I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. Yes, most complex systems have negative externalities and unintended side effects. It would be wrong to suggest that these are the purpose of the systems. But this is not where I hear the phrase used, at least when used appropriately.
The phrase is correct as an explanation of systems that intend one thing and get something very different but that are then defended and promoted. Examples are billion dollar defense systems that don’t work, or million dollar “low cost” housing units. In both cases, and hundreds of others, rent seeking coalitions have taken over the worthy goal of the organization (defense or housing vagrants) and converted it to a money machine for their own purposes.
Somewhere along the line the noble goal was hijacked and the system which was designed to do one thing, instead does something totally different.
Thanks for the comment and I take your point. I guess I would say that sometimes what a system does is what it's for and these might be good examples. People coopt institutions to bend to their own ends. I think I was making the weaker claim, the idea that the inference is not a logical necessity. But, yes, people who have a stake in some outcome, X, will defend the system that does X even if that's not what the system was designed/intended to do. I agree with that point of view and I agree it's an important consideration in the context of public policy. I think the literature on rent-seeking is a good example of how this goes.
Perhaps it's more useful to talk about costs and benefits rather than the "function" of an adaptation. The brain, for example, consumes a great deal of energy (cost) but enables complex inference (benefit). An adaptation persists only when its benefits outweigh its costs over repeated interactions.
This framing also helps to make sense of why people believe things that are evidently false. It can still be adaptive as Tooby says. The benefit is increased group cohesion, while the cost of misrepresenting reality depends on the environment. (Note there is asymmetry.)
If this holds, it suggests that in evolutionary terms group cohesion often outweighs the costs of factual inaccuracy.
1. The claim is best read as political, and in terms of what is implied. “Buses keep polluting and the people in charge are fine with things this way”; “Buses keep polluting, buses stay around, when do we accept what we can see, which is that the people in charge don’t care”. (Related: I think we scientists often make the mistake of reading politics as if it was science. It’s not. For better or worse, politics is a different sphere of human activity, with different ground rules.)
2. Imo, the whole fuss about function is easily addressed with an insight from Ruth Millikan. An item’s function(s) is what is does *that explains it historical reproduction*. Hearts make thump-thump noises and they pump blood, but only the second of these explains why hearts get reproduced in biological evolution. Buses get people from A to B and they pollute, but only the first of these explains why bus services keep getting reproduced by administrations everywhere.
Thanks for the remarks, Thom! On (2), I broadly agree with Millikan’s definition, which as you know is also the one used by many biologists and evolutionary psychologists, though I’ve seen some try to put it at the level of the gene rather than trait, but that definition requires a lot more words to say just right. I will say, without detail, that not everyone sticks to this definition in practice, even if they endorse the view. My writing about the term altruism reflects my concerns on this score. On (1), I think it’s complicated. My view, fwiw, is that if people clarified whether they were making a political/rhetorical claim, or a factual/scientific one, that would be helpful. (“Look, I know buses aren’t *really* designed to maximize pollution, but we should do more to reduce it…”) My view is that politics dressed us as science is a problem and it would be better if the reader didn’t have to try to figure out which sort of claim were being made by a writer/speaker. But, of course, the ambiguity in many cases is intentional and strategic. But, yes, generally I don’t disagree, and again thanks for the remarks.
About function. I think the definition works fine at any level of analysis. Gene, organ, organism, institutional behaviour, whatever. As you suggest, we just have to be clear precisely what kind of item (i.e. what level of analysis) we're talking about, and hence what kind of reproduction we're talking about. Altruism is tricky because people talk about it as if it's a trait or an organ, but it's not, it's a behaviour i.e. the output of some cognitive trait. Not the same thing.
I think the last explanation is partly right, but pretty one-sided. You say: "Alexander is pointing out a kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand, where failures of a system, doing something difficult and complicated, are rebranded as intended outcomes".
I'm sure this is often how it gets used -- I see many, but not all, of the screencaps in his post indicate that -- but I think it is just as easily used to suggest that the function of the system is NOT necessarily what the relevant decision-makers intend.
This seems to me to go to the core of 'structural' or 'systemic' analyses. For example, when people talk about 'structural racism', the whole point is that social structures can FUNCTION to oppress members of particular racial groups -- and they can do so even when all people involved have egalitarian intentions and no racist motives whatsoever. Rather, through a series of (semi-)independent decisions, each of which in insolation can make perfect sense to a genuinely egalitarian decision-maker, overlapping constraints begin to accumulate that disparately affect, say, black people compared to white people. For example, it can make perfect sense to a non-racist landlord to favor the wealthier applicants over the less wealthy; it can make perfect sense to a non-racist police force to prioritize high-crime neighborhoods for patrols; it can make perfect sense to a non-racist employer to prefer employees without a criminal record; and so on. But then these various factors typically exacerbate one another -- housing insecurity leads to job insecurity leads to crime leads to more job insecurity leads to more housing insecurity -- in ways that impact and entrench differences in racial groups. You probably need some racial policymaking in the history to get this going, to be sure, but the point is that the presently existing system's function (presuming that the structural analysis is right) cannot be straightforwardly inferred from anyone's intentions. You have to look at its effects, ONLY SOME of which will be dispositive.
So what I'm saying is I think this slogan, regarding social matters, can often be used to correct for our inclination to infer the function of social systems from the intentions of their architects -- as if function could only arise from natural selection or agential intention. As if everything were either a trait or a tool.
I see what you're saying and to some extent I worry a little that there is a tough issue of semantics. In biology, "function" has a tight meaning, related to the way a trait increased fitness. In political science, one can say a system "functions" to do X, even if there is no design or intent. So I take your point and I think this is a case in which there is not perfect overlap with the way the term is used, which is a very important caveat.
Sure, but I don't see how that issue helps discriminate between these various hypotheses about the use of the slogan. For example, the plausibility of your last hypothesis compared to the one I'm suggesting isn't going to turn on the semantic question, since it looks like 'function' is being used in largely the same way in both cases -- it isn't like one of them is using the biological conception while the other isn't. I mean, are you suggesting that, if we were more careful with the semantics -- making distinctions between various senses of 'function' -- that would somehow make it easier to explain what's behind the (facially false) slogan? I don't see it.
I should have been more clear about the ambiguity. You write: “ when people talk about 'structural racism', the whole point is that social structures can FUNCTION to oppress members of particular racial groups -- and they can do so even when all people involved have egalitarian intentions and no racist motives whatsoever.” My view is that the word “function” there is being used to mean something like “work” or “operate.” That’s a perfectly valid meaning of the word, as in, “my watch is functioning properly.” So I’m agreeing with you that this muddies the waters. In your sentence, the word “function” isn’t a claim about the intention behind the social structures. So in that sense, yes, I’m saying untangling this is more difficult because sometimes people are using “function” to mean something about intent or design and sometimes they are using it simply to mean “work” or “operate.” This issue is a consequence of the polysemous nature of words in natural language and makes addressing the issue I’m pointing to here more difficult. So I think I’m agreeing with you. When people make a claim that a system is “functioning” to do X but they intend the meaning “working” or “operating,” without a claim about intent, then, yes, this critique does not apply. Better?
I am not sure. I think people, including you maybe, operate under the assumption that, if a thing functions to X, then either a) that is because it was designed to do X (by an agent), or b) because it is an individual trait that evolved to do X under natural selection pressures. Any other use of 'function' must really be more like 'work', 'operate', or 'cause'.
But I'm suggesting that some other people seem to think that things can acquire functions (bona fide functions, not just 'functions' that are really just effects or whatever) through other means. And I used a structural analysis of racial oppression to illustrate what that might look like: a social system may function to X but not because anyone designed it to X, and nor because it has that trait as a product of evolution by natural selection (or maybe your conception of this latter type of function is broad enough to cover these cases -- but I'll freely admit I'm not an expert on group selection and such).
To be sure, I'm not convinced this kind of analysis will work out -- that you can recover an intelligibly robust sense of 'function' (that isn't just 'causes') that would apply to undesigned social structures. I'm just pointing to it as a possibility that would explain the slogan.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. Yes, most complex systems have negative externalities and unintended side effects. It would be wrong to suggest that these are the purpose of the systems. But this is not where I hear the phrase used, at least when used appropriately.
The phrase is correct as an explanation of systems that intend one thing and get something very different but that are then defended and promoted. Examples are billion dollar defense systems that don’t work, or million dollar “low cost” housing units. In both cases, and hundreds of others, rent seeking coalitions have taken over the worthy goal of the organization (defense or housing vagrants) and converted it to a money machine for their own purposes.
Somewhere along the line the noble goal was hijacked and the system which was designed to do one thing, instead does something totally different.
Thanks for the comment and I take your point. I guess I would say that sometimes what a system does is what it's for and these might be good examples. People coopt institutions to bend to their own ends. I think I was making the weaker claim, the idea that the inference is not a logical necessity. But, yes, people who have a stake in some outcome, X, will defend the system that does X even if that's not what the system was designed/intended to do. I agree with that point of view and I agree it's an important consideration in the context of public policy. I think the literature on rent-seeking is a good example of how this goes.
Perhaps it's more useful to talk about costs and benefits rather than the "function" of an adaptation. The brain, for example, consumes a great deal of energy (cost) but enables complex inference (benefit). An adaptation persists only when its benefits outweigh its costs over repeated interactions.
This framing also helps to make sense of why people believe things that are evidently false. It can still be adaptive as Tooby says. The benefit is increased group cohesion, while the cost of misrepresenting reality depends on the environment. (Note there is asymmetry.)
If this holds, it suggests that in evolutionary terms group cohesion often outweighs the costs of factual inaccuracy.
Hi Rob.
Two thoughts:
1. The claim is best read as political, and in terms of what is implied. “Buses keep polluting and the people in charge are fine with things this way”; “Buses keep polluting, buses stay around, when do we accept what we can see, which is that the people in charge don’t care”. (Related: I think we scientists often make the mistake of reading politics as if it was science. It’s not. For better or worse, politics is a different sphere of human activity, with different ground rules.)
2. Imo, the whole fuss about function is easily addressed with an insight from Ruth Millikan. An item’s function(s) is what is does *that explains it historical reproduction*. Hearts make thump-thump noises and they pump blood, but only the second of these explains why hearts get reproduced in biological evolution. Buses get people from A to B and they pollute, but only the first of these explains why bus services keep getting reproduced by administrations everywhere.
Thanks for the remarks, Thom! On (2), I broadly agree with Millikan’s definition, which as you know is also the one used by many biologists and evolutionary psychologists, though I’ve seen some try to put it at the level of the gene rather than trait, but that definition requires a lot more words to say just right. I will say, without detail, that not everyone sticks to this definition in practice, even if they endorse the view. My writing about the term altruism reflects my concerns on this score. On (1), I think it’s complicated. My view, fwiw, is that if people clarified whether they were making a political/rhetorical claim, or a factual/scientific one, that would be helpful. (“Look, I know buses aren’t *really* designed to maximize pollution, but we should do more to reduce it…”) My view is that politics dressed us as science is a problem and it would be better if the reader didn’t have to try to figure out which sort of claim were being made by a writer/speaker. But, of course, the ambiguity in many cases is intentional and strategic. But, yes, generally I don’t disagree, and again thanks for the remarks.
"My view, fwiw, is that if people clarified whether they were making a political/rhetorical claim, or a factual/scientific one, that would be helpful"
That is precisely what a scientist *would* say! To demand that clarity is to assert your own preferred ground rules! lol
About function. I think the definition works fine at any level of analysis. Gene, organ, organism, institutional behaviour, whatever. As you suggest, we just have to be clear precisely what kind of item (i.e. what level of analysis) we're talking about, and hence what kind of reproduction we're talking about. Altruism is tricky because people talk about it as if it's a trait or an organ, but it's not, it's a behaviour i.e. the output of some cognitive trait. Not the same thing.
I think the last explanation is partly right, but pretty one-sided. You say: "Alexander is pointing out a kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand, where failures of a system, doing something difficult and complicated, are rebranded as intended outcomes".
I'm sure this is often how it gets used -- I see many, but not all, of the screencaps in his post indicate that -- but I think it is just as easily used to suggest that the function of the system is NOT necessarily what the relevant decision-makers intend.
This seems to me to go to the core of 'structural' or 'systemic' analyses. For example, when people talk about 'structural racism', the whole point is that social structures can FUNCTION to oppress members of particular racial groups -- and they can do so even when all people involved have egalitarian intentions and no racist motives whatsoever. Rather, through a series of (semi-)independent decisions, each of which in insolation can make perfect sense to a genuinely egalitarian decision-maker, overlapping constraints begin to accumulate that disparately affect, say, black people compared to white people. For example, it can make perfect sense to a non-racist landlord to favor the wealthier applicants over the less wealthy; it can make perfect sense to a non-racist police force to prioritize high-crime neighborhoods for patrols; it can make perfect sense to a non-racist employer to prefer employees without a criminal record; and so on. But then these various factors typically exacerbate one another -- housing insecurity leads to job insecurity leads to crime leads to more job insecurity leads to more housing insecurity -- in ways that impact and entrench differences in racial groups. You probably need some racial policymaking in the history to get this going, to be sure, but the point is that the presently existing system's function (presuming that the structural analysis is right) cannot be straightforwardly inferred from anyone's intentions. You have to look at its effects, ONLY SOME of which will be dispositive.
So what I'm saying is I think this slogan, regarding social matters, can often be used to correct for our inclination to infer the function of social systems from the intentions of their architects -- as if function could only arise from natural selection or agential intention. As if everything were either a trait or a tool.
I see what you're saying and to some extent I worry a little that there is a tough issue of semantics. In biology, "function" has a tight meaning, related to the way a trait increased fitness. In political science, one can say a system "functions" to do X, even if there is no design or intent. So I take your point and I think this is a case in which there is not perfect overlap with the way the term is used, which is a very important caveat.
Sure, but I don't see how that issue helps discriminate between these various hypotheses about the use of the slogan. For example, the plausibility of your last hypothesis compared to the one I'm suggesting isn't going to turn on the semantic question, since it looks like 'function' is being used in largely the same way in both cases -- it isn't like one of them is using the biological conception while the other isn't. I mean, are you suggesting that, if we were more careful with the semantics -- making distinctions between various senses of 'function' -- that would somehow make it easier to explain what's behind the (facially false) slogan? I don't see it.
I should have been more clear about the ambiguity. You write: “ when people talk about 'structural racism', the whole point is that social structures can FUNCTION to oppress members of particular racial groups -- and they can do so even when all people involved have egalitarian intentions and no racist motives whatsoever.” My view is that the word “function” there is being used to mean something like “work” or “operate.” That’s a perfectly valid meaning of the word, as in, “my watch is functioning properly.” So I’m agreeing with you that this muddies the waters. In your sentence, the word “function” isn’t a claim about the intention behind the social structures. So in that sense, yes, I’m saying untangling this is more difficult because sometimes people are using “function” to mean something about intent or design and sometimes they are using it simply to mean “work” or “operate.” This issue is a consequence of the polysemous nature of words in natural language and makes addressing the issue I’m pointing to here more difficult. So I think I’m agreeing with you. When people make a claim that a system is “functioning” to do X but they intend the meaning “working” or “operating,” without a claim about intent, then, yes, this critique does not apply. Better?
I am not sure. I think people, including you maybe, operate under the assumption that, if a thing functions to X, then either a) that is because it was designed to do X (by an agent), or b) because it is an individual trait that evolved to do X under natural selection pressures. Any other use of 'function' must really be more like 'work', 'operate', or 'cause'.
But I'm suggesting that some other people seem to think that things can acquire functions (bona fide functions, not just 'functions' that are really just effects or whatever) through other means. And I used a structural analysis of racial oppression to illustrate what that might look like: a social system may function to X but not because anyone designed it to X, and nor because it has that trait as a product of evolution by natural selection (or maybe your conception of this latter type of function is broad enough to cover these cases -- but I'll freely admit I'm not an expert on group selection and such).
To be sure, I'm not convinced this kind of analysis will work out -- that you can recover an intelligibly robust sense of 'function' (that isn't just 'causes') that would apply to undesigned social structures. I'm just pointing to it as a possibility that would explain the slogan.