This week, I have once again been thinking about Astral Codex Ten.

Recently, Scott Alexander posted an essay critical of “the purpose of a system is what it does“. We’ll call this POSIWID for short, because I can’t be bothered typing all that.

I had several issues with this essay, which I will lump into the category of “Scott is missing the point”. Many smarter people than me have written about why Scott is missing the point, so later in this post I will link to an actually interesting and thoughtful post.

Some of the comments may be worth reading, depending on your tolerance for comment sections on the internet. The key thing I want to highlight here is that I still think Scott is a) being uncharitable to the people who disagree with him and b) not being quite as fine grained about what systems and purpose as are as I would like. Here is an example of a post that is more fine grained, still critical, and gains my respect due to being fine grained and backing things up with examples.

Separately, I have been reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. It’s a wild ride through her time at Facebook, doing diplomacy for the company and trying to navigate its bizarre and unpleasant internal politics. Towards the end of the book, she talks about how Facebook systematically failed to prevent incitement of hatred against the Rohingya. There was no support for Burmese-language fonts. The only person who could speak Burmese and do content moderation was a contractor. Because of the lack of font support, people were downloading unsupported versions of Facebook with no options to report content. Of course, it gets worse from there.

But this is where I think POSIWID can have some applications – yes, Facebook had a stated goal in Myanmar. The actual purposes of its systems – yes, systems plural – seemed to function very differently. Catastrophically differently, in fact. Looking at what the systems did (or didn’t do) can tell us more about their purpose than sifting through press releases, reports, or even, yes, memoirs.

I don’t have a good conclusion here; this is more a set of assorted thoughts than a true conclusion. Systems are complicated and underpin most of modern life. It’s worth looking at them in excruciating detail.