(2024-05-08) Davies Seeing Like A Screwdriver

Dan Davies: seeing like a screwdriver. I, somewhat foolishly, got into an argument on social media last week with someone over the slogan “POSIWID”

But “someone who was wrong on the internet” objected to its use, saying that it was conspiratorial and unfair and that instead we should talk about unintended consequences a lot more.

the whole point of the slogan is that we can’t tell from the outside whether something was unintended or not. And for another, “unintended consequences” is all too often a first cousin to “perverse incentives”

I thought that “the purpose of a screwdriver is to drive screws” was a reasonably straightforward sentence, demonstrating that attributing a purpose to something doesn’t involve anything like a conscious belief1. Other people insisted that any such statement has to be unpacked into statements about intentions. It didn’t really go very far.

So I thought I’d go back to Stafford Beer to look at the context in which the original aphorism was coined. Here it is, from p98 of “Diagnosing the System”:

The “disingenuous” question referred to at the start is effectively the question of “whether the system is capable of handling all the information produced by its environment”.

So the context here is a very important point which distinguishes cybernetics from information theory; the distinction between “information” (something that plays a causal role in a decision making system) and “data” (assemblages of facts and sequences of bits). The question of “purpose” arises precisely because this is how you decide what constitutes a relevantly different state of the world.

And the question of “relevantly different state of the world” is determined at a number of levels

As I say in the book, it’s easy to mistake POSIWID for a much cruder, “it is what it is” kind of cynicism. It’s actually a much deeper concept in my view.

The purpose of a system is exactly what is being worked out every day, as that system reproduces and maintains itself, decides what events it is going to react to and how it is going to balance present interests and future possibilities. And so the doing of things is, identically, the creation of purpose.