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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

But in the absence of credible information to the contrary, it's not wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

when a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view

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> But in the absence of credible information to the contrary, it's not wrong.

In the sense it is intended, it is entirely correct. It is not a claim about what the intent of the people involved in the system is, it is a recognition that (1) intent doesn't really aggregate, and, more importantly, even if it did (2) intent that consistently fails, because of the nature of the system, to materialize into function doesn't matter.

> it's not wrong.

It's an elegant idea in it's simplicity, but there's zero reason to think this heuristic is more valid than any other, and in my personal experience this line of thinking is usually wrong.

What kinds of experiences have shown this heuristic to be not so useful to you?

People often can't see past their own hostility when figuring out what a system 'does'. And now they have have a clever sounding way to pretend that they're describing a system with detached reason, not just describing their attitude towards the system.

It's like a art review where a writer - completely unaware of what they're doing - talks only about the work, but says nothing about the work and opens a window into their soul. A lot of people don't even recognize when it happens in that context. It's even easier for a speaker to deceive a listener (and themselves) in the context of speaking on systems. Systems thinking is hard and almost everyone is terrible at it.

Your metaphor is not clear to me, but you seem to be asserting more of an empirical problem with people, not saying anything about the heuristic itself. It does not speak to how we know a system does what it does, or that we can even know I guess, so even if you have some kind of point here I don't see how it applies in this case.

"If we know what a system does, we know that it is its purpose": is that ok?

Is the useSkin parameter something you manually added? I am not logged in and when I navigate to another page the parameter (and with it the skin preference) disappears.

Oh sorry, yes I have a browser extension that always adds that parameter to any wikipedia page. I usually strip it when posting a link, but I forgot (and since it's a long link, it doesn't display in its entirety so I didn't catch it).

I just discovered that feature due to your mistake, so thank you!

For similarly newly enlightened people it's a feature of MediaWiki (which Wikipedia runs on) and there are five (plus two) themes selectable with ?useskin= values:

- timeless (as seen above): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=timeles...

- monobook (default 2004-2009): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=monoboo...

- vector (default 2010-2021): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=vector

- vector-2022 (desktop default 2022-): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=vector-...

- minerva (mobile default): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=minerva

- modern (delightedly dated, deprecated): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=modern

- cologneblue (also ancient and anti-favored): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=cologne...

You can also choose a preferred skin when you log in and go to Preferences → Appearance.

That makes sense! I can see why you would prefer that skin. Out of curiosity, why use a plugin and not Wikipedia's appearance preferences[1]?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec...

IIRC that requires having an account and being logged in, or maybe it just required a persistent cookie to remember the preference. Either way, my browser still aggressively clears cookies on exit so this solution was more permanent for me than the official solution.

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