Voters will judge Trump on the economy

In the run-up to the midterms, Trump will use Thursday's growth figures to paint his economic approach as the right one. ... Economists ... attributed the overall increase in growth to the huge sums being spent by tech giants investing in the rollout of artificial intelligence (AI). 

Archie Mitchell, Voters will judge Trump on the economy - how is it doing? (BBC News, 3 May 2026)

POSIWID - The Acronym

POSIWID stands for Purpose Of System Is What It Does

Although the phrase is associated with Stafford Beer, credit for the acronym is claimed by the engineer Bill Livingston.

I heard Stafford give a speech in Orlando in 1986 where he used 'The purpose of a system is what it does'. Using the concept so much I found the phrase ungainly I came up with POSIWID as a code word. In 1993 when I went to see Stafford in Toronto, I presented him with a pen I had engraved with POSIWID. He sort of chuckled and that was the end of it.

POSIWID is always used as an absolute. That is, no assignations about purpose are invented. What it does is, by definition, its purpose. I have never encountered a disconfirming example, nor have any of the thousands that have adopted the concept. Of course, it all started with Ashby. Bill Livingstone

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Following my post yesterday on Some Key Features of POSIWID, I received some suggested variations on the acronym.

The simplicity of the phrase belies its depth acknowledging that a system can't have a purpose, as that would allude to object intention. So more like: function of a system is what it does, or...

Purpose Of A System Is The Effect Detected #POSITED

...by whoever looks for it 🤓

— ComplexWales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿💙 (@ComplexWales) April 24, 2022

Beer should have answered his own question and added three more letters to this already long acronym: #FTS (For The System).
An observer can ask:
1⃣ - What is this system doing for me?
2⃣ - What can I do for this system?
3⃣ - What is this system doing for that system?

— The Kihbernetics Institute (@Kihbernetics) April 24, 2022

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William Livingston, Have Fun At Work (FES 1988). Review by James R Fisher (September 2006)

Some Key Features of POSIWID

The Plurality of POSIWID

A system doesn't necessarily have a single purpose, and different observers may detect different purposes. Or even different systems.

POSIWID should be plural (January 2010) - with thanks to Chris Bird

Constructing POSIWID (April 2022) - with thanks to Harish Jose

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What You Measure Is What You Get - WYMIWYG

Label: Target-Setting

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Inertia

Large organizations have strong feedback loops that maintain and restore the status quo against the most forceful and ingenious interventions.

Enterprise POSIWID (March 2012)

Corporate Grind (November 2014) 

And is the Aim of Human Society (September 2021) to maintain its equilibrium?

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Conspiracy

POSIWID appears to encourage the creation of conspiracy theories - looking for the hidden agenda that will explain actions - especially when the official story doesn't seem to add up.

But it is one thing to search open-mindedly for a hidden agenda, and another thing entirely to presume its existence without evidence. Sometimes it is not conspiracy theory but chaos (cock-up) theory that best explains some complex series of events.

Label: Conspiracy

Sometimes a dreadful event is so politically convenient for certain parties or interest groups that they may be accused (by their opponents or by conspiracy theorists) of having engineered the event themselves. 

See Visible Problems (June 2010), The Value of Chaos (December 2021)

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Invisible Hand

Economists and Marxists may regard the whole sociopolitical system as having a higher purpose, beyond the control of individual actors.

Are Markets Tools? (January 2012), Culture War - What is it Good For? (July 2021)

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Determinism

Biological determinism (e.g. evolutionary biology). As I see it, one of the main problems of evolutionary biology is that for any plausible hypothesis, one can invent any number of equally plausible alternatives. Explaining Bodies (February 2013)

Technological determinism (December 2020)

Labels: Determinism, Indeterminacy

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Delayed reaction

Sometimes it takes a while for another purpose of a complex system to emerge.

Example: Walter Wolfgang Returns (August 2006)

See also: Delayed Success - Evolution (April 2023)
 

Or perhaps purposes are tacked on afterwards (October 2006)

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Absence of purpose

Absence-of-purpose at one level may be sustained by a deeper purpose. POSIWID helps us to search for a purpose, but doesn't reveal what kind of purpose we might find.

Example: Pact with the Devil (June 2006)

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Whole system

There is an interesting relationship between the purpose (effect) of the individual and the purpose (effect) of the system. We cannot infer a strong purpose for an individual based on a very low probability effect. But the aggregate effect of the whole population may have a reasonably high probability.

See Purpose and Probability (September 2005)

There are also interesting questions about the purpose of diversity, which can only be addressed relative to the whole system.

Label: Diversity

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Reframing purpose

From failure to success, from stalemate to victory - see Political Theatre (May 2012), Culture War - What is it Good For? (July 2021)

Label: Framing

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Symmetrical POSIWID

For gardeners, the worm's purpose is to chew up grass cuttings and vegetable peelings and torn-up cardboard and produce compost.

For worms, the main purpose of the gardener is to provide a regular supply of grass cuttings and vegetable peelings and torn-up cardboard.

So there is a pleasing symmetry between the purpose of the gardener and the purpose of the worm. For religious folk, both the worm and the gardener are fulfilling God's purpose.

The Mirror of POSIWID (July 2008)

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Identity versus viability

The primary purpose (POSIWID) of closed systems is to maintain their identity, and to resist all challenges to this identity. However, in complex dynamic environemnts, viability often requires responding creatively to change. Identity is therefore often in conflict with viability.

Example: Tribal Identity (October 2005)

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Simplicity and complexity

If things seem unnecessarily complicated, this may be the result of some conscious or unconscious motive. Gagan Saxena notes that sometimes bad websites, phone-trees and policies have a dark purpose.

See Badly Designed Websites (August 2010)

Sometimes a corporate bureaucracy appears to be designed to make life difficult for employees and customers; even if such a design is not consciously planned, it may be sustained by the short-term benefits it confers (such as cost-saving or corporate convenience).

See Contradiction and Ambivalence (June 2011), Enterprise POSIWID (March 2012)

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Denial

This is not who we are (September 2021) - yeah, right

What is the purpose of denial, and what does it achieve? For example, climate change denial. When a famous scientist stakes his reputation on denying some widely accepted environmental belief. Is this akin to other forms of denial, such as AIDS denial or Holocaust denial? Given that a given belief is a basis for collective support for a given position, denial appears to have the effect (and therefore the implicit purpose) of undermining this position.

Purpose of Denial (May 2005)

Label: Denial

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Amplification

If you know the effect that your actions are likely to have, and you go ahead anyway, this only makes sense if the alternative is far worse. Or if you imagine you won't get caught. For example, concealing or destroying evidence. POSIWID thinking therefore acts as an amplifier, accentuating the whisper of suspicion into a bawl of accusation.

Example: Erasing the tapes (September 2007)

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Communication and Rhetoric

If a communication has diverse effects, how shall we determine the underlying purpose of the communication? Who is the real audience?

Real Audience (November 2006)

There is also a question as to whether the effects can be attributed to the rhetoric or to something behind the rhetoric.

Scarcity and Poverty (January 2011)

Are the effects of a communication more important than whether it is true or not? (Note Foucault's notion of Fiction Functioning in Truth)

Discourse Wars (June 2020)

And if a communication causes people to be upset or angry, can we assume this was the purpose all along?

Label: Outrage

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Adam Curtis

Finally, let me put in a plug for Adam Curtis, whose documentary films provide a huge wealth of material on this subject. I still need to post something on his latest series.

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See also POSIWID - the Acronym (April 2022)

Overcoming Bias

Thanks to Alex, I have discovered a thought-provoking blog called Overcoming Bias, hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

There is some excellent material on the blog, highly recommended to any POSIWID reader, but I am puzzled by the official agenda.

"Our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us we that are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing. In this forum we discuss whether and how we might avoid this fate, by spending a bit less effort on each specific topic, and a bit more effort on the general topic of how to be less biased. We discuss common patterns of bias and self-deception, statistical and other formal analysis tools, computational and data-gathering aids, and social institutions which may discourage bias and encourage its correction."

In other words, bias is a Bad Thing, and needs to be Overcome. Attention will be focused not on the causes of bias but on remedies for bias. The agenda is largely written in the first person plural - we start by dealing with our own bias, in accordance with the principle taught by Jesus (Matthew 7:5).

I am minded to regard the emphasis on finding (technical) solutions rather than understanding (systemic) problems as itself a form of intellectual bias. We might observe that the Institute was in part funded by James Martin, a noted technology optimist.

I am also minded to regard the agenda of the blog as promoting what Lacan called the Discourse of the University - disinterested, abstract and apparently disembodied knowledge. (Lacan's critique of this discourse indicates hidden subjectivity in the apparently objective.)

However when I browse the actual content of the blog, I find that the contributors have a tendency to talk about the causes of bias rather than the remedies, and to talk about bias in other people rather than themselves. There's an interesting metaproblem there.

The purpose of the Overcoming Bias blog (or for that matter the POSIWID blog) is not what it says it does, but what it does.

Conflict of Interest 2

Fake Steve Jobs accuses the Real Lawrence Lessig of a possible conflict of interest.

• Lawrence Lessig goes to bat for Google - plus correction

It seems to be getting easier to construct conflict-of-interest accusations against experts of all kinds. Thanks to the transparency and lack of privacy accorded by the Internet, we can probably trace some financial connections (direct or indirect) between any given expert and any given corporation.

Such financial connections have a tendency to undermine the credibility and perceived neutrality of the expert judgement. This is based on POSIWID thinking - a suspicion that the (hidden) purpose of any given judgement is to enrich the expert and/or his employer.

POSIWID thinking still applies if the sequence of events is reversed. A common pattern is that the payment precedes the opinion: Corporation A pays money to Institution B, which is used to fund research by Academic C, who subsequently (by a remarkable coincidence) expresses an opinion favourable to Corporate A. In this case, the purpose of the favourable opinion is not to trigger a specific payment (because that payment may have been made some years previously) but to perpetuate a system in which such payments are possible and encouraged.

But what happens if we take this thinking to the extreme, whereby anyone with genuine knowledge and expertise in any field is tarnished by some financial interest, however obscure or indirect? What happens if experts prefer to remain silent, rather than subject themselves to hostile scrutiny of their personal affairs? What happens if corporations don't fund research? It seems that the likely effect of this thinking is to erode expertise of all kinds.

Perhaps that's a good thing sometimes. We have seen appalling miscarriages of justice, caused by unchallenged but flawed opinions by so-called experts. And sometimes public policy has been grossly distorted by covert commercial interests. But the systematic erosion of expertise is problematic as well. Expertise performs a useful purpose, which cannot be completely replaced by amateur internet searches.

So where does this leave us? On one side we have the force of expertise, which is sometimes inappropriately and covertly coopted by powerful interests. On the other side we have the force of scepticism and suspicion, which is sometimes coopted by a kind of intellectual nihilism. Both sides are necessary for healthy debate. Nobody controls, but everyone contributes to, the system that maintains this balance.

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