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Comment by tremon

5 days ago

But in the absence of credible information to the contrary, it's not wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

when a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view

11 comments

tremon

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dragonwriter  5 days ago

> But in the absence of credible information to the contrary, it's not wrong.

In the sense it is intended, it is entirely correct. It is not a claim about what the intent of the people involved in the system is, it is a recognition that (1) intent doesn't really aggregate, and, more importantly, even if it did (2) intent that consistently fails, because of the nature of the system, to materialize into function doesn't matter.

scarab92  5 days ago

> it's not wrong.

It's an elegant idea in it's simplicity, but there's zero reason to think this heuristic is more valid than any other, and in my personal experience this line of thinking is usually wrong.

  • beepbooptheory  5 days ago

    What kinds of experiences have shown this heuristic to be not so useful to you?

    • finnthehuman  5 days ago

      People often can't see past their own hostility when figuring out what a system 'does'. And now they have have a clever sounding way to pretend that they're describing a system with detached reason, not just describing their attitude towards the system.

      It's like a art review where a writer - completely unaware of what they're doing - talks only about the work, but says nothing about the work and opens a window into their soul. A lot of people don't even recognize when it happens in that context. It's even easier for a speaker to deceive a listener (and themselves) in the context of speaking on systems. Systems thinking is hard and almost everyone is terrible at it.

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pindab0ter  5 days ago

Is the useSkin parameter something you manually added? I am not logged in and when I navigate to another page the parameter (and with it the skin preference) disappears.