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Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of the system is what it does.

Humans have eradicated tons of species from various islands and areas over the years. If this was a priority it would be solved or on its way to being solved. It's not a priority so the problem just kind of continues at a simmer and nobody really cares as long as it doesn't encroach on the developed areas where people who's voices matter (at a state level) live and the business of lightening tourists' wallets takes place. And people like the author are left sadly pissing into the wind bemoaning the state of affairs.

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New Zealand at least is trying _very_ hard:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/new-zeala...

> The purpose of the system is what it does.

This is a tautological and useless definition of telos. Sometimes things just don't have a purpose.

Eh, it's a heuristic. When you put time and effort in, you can usually do better. Superforcasters can beat "nothing ever happens", and even regular people can in particular areas, but if you don't know about a subject it's a good starting point.

Similar to the "efficient market hypothesis". It's clearly false, but good luck walking into a randomly selected part of the market and reliably being able to beat it.

I have no clue what this babble has to do with the concept of a "purpose" or a "telos" or an "end".

I don't think it's babble, they're reasonably good heuristics if you have little information or time. What part is confusing?

The point of "POSIWID" is that you can look at e.g. a government office that's never denied a request and make a first guess that its purpose is to rubber-stamp documents.

That just seems like an incoherent understanding of "purpose", which seems most reasonably based off "intent" and can only be measured by claims of intent.

The heuristic you're referring to seems to be figuring out whether a system does what it's intended to, which seems to be an entirely different issue. Why overload an already useful word with seemingly contradictory semantics?

Granted, it seems like a very useful concept, just an abominably-named one.

What's your position on intentionality[0]? I don't put stock into anything too fancy there. Being simple about things in general, you can define a physical or mathematical system that uses optimization of some sort to drive the world toward certain states over others.

Questions regarding if the system's conscious or "cares about anything" don't really matter.

Accepting that, you can say any system that drives towards states "intends" to do so.

Unless a system is not functioning well, is weak, or is adversarial opposed, in general what it does should be more or less what it "intends".

This isn't iron-hard, but as a first guess, that gets you "the purpose of a system is what it does".

[0]: e.g. I don't know if your definition of "telos" requires anything in that direction. If you've got definitions you can link them from the SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) or similar. Maybe too far into the weeds to be useful from a cybernetics perspective though. More theological.

It's still useful to communicate with people who don't desire to or do not tend to think in systems. You can define things any such way you'd like, of course, especially if communication is not your desire.

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