(2025-04-13) Rival The Purpose Of POSIWID Is What It Does

Rival Voices: The Purpose of POSIWID Is What It Does. The phrase POSIWID—“The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does”—has been making the rounds on Twitter. In response, Scott Alexander just published a Substack post arguing the opposite: that the purpose of a system is “obviously not” what it does. 2025-04-11-AlexanderComeOnObviouslyThePurposeOfASystemIsNotWhatItDoes

He concludes that POSIWID serves no real function beyond making people paranoid and hateful.
So, it’s up to me, a paranoid hater, to defend it.

let me state my thesis directly:

Obviously, the purpose of POSIWID is to make lying harder.

fair enough. Systems do fail, some outputs are accidental, and some results are side-effects.
But into “some outcomes are unintended,” he smuggles in a much stronger claim: that we should never infer hidden purpose from observed behavior.

Of course systems sometimes succeed at goals they’re deliberately concealing. Often, concealment is the strategy: the only way to achieve certain goals is by hiding them.

What makes Scott’s position even stranger is his involvement in the Effective Altruism movement, which exists only because so many charities are ineffective.

Does Scott really believe all charity inefficiency is just well-meaning incompetence?
That none of it is ill-intentioned competence?
That none of it is grift?
Because if he does, he’s wrong.

here are four quick counter-examples to show it’s a useful one

concealment takes many forms. Everything from grift in fake charities, to geopolitical fronting through fake “NGOs”, to soft-power interference and narrative laundering by international and national institutes.

1. Charities

In 2015, the FTC shut down a network of cancer charities (CFA and affiliates) that raised $187 million and spent it on luxury cars, salaries, and professional fundraisers. They claimed to help patients. They didn’t.
That’s not a glitch. That was the actual purpose

2. GONGOs

Charities often are NGOs—non-governmental organizations.

But look at USAID. In many cases, NGOs are government-funded and used as a tool of statecraft—doing things that would be politically toxic to do directly.
These are so common it was necessary to come up with a name for them in the 1980s(!)— GONGOs: Government-Organized NGOs.

You know what else is clunky? Asking, “Are non-governmental organizations linked to the government?” It sounds like a contradiction.

3. The Confucius Institutes

The Confucius Institutes exist worldwide with the stated purpose of “promoting Chinese language and culture”.
Now maybe I am just a paranoid hater. Very well. But how come so many institutions shut their Confucius Institutes down?

Are they all just paranoid haters? Or was the Confucius Institute behaving not as described, but as designed—for propaganda and political interference?

4. The BBC

The BBC’s stated mission is to “serve all audiences through impartial content that informs, educates, and entertains.”
Yet here they recently lambasted the UK Conservative leader for not watching Adolescence—a fictional drama about a “13-year-old incel” shown free in schools. Which public interest is served here exactly, and to whose account?

Is the purpose of peer review to “ensure scientific rigor”?

Is the purpose of HR to “protect employees”?

Is the purpose of university DEI offices to “promote inclusion” and “support marginalized students”?

Does Scott truly believe all this? Does he truly believe that every divergence from stated goals is just a well-meaning failure? That every single system is run by bumbling but good-hearted idiots?

let’s go one level up.

What Is the Purpose of POSIWID?

Avoiding false negatives requires leaning toward assuming competence, while risking attributing intent when it isn’t there.

Avoiding false positives requires leaning toward assuming benevolence, while risking not seeing intentionality that is there.

Used exclusively, neither is tenable

Whether you need POSIWID or anti-POSIWID depends on which way the errors are skewing: are you in an environment where people are too quick to assume malice? Or are you in an environment where people are too quick to assume good intentions?

There’s no fixed answer—it depends on the kind of environment you’re in, and how it’s changing over time.

POSIWID is not law, but heuristic. Of course it’s not infallible. But it is adaptive in low-trust environments, because it shifts the burden of proof away from institutional PR and toward observable behavior.


POSIWID, take 2

Scott Alexander wrote a take, starting the discourse. I wrote a fire-and-brimstone reply. He replied, not as fiercely: 'basically agree'. Disappointing.

I did, however, learn a lot by reading and discussing in the comments, and ended up coming to the following realisation:
POSIWID isn’t literally true;
And that’s why it works.

The only reason we started discussing whether POSIWID—the assertion—is true, is because POSIWID—the meme—spread. And at least part of the reason that it spread is that it isn’t true, that it simplifies too much.

Not being true makes POSIWID, as an assertion, fail. But it also makes POSIWID, as a meme, work: it spread!

In the followup to his original post Scott suggests that POSIWID—the assertion—is not fully precise and that people should use the more precise:
“If a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don’t change it, consider that the stated purpose is less important than some actual, hidden purpose, at which it is succeeding”

So two questions got conflated. One: is POSIWID—the assertion—technically correct, at literally all times, in a sort of a-historical way? And the answer is: No, it is not. The second is, despite that, is it right to spread POSIWID—the meme? And the answer to that is. It depends.

In this case, the only way to achieve a memetic goal—i.e. to shift people in your cluster away from attributing good-intent when it wasn’t there—was by being literally more wrong.

whether shifting your cluster away from wrong attributions of missing good-intent is the correct move (that is, whether spreading POSIWID, the meme, is the correct memetic move) is a contextual, empirical, and dynamic question

It worked so well, in fact, that we’ve since overcorrected: too much good intent started being incorrectly attributed, creating the fertile memetic ground for POSIWID to emerge as the opposite corrective.

It changes over time because the way being erred in isn’t fixed. To see that we just need to go back in time 40 years to when the “inverse-POSIWID” meme was coined: Hanlon’s Razor.
Hanlon’s razor says: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”.

It’s hard to get these things—estimates of ill-intent in a group—right because they’re the kind of thing that hide and thus the kind of things you gotta infer.

because how much ill-intent there is also varies over time the whole thing ends up forming a dynamic system that changes through time (predator/prey population curves)

as the bias in attribution historically oscillated between over-attributing and under-attributing ill intent, heuristics like Hanlon's Razor and POSIWID emerged as corrective forces to push the system back toward interpretive balance

Neither meme—neither Hanlon’s Razor nor POSIWID—is a-contextually, that is, fully, technically, literally correct.

Mass communication always entails mass simplification.

both memes are noble lies.

Being lies neither meme is, thus, defeasible on its own. Both are instances of what @suspendedreason called torque dynamics: memetic attempts to push discourse one way or another.

Think of a meditation master that tells one student seeking “The Right Way” to go left, and another to go right. He doesn’t intend to lie, but it’s impossible for him to do what is being asked of him

Was Scott deliberately doing this—being literally more wrong in the service of a higher memetic goal, as he perceives it—when he wrote his OG take?

Ever since I realized this—that people use what seem to be factual claims to shift people relatively—I not only see it all the time, but also see people “admitting” to it all the time, in the wild (i.e. on Twitter).

”arguing on twitter is about negotiating norms”.

And finally, this, by @ItIsHoeMath

I don’t [...] care if it’s true. I don’t prioritize the truth values of facts when I post, I prioritize the communication value.

These are all best modeled as conscious and deliberate interventions in the discourse. People who are playing at a “higher level”. (meta-level?)

What Is the Purpose of a Guy Blogpost?

To answer that, we have to go back to the dynamic system I modeled above

The problem with this discursive equilibrium is that it only works as long as long as the population of naive people (prey) who take the statements of strategic meme makers (predators) at face value is large enough

I hope that by naming the game, to the best of my ability, I can show that I’m not a predator, but just a prey whose special interest is strategy.

But, then again, disguising themselves as prey is exactly what predators do.


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