[btown]

It’s really important to remember in this context that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on speech. Do not think for a second that verification initiatives are designed without anticipating this outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[praestigiare]

The phrase does not mean that you can pick any single effect of a system and claim that is its purpose, as your linked article does in its examples. (Ironically, a form of reducto as absurdum.) It is a heuristic, a pattern of thought to attempt to overcome the bias towards judging systems based on the intentions behind them instead of the outcomes they produce. The point is that when you choose a course of action, you are implicitly choosing its negative effects as well, and the choice should be judged on all its effects. You are making a cost / benefit analysis, and if that is not explicit, it can easily be wrong.

[socalgal2]

That's a typical "reductio absurdum"

The purpose of a system is not what it does.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

[djrj477dhsnv]

I think you're taking it too literally. A more generous interpretation would be "what it does can be a better indicator of what the true hidden motive was for nefarious state programs".

[imtringued]

I have to agree that this is problematic in the sense of ascribing malicious intent, but it is actually a useful concept when performing an honest/truthful analysis and trying to acquire new knowledge and perspectives so you can compare them. i.e. the analysis of what it ought to do versus what it actually does.

Given a software product, there are often marketers/advertisers telling you what use cases they envisioned for their product, but you as the customer actually know more about your core business and your own needs. Hence you choose the products not based on what the vendor claims about the product i.e. the intended/prescribed purpose, you care more about what the product can do for your business and that includes discovering ways to use the product that the vendor could have never imagined in the first place.

[simmerup]

So the purpose of a hospital is to kill people?

[pona-a]

Does your hospital kill more people than it saves? If so, you might be describing the 19th century Vienna General Hospital, which had two maternal wards: one staffed by trained physicians, suffering up to 30% mortality, the other by midwives, only experiencing 2~10% rates. The difference was so pronounced, local women desperately avoided the first ward, begging to give birth in the streets rather than be admitted there. Ignaz Semmelweis later attributed the disparity to doctors having performed autopsies before attending births without disinfecting their clothes, hands, or tools, dropping to only a few percent with disinfection.

Or if you limit your demographics, perhaps you might be thinking of the Tuskegee syphilis study, where treatment was intentionally withheld for a progressive, life-threatening disease without the consent of the patients, making its purpose to slowly kill the participants by its own admission?

Yes, if your hospital does seem to kill more people than most and there's no alternative explanation like accepting more severe cases, then its purpose might be inverse or orthogonal to its stated goal.

[const_cast]

Hospitals save orders and orders of magnitude more people than they accidently kill.

Infant mortality for hospital babies is what, well under 1/1000? Infant mortality was 25% for the vast majority of human history.

Modern medicine is legitimately indistinguishable from magic.

[throwaway290]

> "the purpose of a system is what it does"

So then the purpose of the internet was to share cat pics? This quote is so wrong in every way.

> Do not think for a moment

I will decide what I think thank you. It's very ironic when arguments against "censorship" go this way.