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Molly Trombley-McCann's avatar

I've always appreciated this phrase (the purpose of a system is what it does) as a form of encouragement to engage with what is actually happening, not what we planned to happen or what we think should happen, etc. Today reading this I thought of the Maya Angelou quote "When a person shows you who they are, believe them." So maybe, "When a system shows you what it does, believe it"? Which maybe doesn't help with the tendency to attribute human motivations to systems, but it captures something important for me.

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Combaticus Wombaticus III's avatar

So to use the terminology from the Unaccountability Machine then, am I right in thinking that POSIWID is ultimately just a way of saying “your analysis will be useless unless you know the System 5 of what you are analysing?”

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