per election" would prohibit all forms of multi-vote elections, such as the extremely common situation where multiple electoral offices are elected on the same ballot (state governor and senator and some local official and some referendum on policy, etc), as evidently the person has multiple votes in that election. This is not the intention of the slogan, very obviously. Nor is the intention of the slogan to prohibit more complex election schemes such as quadratic voting, where you do outright have multiple votes in the exact same vote. You claim that the meaning is clear just from the slogan when it still isn't, even with your addition, not without additional assumptions not present in it - which is the entire point. "Per election" being, of course, one such assumption.
As for your claim that the POSIWID idea is unclear from the phrase itself, this is, once again, entirely subjective. Personally, it was entirely clear to me what it meant the first time I read it. More to the point, it's completely irrelevant, because _with the exception of twitter_, the phrase is never used or seen or heard in a vacuum; it's immediately followed up by a discussion of the actual causes, which makes its meaning evident. Nobody is mislead at any point, you are simply wrong here.
(When it comes to twitter, my advice is to simply get off twitter and touch grass.)
Now for the twitter randos. They do not demonstrate "ubiquitous misuse" even remotely. All they demonstrate is that there _exist_ people who misuse it (though half of the examples given by Siskind don't even do that), which is vacuous. For pretty much any conceivable claim, no matter how idiotic, there will exist several people on twitter who endorse it. This is simply the law of large numbers when applied to a social network with what, five hundred million users? To demonstrate _ubiquity_, you would need to do an actual count of different usages, which had not been done.
Finally, let's address the definition. First of all, it's not *mine*. It's Stafford Beer's. Here is what he says on page 99 of "Diagnosing the system for organizations":
> Inspired by this purpose, and required to act by its proper inputs and the perturbations that assail it, the viable system's State 1 produces actions — and for itself a new, resultant, State 2.
> A GOOD OBSERVER will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the resultant state. Hence the key aphorism:
> The purpose of a system is what it does.
> There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it consistently fails to do.
This is preceded by a very conventional feedback cycle diagram, the heart of all cybernetic analysis. He calls it an "aphorism", which is simply a synonym for slogan. All I am doing is telling you what the guy already said, something like forty years ago; there is no interpretation involved at any stage of this process.
(The dichotomy between slogan and heuristic is likewise bizarre. It can be both?)
That _you personally_ are not impressed with this heuristic* is not my problem. Neither is it Stafford Beer's. It is contained within an extremely sensible and technical work, and refers back to it, as any slogan does. If you want to _understand it_, then I suggest you simply read his work; it's very easy to find. The heuristic itself is perfectly fine.
* primarily because you are misunderstanding it by (for some reason, I presume rhetoric) selecting a narrow subset of outcomes of the NYCBS, as opposed to analyzing the *entire* set of outcomes, which of course involves moving passengers. A cybernetician would never make such a mistake, this is extremely basic stuff.
>"per election" is not a part of the slogan, this is entirely your own addition; the phrase is not even present in the wikipedia article you are citing.
I don't really see what this has to do with my argument. My point is that no one hears the slogan "one man, one vote" and naturally assumes "one vote per lifetime", but people do assume POSIWID means "~everything a system does is part of its purpose/there is no point in claiming the purpose of a system is something it consistently fails to do.". I also don't think "one man one vote" is ever misunderstood as making a claim about ranked choice voting or concurrent elections.
>For pretty much any conceivable claim, no matter how idiotic, there will exist several people on twitter who endorse it.
I've never seen anyone misuse "one man, one vote" in any of the ways you describe. I think the ubiquitous misuse case is far stronger for POSIWID.
> That _you personally_ are not impressed with this heuristic* is not my problem. [...] selecting a narrow subset of outcomes of the NYCBS
I didn't intend for my argument to be subjective, and my example wasn't meant to be an exhaustive description. To rephrase: the set of all things a system does is far, far larger than the set of all things a system is supposed to do, and the latter almost always contains elements the former does not. Any approximation that differs this much from the truth is a bad approximation, and therefore a bad heuristic.
> (The dichotomy between slogan and heuristic is likewise bizarre. It can be both?)
I wasn't trying to strike any dichotomy between heuristic and slogan and I apologize if my argument was unclear in that respect. The point I was making is that the POSIWID cannot be judged only in terms of its utility as a slogan, and when it's judged in other terms it doesn't do very well. (I don't think POSIWID does well as a slogan either, but that's what the rest of my argument was about.)
Secondly, re: the slogan thing, I'm not sure if I can agree that 'aphorism' and 'slogan' are synonyms. Firstly, neither Google nor Webster lists them as such, and secondly, their respective definitions are:
slo·gan
/ˈslōɡən/
noun
noun: slogan; plural noun: slogans
a short and striking or memorable phrase used in advertising.
aphorism
noun
aph·o·rism ˈa-fə-ˌri-zəm
Synonyms of aphorism
1 : a concise statement of a principle
2 : a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment : adage
I think these are meaningfully different. A slogan is striking and memorable, an aphorism is a statement of general truth. (I think slogans should also be naturally read as something that is true.) If POSIWID isn't trying to be true at all, but simply a reference to an outside work or idea unrelated to the idea "the purpose of a system is what it does", then it would fail the "principle" and "truth" clauses of the definition.
(The tone of your response makes me fear I've come across more combative than I've intended. I apologize if this is the case. Thank you for your response.)
"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)
This is purely subjective sophistry.
"per election" is not a part of the slogan, this is entirely your own addition; the phrase is not even present in the wikipedia article you are citing. And of course a literal reading of "one person, one vote, per election" would prohibit all forms of multi-vote elections, such as the extremely common situation where multiple electoral offices are elected on the same ballot (state governor and senator and some local official and some referendum on policy, etc), as evidently the person has multiple votes in that election. This is not the intention of the slogan, very obviously. Nor is the intention of the slogan to prohibit more complex election schemes such as quadratic voting, where you do outright have multiple votes in the exact same vote. You claim that the meaning is clear just from the slogan when it still isn't, even with your addition, not without additional assumptions not present in it - which is the entire point. "Per election" being, of course, one such assumption.
As for your claim that the POSIWID idea is unclear from the phrase itself, this is, once again, entirely subjective. Personally, it was entirely clear to me what it meant the first time I read it. More to the point, it's completely irrelevant, because _with the exception of twitter_, the phrase is never used or seen or heard in a vacuum; it's immediately followed up by a discussion of the actual causes, which makes its meaning evident. Nobody is mislead at any point, you are simply wrong here.
(When it comes to twitter, my advice is to simply get off twitter and touch grass.)
Now for the twitter randos. They do not demonstrate "ubiquitous misuse" even remotely. All they demonstrate is that there _exist_ people who misuse it (though half of the examples given by Siskind don't even do that), which is vacuous. For pretty much any conceivable claim, no matter how idiotic, there will exist several people on twitter who endorse it. This is simply the law of large numbers when applied to a social network with what, five hundred million users? To demonstrate _ubiquity_, you would need to do an actual count of different usages, which had not been done.
Finally, let's address the definition. First of all, it's not *mine*. It's Stafford Beer's. Here is what he says on page 99 of "Diagnosing the system for organizations":
> Inspired by this purpose, and required to act by its proper inputs and the perturbations that assail it, the viable system's State 1 produces actions — and for itself a new, resultant, State 2.
> A GOOD OBSERVER will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the resultant state. Hence the key aphorism:
> The purpose of a system is what it does.
> There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it consistently fails to do.
This is preceded by a very conventional feedback cycle diagram, the heart of all cybernetic analysis. He calls it an "aphorism", which is simply a synonym for slogan. All I am doing is telling you what the guy already said, something like forty years ago; there is no interpretation involved at any stage of this process.
(The dichotomy between slogan and heuristic is likewise bizarre. It can be both?)
That _you personally_ are not impressed with this heuristic* is not my problem. Neither is it Stafford Beer's. It is contained within an extremely sensible and technical work, and refers back to it, as any slogan does. If you want to _understand it_, then I suggest you simply read his work; it's very easy to find. The heuristic itself is perfectly fine.
* primarily because you are misunderstanding it by (for some reason, I presume rhetoric) selecting a narrow subset of outcomes of the NYCBS, as opposed to analyzing the *entire* set of outcomes, which of course involves moving passengers. A cybernetician would never make such a mistake, this is extremely basic stuff.
Firstly, some clarifications:
>"per election" is not a part of the slogan, this is entirely your own addition; the phrase is not even present in the wikipedia article you are citing.
I don't really see what this has to do with my argument. My point is that no one hears the slogan "one man, one vote" and naturally assumes "one vote per lifetime", but people do assume POSIWID means "~everything a system does is part of its purpose/there is no point in claiming the purpose of a system is something it consistently fails to do.". I also don't think "one man one vote" is ever misunderstood as making a claim about ranked choice voting or concurrent elections.
>For pretty much any conceivable claim, no matter how idiotic, there will exist several people on twitter who endorse it.
I've never seen anyone misuse "one man, one vote" in any of the ways you describe. I think the ubiquitous misuse case is far stronger for POSIWID.
> That _you personally_ are not impressed with this heuristic* is not my problem. [...] selecting a narrow subset of outcomes of the NYCBS
I didn't intend for my argument to be subjective, and my example wasn't meant to be an exhaustive description. To rephrase: the set of all things a system does is far, far larger than the set of all things a system is supposed to do, and the latter almost always contains elements the former does not. Any approximation that differs this much from the truth is a bad approximation, and therefore a bad heuristic.
> (The dichotomy between slogan and heuristic is likewise bizarre. It can be both?)
I wasn't trying to strike any dichotomy between heuristic and slogan and I apologize if my argument was unclear in that respect. The point I was making is that the POSIWID cannot be judged only in terms of its utility as a slogan, and when it's judged in other terms it doesn't do very well. (I don't think POSIWID does well as a slogan either, but that's what the rest of my argument was about.)
Secondly, re: the slogan thing, I'm not sure if I can agree that 'aphorism' and 'slogan' are synonyms. Firstly, neither Google nor Webster lists them as such, and secondly, their respective definitions are:
slo·gan
/ˈslōɡən/
noun
noun: slogan; plural noun: slogans
a short and striking or memorable phrase used in advertising.
aphorism
noun
aph·o·rism ˈa-fə-ˌri-zəm
Synonyms of aphorism
1 : a concise statement of a principle
2 : a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment : adage
I think these are meaningfully different. A slogan is striking and memorable, an aphorism is a statement of general truth. (I think slogans should also be naturally read as something that is true.) If POSIWID isn't trying to be true at all, but simply a reference to an outside work or idea unrelated to the idea "the purpose of a system is what it does", then it would fail the "principle" and "truth" clauses of the definition.
(The tone of your response makes me fear I've come across more combative than I've intended. I apologize if this is the case. Thank you for your response.)