(2025-04-13) Rival The Purpose Of Posiwid Is What It Does

Rival Voices: The Purpose of POSIWID Is What It Does. The phrase POSIWID—“The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does”—has been making the rounds on Twitter. In response, Scott Alexander just published a Substack post arguing the opposite: that the purpose of a system is “obviously not” what it does. 2025-04-11-AlexanderComeOnObviouslyThePurposeOfASystemIsNotWhatItDoes

He concludes that POSIWID serves no real function beyond making people paranoid and hateful.
So, it’s up to me, a paranoid hater, to defend it.

let me state my thesis directly:

Obviously, the purpose of POSIWID is to make lying harder.

fair enough. Systems do fail, some outputs are accidental, and some results are side-effects.
But into “some outcomes are unintended,” he smuggles in a much stronger claim: that we should never infer hidden purpose from observed behavior.

Of course systems sometimes succeed at goals they’re deliberately concealing. Often, concealment is the strategy: the only way to achieve certain goals is by hiding them.

What makes Scott’s position even stranger is his involvement in the Effective Altruism movement, which exists only because so many charities are ineffective.

Does Scott really believe all charity inefficiency is just well-meaning incompetence?
That none of it is ill-intentioned competence?
That none of it is grift?
Because if he does, he’s wrong.

here are four quick counter-examples to show it’s a useful one

concealment takes many forms. Everything from grift in fake charities, to geopolitical fronting through fake “NGOs”, to soft-power interference and narrative laundering by international and national institutes.

1. Charities

In 2015, the FTC shut down a network of cancer charities (CFA and affiliates) that raised $187 million and spent it on luxury cars, salaries, and professional fundraisers. They claimed to help patients. They didn’t.
That’s not a glitch. That was the actual purpose

2. GONGOs

Charities often are NGOs—non-governmental organizations.

But look at USAID. In many cases, NGOs are government-funded and used as a tool of statecraft—doing things that would be politically toxic to do directly.
These are so common it was necessary to come up with a name for them in the 1980s(!)— GONGOs: Government-Organized NGOs.

You know what else is clunky? Asking, “Are non-governmental organizations linked to the government?” It sounds like a contradiction.

3. The Confucius Institutes

The Confucius Institutes exist worldwide with the stated purpose of “promoting Chinese language and culture”.
Now maybe I am just a paranoid hater. Very well. But how come so many institutions shut their Confucius Institutes down?

Are they all just paranoid haters? Or was the Confucius Institute behaving not as described, but as designed—for propaganda and political interference?

4. The BBC

The BBC’s stated mission is to “serve all audiences through impartial content that informs, educates, and entertains.”
Yet here they recently lambasted the UK Conservative leader for not watching Adolescence—a fictional drama about a “13-year-old incel” shown free in schools. Which public interest is served here exactly, and to whose account?

Is the purpose of peer review to “ensure scientific rigor”?

Is the purpose of HR to “protect employees”?

Is the purpose of university DEI offices to “promote inclusion” and “support marginalized students”?

Does Scott truly believe all this? Does he truly believe that every divergence from stated goals is just a well-meaning failure? That every single system is run by bumbling but good-hearted idiots?

let’s go one level up.

What Is the Purpose of POSIWID?

Avoiding false negatives requires leaning toward assuming competence, while risking attributing intent when it isn’t there.

Avoiding false positives requires leaning toward assuming benevolence, while risking not seeing intentionality that is there.

Used exclusively, neither is tenable

Whether you need POSIWID or anti-POSIWID depends on which way the errors are skewing: are you in an environment where people are too quick to assume malice? Or are you in an environment where people are too quick to assume good intentions?

There’s no fixed answer—it depends on the kind of environment you’re in, and how it’s changing over time.

POSIWID is not law, but heuristic. Of course it’s not infallible. But it is adaptive in low-trust environments, because it shifts the burden of proof away from institutional PR and toward observable behavior.