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| ▲ | preg_match a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's close, the purpose of bureaucracy is better controls, auditability, accountability, and security. All of those not only take time, they are "made up" of time. There's a trade-off with efficiency, it's inherent to the problem. The faster you do something, the less chance you have to prevent catastrophe. So, if you slow things down, intentionally, you have a better chance of making the right decisions. It's why approval processes exist. If everyone was perfectly aligned and made no mistakes, then we would never need approval processes for, say, customer data. We would just allow even the lowest on the ladder to access any data they want, whenever they want, no questions asked. And it would be fine, because they would only use it to make their job faster, no downside. But it doesn't work that way in reality. In reality, we have to purposefully slow things down so we get a chance to reflect. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It's close, the purpose of bureaucracy is better controls, auditability, accountability, and security. All of those not only take time, they are "made up" of time. There's a trade-off with efficiency, it's inherent to the problem. The faster you do something, the less chance you have to prevent catastrophe. Except that the trade off is frequently a false dichotomy. Some of the best and most effective controls are automated systems. The audit logs from a computer are dramatically more likely to be accurate than ones filled out on paper by hand. A pressure relief valve doesn't get the flu and then have someone filling in for them who isn't as experienced at doing it manually. The slower you do something, the more likely you are to miss something important because you exhausted your time/resources on something unimportant, or that the process gets burdensome enough to cause the people on the ground to bypass it in its entirety. It's also common for the output of a process to itself be critical for safety, security, health, etc., and then any delays to the process make its output unavailable when its output being available can be a matter of life or death. This one is especially hard to see in a bureaucratic environment because people frequently aren't aware of everything which is downstream of them that they could be holding up. |
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| ▲ | nullc a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The purpose of a system is what it does. | | |
| ▲ | danaris 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sure, but "taking up time unnecessarily" is only what bureaucracy does from a particular outside perspective. If you actually look at bureaucracy, what you'll see is that, on the whole, it keeps many abuses and neglects in check, though there are some who manage to abuse it to cause trouble as well. You can't just say "this is what I perceive this system as doing" and then throw POSIWID at anyone who disagrees with you. | |
| ▲ | tomcatfish a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does" (2025) www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The premise of "the purpose of a system is what it does" is that if it did something the people in control of the system didn't want then they would change it, from which the implication is that they like what it does and want it to keep doing that, i.e. that's the system's purpose. There are real instances of that happening, e.g. the purpose of zoning rules is to constrain the housing supply. It isn't an unintended consequence, there are people in actual reality who lobby for things like density restrictions under disingenuous pretenses because "we want to charge higher rents to tenants" or "we want housing prices to go up forever even if it means young people get priced out of home ownership" are not sympathetic motives. The problem is naturally that the quip is false whenever the reason the system fails is incompetence, lack of resources/information, etc. rather than ulterior motives. Which is also why it's a meme, because it's essentially the inverse of Hanlon's razor and therefore becomes the thing people reach for when they want to insinuate malice rather than stupidity. The problem with both is, of course, that it isn't always malice but it also isn't never malice. The example from the thread is basically perfect, because bureaucracy is both at the same time. Some of the rules were put there by honest people with honest goals, but not all of them. Meanwhile this (see "General Interference with Organizations and Production"): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184 | | |
| ▲ | nullc a day ago | parent [-] | | "The purpose of a system is what it does" is, in my view, a statement about accountability. It's an answer to "it causes this or that harm? Well, that's not the purpose of the system". We should reject those arguments: The purposes is what it does. It takes a particular kind of rationalist-cult-addled weaponized autism to strawman this basic and important position. (not referring to you, of course :)) It might well be literally false in any specific case-- systems often have unintended and unexpected consequences and in large systems the unintended effects are often more significant than the primary effects. But it is never acceptable to dismiss those on the basis that they're unintended. We are no less responsible for the systems we create, control, and (often) impose upon others because of some argument about their "purpose"-- and sure, sometimes the effect truly is intended and someone is just lying about it but we don't need to go down that rathole. If a system's 'purpose' was somehow different than what it does we must adapt it or abolish it, or otherwise we must admit that we accept what it does, that we expect and intend what it does to continue, and that we who are responsible for it are responsible for all its consequences-- what it does is its purpose either by actual intent or because we failed to eliminate the system. If the standard of care of treatment for cancer treatment results in 30% mortality, and a facility achieves that-- then we can say that it's purpose is to provide that standard of care. The purposes is what it does doesn't imply that such the facility it trying to kill people. It's purposes is to provide a service which includes in its effect a level of mortality, and its existence is desirable in spite of the death because we believe the alternative is worse, because e.g. we believe without it the mortality in those patients would be 50% instead. The statement is a rejection of often self-serving claims about motivations as excuses. This is particularly acute for regulatory regimes (or the procedural artifacts of them)-- as they're imposed on people against their will and "just don't do that" is always an alternative. To continue existing any such scheme must justify its existence on the basis of "what it does" vs where we'd be without it-- not on some lofty argument about the intentions behind it. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is actually a good point. The purpose of the New York bus system isn't to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide, but its purpose also isn't just to transport New Yorkers. Its purpose is to transport New Yorkers by emitting four billion pounds of carbon dioxide. They're choosing to do it that way instead of doing something else, and instead of doing nothing. And then it's kind of hyperbolic rhetoric to claim the purpose is only the bad thing the system does, but it is actually doing the bad thing, so then if you want to claim that its purpose isn't to do that, maybe get it to stop doing that. | | |
| ▲ | Vaushite 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's also likely that "keep the bosses rich" is the purpose of most currently existing institutions that make money. I actually don't think anyone involved gives a shit about the carbon dioxide. Even oil barons don't - they care about selling oil, and if an emissionless way to burn oil were discovered, they wouldn't mind. "... using oil" may be part of the purpose. |
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| ▲ | bothers a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | p00ki3 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Come on, obviously context matters and reducing apples and oranges to the same thing with such generalization is nonsense Grammatically correct but so are many Superman comics and I have yet to see a real Superman; educated language use is not evidence the writer made a meaningful point The behavior of many a ghoul in Washington should make it clear a lot of the bureaucratic fuckery is just to insulate certain people from accountability And we can neatly set aside that in healthcare it's different and much (if not all) is important safety protocol | | |
| ▲ | gustavus a day ago | parent [-] | | Response to objections to Obviously POSWID is not What it does
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment... | | |
| ▲ | p00ki3 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh look more rhetoric the grammatical rules for which only make sense within themselves in some reductive recursive way until the point is achieved and the syntax structure ends I can do that too. What obligation to accept this has any meaningful relationship to my existence? I agree with Lecun there is no intelligence embedded implicitly to language syntax; but he's wrong about code because it does capture an observable physical state relative to a machine. Context matters. The same has yet to be said of human semantics as awareness of them is never uniformly distributed. That's why small models uniquely tuned to local context and ability will eventually succeed as everyone will just run their own little inference loop on their device telemetry and IO And then with our local hospitals compute infra perhaps we can synthesize designer personalized drugs rather than continue with over-centralized planning Maxwell's equations didn't work until he quit trying to account for entirely simulated abstraction levers and pulleys because that's how physical reality works. We don't have to simulate all states of biology just hot fix over time. For a long time AI was presumed to never be workable until "why do reality/physics/big bangs/black holes exist?" was resolved. Hm. But language is leaky abstraction and never meant to be fully representative of reality. Just some lightweight cognitive triggers to light up neural happy paths that invoke memory of sensory input; education. It's what language is for and what it does. This is just a restatement that life is about chasing utility. I agree. But utilitarian systems designed for a purpose do 100% exist. |
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| ▲ | Vaushite a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The guy is just huffing copium because he missed the point, it seems. It seems his process is to pick a system, pick one thing it does, observe that doesn't seem to be the main purpose and then declare the principle dead. Let's focus on one of the examples he gives: > [POSIWID implies that] The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide [and this is obviously absurd] But that's not what the bus system does, is it? That's only one thing it does and it's the least purposeful thing it does, as if you chose that one on purpose. I'd sooner think the purpose of the NYC bus system is to move money from government coffers to oil barons, or to placate left-wing protestors, or to satisfy a sustainability checklist item, or to increase the employment rate in NYC than to think the CO2 is the point. |
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