This approach (“the purpose of a system is the positive feedback loop that sustains itself”) is a fascinating angle and feels like it has a lot of truth to it.
The weakness is that it’s easy to tell just so stories about why some negative thing some organization does is necessary to sustain it and thus actually it’s purpose. Plus this feels disjoint from the conventional human meaning of the word “purpose” which implies that it is something humans and doing intentionally.
One strength of “The purpose of a system is what it rewards” is that what a system rewards is often something that’s concretely available (provided you can get access to performance evaluation criteria) and something humans can be held accountable for and pressured into changing.
Or to put it another way, I think Simler’s definition is true and fascinating, but mine is probably more useful.
robotelvis
There is definitely some truth in what you say.
Where it gets tricky is that it can be hard to see from the outside whether a system continues to do B because they don’t care about B, because it’s impossible hard to do A without also doing B, or because they are trying really hard to avoid doing B but haven’t really worked out how yet.
Looking at what a system rewards lets you see which of these situations the system is actually in. If they are actively rewarding people for not doing B, then B is not the purpose of the system.
One interesting subtlety is what we should say about a system whose purpose is A, that rewards A, and yet ends up doing a lot of B. I think that B isn’t the purpose unless it actively rewards B, but you could say the purpose is to “do A, and tolerate doing B in course of doing A”.
Good points. I think it’s fine and reasonable for a system to reward leading metrics like “are we raising money” in the service of a higher goal. But if you aren’t also doing something to reward the higher goal, or including counter-metrics to catch the obvious ways you could be moving the leading metric without serving the higher goal, then I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that the higher goal is actually your system’s purpose.
This is of course where things get subtle—but I think this part is important.
I think the important point here is that you can’t be certain that you are right. Setting a norm where anyone who thinks they are right is justified in using whatever means necessary to overturn society doesn’t tend to lead to good outcomes.
The great thing about civil disobedience is it sends a strond coordinating message to other people that this is something that might be worth resisting without also damaging your cause by making you look violent and bad.
As you say (and I alluded to as a footnote) there are a lot of interpretations of what the beatitudes mean.
My personal feeling is that those who emphasize the “spiritual” interpretations are often doing it as a dodge, to avoid the challenge of having to follow the non-spiritual interpretations.
That said, I make no claim that my interpretations are what most Christians believe. They are definitely what some Christians believe, and they are the interpretation of the Beatitudes that I find personally valuable today, as a non-Christian.
Now fixed—missing beatitude added. That was awkward.
Urgh. So you are right. Not sure how I missed that one. Probably because I counted to eight and the last one isn’t always included in the list. I’ll do a revision.
An interesting perspective. I’m not sure I agree, but I’m also not sure I disagree.
Maybe I should clarify that I consider the “extended CEO” to essentially include everyone whose knowledge is of importance at the company. If you asked Sundar how many servers of a particular type to put in, he’d forward you to the relevant VP, who would forward you to the relevant director, who would forward you to the relevant principal engineer, who would actually answer your question. That’s what I mean by asking a question of the “extended CEO”.
A similar principle applies to simple rules like “don’t be evil” or “blessed be the meek”. Yes Sundar and Pope Francis didn’t create these principles, but, by taking over as CEO, they had to first show that their thinking was aligned with the principles of the existing “extended CEO” and those principles are summarized by simple lists like “ten things we know to be true” and the Beatitudes, so that other people are able to better simulate the opinion of “the extended CEO”.
When I was at Google, it was very common to resolve an internal disagreement by pointing to the answer that one of the “ten things we know to be true” principles would direct us to behave—and that allowed for internal consistency. Similarly, when I was a Christian, it was common to point to principles in the Beatitudes to resolve questions of what it meant to act in a moral way as a Christian.
Any Google CEO who doesn’t want to follow “ten things we know to be true” or any Pope who doesn’t want to follow the Beatitudes is going to need to do some heavy lifting to re-align their org around a different set of principles, or at the very least, signal strongly that those principles don’t currently apply.
Good question. Sometimes the counter metric is inherently tricky to measure and the best available metric is simply “does a reasonable person thing this is causing harm”.
Even if you measure it in a way that’s totally subjective, you can still make it part of the way you reward people and thus part of the systems purpose.