Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn’t the hospital curing more patients? “That’s not its purpose!”
The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don’t have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.
The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.
Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there’s no point in trying to fix anything. There’s no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That’s different of course from my perspective – revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.
If the purpose of a hospital is to only cure enough patients, the question becomes; “Why is the purpose of a hospital to cure just enough patients?”
You aren’t supposed to just use it to argue in a circle. The purpose of a system is what it does, so, why is that the purpose of the system and why do we have that system?
It implies that the system is working as intented, and that’s why we need to destroy it to build an entirely different system.
I think you’re describing an heuristic for predicting how the hospital behaves as part of a larger dynamic system. For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election. So I assume you’re saying, the hospital saves just enough lives that it doesn’t create outrage that we’re not funding the hospital enough. (Or, perhaps, that the expected marginal cost:outrage tradeoff is not lower than any other place the government can sink tax dollars.) I think we ought at least agree here.
What I don’t get is why you describe this as “the purpose of the hospital.” I would say it like this: it’s the purpose of the government to identify the pareto frontier of where to put tax dollars (this may benefit some members of society more than others, and you could perhaps even convince me that’s its purpose); but it’s the purpose of the hospital to provide the best reduction in public outrage per dollar tax money received as possible – or in other words, to save as many lives as it can.
After the revolution, should we really tear down the hospital because it can’t meet our new government’s demands? Or is the hospital perfunctory and the system that it’s part of to blame? This is what is muddled, IMO, by “the purpose of the system is what it does.”
For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election.
But this isn’t how money works.
Canada prints its own currency, it doesn’t need to pull dollars from one place to fund something else. The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference. Austerity isn’t necessary.
So, why does it happen?
This heuristic can’t explain why anything happens, but that’s not what it’s for? It’s for raising the contradictions and forcing us to ask harder questions of systems, like: if a country prints its own currency why would it ever choose austerity?
There’s still more work to do to answer that question and this heuristic is useless for doing so, it’s really only a basic first step towards building a critique.
The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference.
That is simply not true. The government may print arbitrarily much money, but due to inflation that will not necessarily fund everything. Who would accept worthless money in exchange for services?
If “TPOASIWID” actually raised further questions, that would be very useful! But it does not raise further questions. When I see somebody say that phrase, I assume they have no interest in learning more about the system as they already have the only answer they ever need. Who would say “TPOASIWID” and then go on to do a cost-benefit analysis? It is not the first basic step toward a critique – it’s the last.
This is why I can’t take “The purpose of a system is what it does” seriously
Why? The purpose of the system is to not work, so there are no democratic checks.
Seems fatalist to me. Take your preferred system of government, introduce on flaw, and critics will say the flaw is intentional rather than proposing ways to fix it. Also, the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The purpose of a hospital is to cure just enough patients.
And the purpose of Ukraine is to be caught in a stalemate. The West gives them just enough support to never lose, but never enough support to win.
And the purpose of the British government is to pretend like it is responsive to protests.
And the purpose of buses is to burn gasoline and support the oil industry, when trains or trams would be much more efficient.
And the purpose of arguing on the internet is to waste everyone’s time while accomplishing nothing
Etc etc
Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn’t the hospital curing more patients? “That’s not its purpose!”
The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don’t have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.
The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.
Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there’s no point in trying to fix anything. There’s no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That’s different of course from my perspective – revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.
If the purpose of a hospital is to only cure enough patients, the question becomes; “Why is the purpose of a hospital to cure just enough patients?”
You aren’t supposed to just use it to argue in a circle. The purpose of a system is what it does, so, why is that the purpose of the system and why do we have that system?
It implies that the system is working as intented, and that’s why we need to destroy it to build an entirely different system.
I think you’re describing an heuristic for predicting how the hospital behaves as part of a larger dynamic system. For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election. So I assume you’re saying, the hospital saves just enough lives that it doesn’t create outrage that we’re not funding the hospital enough. (Or, perhaps, that the expected marginal cost:outrage tradeoff is not lower than any other place the government can sink tax dollars.) I think we ought at least agree here.
What I don’t get is why you describe this as “the purpose of the hospital.” I would say it like this: it’s the purpose of the government to identify the pareto frontier of where to put tax dollars (this may benefit some members of society more than others, and you could perhaps even convince me that’s its purpose); but it’s the purpose of the hospital to provide the best reduction in public outrage per dollar tax money received as possible – or in other words, to save as many lives as it can.
After the revolution, should we really tear down the hospital because it can’t meet our new government’s demands? Or is the hospital perfunctory and the system that it’s part of to blame? This is what is muddled, IMO, by “the purpose of the system is what it does.”
But this isn’t how money works.
Canada prints its own currency, it doesn’t need to pull dollars from one place to fund something else. The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference. Austerity isn’t necessary.
So, why does it happen?
This heuristic can’t explain why anything happens, but that’s not what it’s for? It’s for raising the contradictions and forcing us to ask harder questions of systems, like: if a country prints its own currency why would it ever choose austerity?
There’s still more work to do to answer that question and this heuristic is useless for doing so, it’s really only a basic first step towards building a critique.
I still think it’s extremely useful.
That is simply not true. The government may print arbitrarily much money, but due to inflation that will not necessarily fund everything. Who would accept worthless money in exchange for services?
If “TPOASIWID” actually raised further questions, that would be very useful! But it does not raise further questions. When I see somebody say that phrase, I assume they have no interest in learning more about the system as they already have the only answer they ever need. Who would say “TPOASIWID” and then go on to do a cost-benefit analysis? It is not the first basic step toward a critique – it’s the last.