[Timon3]

While I'm not sure I agree that the quote is applicable here, it is generally an incredibly useful way to analyze systems.

Reality doesn't care what you're hoping to achieve with a system, the outcome won't change based on thoughts and ideas. Since reality tends to be fairly complicated, we usually won't design perfect systems on the first try - instead we have to analyze the outcome, and make changes to nudge the results into the direction we want.

But what if we don't do that? What if we stick with the initial approach even after we measure that the outcome doesn't align with our initial intentions, maybe even introduces unwanted side effects?

It would be fair to say "well, we tried our best" if nobody was able to have hidden intentions, but that's not the world we live in. People can be very, very happy about our systems not aligning with our intentions & introducing unwanted side effects because this misalignment advantages them in some way. These people can then block changes to the system to keep these advantages alive.

I believe a small fraction of decision makers is enough to keep most systems fixed in such a misaligned state, and we'd never do anything about it if we followed your logic.

[throwaway27448]

"Purpose" and "hope" (hell let's through "telos" in there) are inherently subjective terms. Conflating this with empirical observation of effect is simply not useful outside of certain political situations where you intentionally want to disregard intent. It's asinine unless accompanied with persuasion that intent is working against collective interests.

In most situations disregarding intent is not useful for getting things done unless you have unilateral power to override intent.

A better explanation is that John Deere, like the massive truck corporations that make pickups, was happy to take advantage of blatant loopholes.