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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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By that definition, the purpose of a computer is to get hot. It of course does get hot, but a purpose is more than simply a side-effect.
Purpose, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is "why you do something or why something exist". A side-effect wouldn't pose any cause, therefore it's NOT its purpose.
The purpose of the cooling system of a computer is to move the heat away because that's what it does.
Yeah but the point of a cooling system isn't e.g. "making noise" even though that' also something that it does.
there is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system (computer) is what it consistently fails to do (overheat)
The purpose of a computer that overheats is to stay broken until discarded or acted upon and repaired, the purpose of a computer that can manage heat is to compute, really simple concept
No amount of good intentions or willpower can make a system act contrary to its actual processes and outcomes
The point of POSIWID is to challenge magical thinking in the context of political system's analysis
Exactly. Its purpose isn't "generating heat", although it sure does that. Likewise, the purpose of cars isn't "crashing", although some do crash. That doesn't make it htier purpose though.
Again, unless it's broken in which case its purpose is just "generating heat" seems like you're just tripped up by some semantic understanding of the word purpose. Also what is the purpose of a car that has already crashed, do you think the purpose of a wrecked car is to drive it?
You do realize there's an entire concept surrounding the word "purpose" that you're just willfully missing
Who told you that the purpose of a computer is to be cold?
It is not. The purpose of it is neither to be cold nor to be hot.
It is not. The purpose of it is neither to be cold nor to be hot.
Cool so then your point was irrelevant, wasn't it?
Generating heat is part of how a computer operates. If some standard-model computer isn't producing heat, it probably isn't functioning very well. That said, it also does several other things, things it does with much greater efficiency than its heat generation (which has some mitigation with cooling systems, depending on the machine), so those must also be considered part of its purpose.
What cannot be considered part of its purpose is what it does not do, such as, uh, reproducing, for example.
Would you say the purpose of you sleeping at night is "making noise"? Because it's also something that you do whiel sleeping. I would say "no". But if the purpose of a system is what it does, then making noise would also a purpose, right?
Any massive object existing in a medium (i.e. not a vacuum) if it moves at all by virtue of entering space occupied partially by particles of the medium. Does the purpose of sleep include continuing to exist and not halting movement on a molecular level? Sure, I think if I went to sleep and stopped existing, I failed to sleep. If I froze on a molecular level, I would just be dead and therefore also have failed to sleep.
It's interesting how seamlessly you moved to an un-authored system from the technological and political context this was initially about. You're missing the forest for the trees here, in any case. The real point of the statement is that when you aren't talking about something trivial like molecular-level noise, but the massive and systemically enforced prison slavery system in the US (you know, just to pick an example), it is absurd to say that the production and maintenance of such conditions is somehow contrary to the purpose of the US Justice System, or just some sad incident of fate rather than a lifelong cornerstone of the US economic-political system.
I've put dough on top of my computer to rise while playing games before because of the extra warmth, purpose of a system is what is does
I burnt a toast in the toaster. But ruining my bread is not the purpose of the toaster.
Similarly, if a fire alarm goes off on a false positive, that doesn't mean the purpose of the fire alarm was to waste the firefighters time. Not every effect of a system is also its purpose.
But if your toaster ALWAYS ruined your toast, and you kept putting bread in it for, say, seventy years, and every single time it made a burned mess you say "But the toaster is supposed to make toast, it was designed with the intention to make toast, this burned mess is just bad luck/an unintended side effect/the result of a few bad apples" - then your epistemological paradigm might be lacking.
Yeah just the effect that KEEPS HAPPENING over and over again. As another poster put it, if a toaster burns toast every single time, then yeah, that's a toaster for burning bread. That's all its useful for.
My puter keeps me warm :)
My quantum computer doesn't, unfortunately. That liquid nitrogen judst keeps ruining everything :(
If you make your own liquid nitrogen in house you can heat it that way
you do realize that computers run like, way less hot than they used to, right? Like many people have worked towards computers running not so hot.
Assuming that were the case, what is the point you are trying to make? "Getting hot" is not the purpose of a computer. Rather, its a side effect (that people are trying to avoid).
Yeah, now imagine if people weren't doing that and the statement that a computers purpose is to run hot would stand.
See, the existence of the cooling bit of the system suggests a different purpose. You're making progress. So what parts of the social systems around you are meant to avoid the bad "side effects" you're suggesting. Might help to pick a specific example to talk about. Prison industrial complex and its purpose being to make things worse and traumatize people rather than rehabilitation would be my suggestion. But pick whatever you want.
Umm actually dummy, there are 2 counterpoints to your problem
First, computers technically include abascuses and calculators, and they don't require electricity to power and thus heat up... (So specify it's an electronic one)
2nd, if a device technically produces a side-effect, unwanted or not, in the future, the maker will either deal with it by:
a. publicly announce that error and patch it up (eg. glitches in game)
b. use that, for a different Purpose (eg. using a bakery good identifier to find cancer)
If it follows the latter reasoning, what it does WILL become its purpose... it will become a feature, not a bug...
Until then, it's up in the air whether its maker intended it or not...
Its obvious I was talking about an electric one. However, abacuses technically produce heat while being used (from friction) and my electric calculator does too. So maybe you should have specified if you meant an electric calculator... ;)
But the claim was that what it does CURRENTLY IS its purpose. You are just saying that eventually, people will learn to take advantage of the side effects (which may or may not actually happen IMO).
Obviously, I should've specified that, though it takes a lot of effort to produce noticeable one...
Well, as I said, the intention is up in the air, so as long as the creator would neither deny or confirm it, via updates, we might consider it as its secondary purpose, if it STILL produces those side-effects CLEARLY, according to the creator...
But for the sake of simplicity, I'll just give up the argument for now.
Would you say it's not a purpose anymore if the creator clarifies they didn't have any intentions about it? Or would it still be a purpose?
POSIWID is about counteracting the human tendency to ignore reality while citing the system’s intended purpose. If you want to be overly technical about it, someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out that “utility” would have been a better word than “purpose”. Given the history of the phrase, we can look at how it’s used and see that the phrase is functionally equivalent.
Makes sense, thank you.
Who decides what a computer is for? The buyer? The manufacturer? The brand CEO? The government? The silicon chip in the CPU?
For the buyer a computer is a gambling and pornography viewer. For the manufacturer a computer is a series of parts assembled to the Brand's spec so it gives them enough money to continue operations. For the Brand CEO a computer is a symbolic token that increases shareholder value. For the government a computer is a surveillance device. For a silicon wafer, a computer is a change in voltage within its molecular structure (but I'm sure it doesn't think too much about that).
Can we say any one of these is objectively correct? If I attach rat neurons to a computer, is the rat a computer? Is the computer a rat? We inevitably arrive at the classic Heraclitus vs. Parmenides to ask whether existence is still or in motion.
If I step into the Mississippi river, and then return a year later to find that same shore is on an oxbow lake instead, am I stepping in the same river twice? If in another year it fills in with silt and is tilled into farmland, can I still step in the same river thrice? Certain US state borders would certainly have you believe so. They freeze old river courses in time to maintain purely ideological separations of physical space into discrete units. A line on a map can't stop the flow of water and silt any more than an engineer's drawing can stop tunneling quantum particles. Is that really a side-effect when quantum particles are meant to tunnel? Is heat generation really a side effect when heat itself is an effect of the chemical processes in MOSFET circuits? If they didn't release energy, they wouldn't work at all now, would they? Dissipation of energy is required to change the states of atoms and molecules. So how can we say a computer isn't meant to produce heat when it very clearly is?