At an organization that had better remain nameless, one time sysadmin broke the web site which we were supposed to use to submit trip reports after travel. No one cared. Well, that let the cat out of the bag about that particular process.
(By way of contrast, there were certain other things that when sysadmin broke them, they had a company vice president screaming at them over the phone very quickly.(*))
(*) no chairs were thrown across the room, however.
Then there’s the category of things where your research division is like “oh, that’s going to be a train wreck. Please can we be allowed to record the chaos so we can write a paper about it.” No, research was not allowed to write that paper.
Wikipedia helpfully tells us “The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.”
Have you considered incorporating or referencing Scott Alexander's https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/05/ambijectivity/ when discussing the false objective-subjective dichotomy? For example, you say that "meanings mostly are publicly verifiable, so reasonable observers mostly agree about them", which seems plausible, but elides the issue that there still are large areas of meaning-space that are neither entirely objective or subjective, and where bounded disagreements between reasonable observers are the expected default.
This is a huge topic. Let me try to restate your main point:
Purposes are neither objective (out there in the world) nor subjective (inside the individual head). Instead they live in a sort of nebulous social sphere, where people collaborate in the process of determining what they are and how they work. "They are interactional opportunities for action" is how you phrase it, but that leaves out a lot of detail.
I'm particularly interested in how group purposes and individual purposes are different and have a complicated relationship – this is sort of what all political theory and organization theory is about. I asked ChatGPT for a literature overview of one aspect of this, and I doubt I will follow up on it, but maybe you should! https://chatgpt.com/share/679e609f-bec8-8013-94c2-9568b8b8788e
Another dimension of purpose that is worth exploring: legibility. Companies try to make their purposes explicit and legible, the current technology for doing that (internally) is KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Most big tech companies use some variant of this practice, where every level of the org is assigned goals that are both explicit (written down and public) and supposedly quantifiable. There's a good deal of skepticism about this (metrics can be gamed, etc), but not a lot of thinking about how group purpose actually could work better.
Goodhart's Law basically says that explicit goal metrics are no good. I sort of believe a Freudian generalization of this, which is that people can never articulate their actual underlying purposes. Or only rarely and with difficulty.
Hm maybe illegibility is the same thing as nebulosity, or one way in which it manifests or something.
When you move upwards in a hierarchy of purposes it usually does not end but disperses into an ecosystem of synergistic and conflicting purposes some of which could be called mundane and others which could be designated as higher.
All those purposes are somehow stakeholders in a given activity such as implementing a policy, running a business/a government agency/an NGO or leading a personal life.
When you try to optimize for any particular purpose you usually run into conflict with other purposes in the ecosystem.
Gregory Bateson made the point that ecosystems are harmed and skewed if any particular purpose gets to dominate the other purposes.
In political theory the dream of having one particular higher purpose eliminering the others is totalitarian.
In economics it is the dream of optimization.
There will always be the dream of cleaning up a messy world.
That is one of the purposes in the ecosystem. That purposes is supposed to be there alside all the others. A wish to clean up the mess as an integral part of the mess.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind is recommended reading
At an organization that had better remain nameless, one time sysadmin broke the web site which we were supposed to use to submit trip reports after travel. No one cared. Well, that let the cat out of the bag about that particular process.
(By way of contrast, there were certain other things that when sysadmin broke them, they had a company vice president screaming at them over the phone very quickly.(*))
(*) no chairs were thrown across the room, however.
Then there’s the category of things where your research division is like “oh, that’s going to be a train wreck. Please can we be allowed to record the chaos so we can write a paper about it.” No, research was not allowed to write that paper.
Wikipedia helpfully tells us “The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.”
Have you considered incorporating or referencing Scott Alexander's https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/05/ambijectivity/ when discussing the false objective-subjective dichotomy? For example, you say that "meanings mostly are publicly verifiable, so reasonable observers mostly agree about them", which seems plausible, but elides the issue that there still are large areas of meaning-space that are neither entirely objective or subjective, and where bounded disagreements between reasonable observers are the expected default.
This is a huge topic. Let me try to restate your main point:
Purposes are neither objective (out there in the world) nor subjective (inside the individual head). Instead they live in a sort of nebulous social sphere, where people collaborate in the process of determining what they are and how they work. "They are interactional opportunities for action" is how you phrase it, but that leaves out a lot of detail.
I'm particularly interested in how group purposes and individual purposes are different and have a complicated relationship – this is sort of what all political theory and organization theory is about. I asked ChatGPT for a literature overview of one aspect of this, and I doubt I will follow up on it, but maybe you should! https://chatgpt.com/share/679e609f-bec8-8013-94c2-9568b8b8788e
Another dimension of purpose that is worth exploring: legibility. Companies try to make their purposes explicit and legible, the current technology for doing that (internally) is KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Most big tech companies use some variant of this practice, where every level of the org is assigned goals that are both explicit (written down and public) and supposedly quantifiable. There's a good deal of skepticism about this (metrics can be gamed, etc), but not a lot of thinking about how group purpose actually could work better.
Goodhart's Law basically says that explicit goal metrics are no good. I sort of believe a Freudian generalization of this, which is that people can never articulate their actual underlying purposes. Or only rarely and with difficulty.
Hm maybe illegibility is the same thing as nebulosity, or one way in which it manifests or something.
When you move upwards in a hierarchy of purposes it usually does not end but disperses into an ecosystem of synergistic and conflicting purposes some of which could be called mundane and others which could be designated as higher.
All those purposes are somehow stakeholders in a given activity such as implementing a policy, running a business/a government agency/an NGO or leading a personal life.
When you try to optimize for any particular purpose you usually run into conflict with other purposes in the ecosystem.
Gregory Bateson made the point that ecosystems are harmed and skewed if any particular purpose gets to dominate the other purposes.
In political theory the dream of having one particular higher purpose eliminering the others is totalitarian.
In economics it is the dream of optimization.
There will always be the dream of cleaning up a messy world.
That is one of the purposes in the ecosystem. That purposes is supposed to be there alside all the others. A wish to clean up the mess as an integral part of the mess.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind is recommended reading