When you use check kiting, you write a check against bank A to pay off bank B, and you write another check against bank B to pay off bank A. Similarly, when you use goal kiting, you address any objections to goal A by saying your plan will also achieve goal B, and you address objections to goal B by saying you will also achieve goal A.
There are many examples, but to pick one in particular, the US education system does this egregiously. If colleges aren’t preparing students for jobs with practical training, that’s OK, because education is a higher ideal that isn’t supposed to be practical. If you don’t feel expensive college tuition is worth it for you, then you should look at statistics about how much better jobs college graduates get. If foreign language classes don’t teach you the language, that’s not a problem, because you’re being exposed to other cultures and that’s valuable. We keep the students bottled up in the same place all day for learning; if they don’t learn, well, the real point was to teach them social skills; if the “social skills” they learn are becoming nasty bullies, that just means they need to be in school more, so we can teach them not to bully people. We teach trigonometry because people will need to use it; if they don’t need to use it, it’s still important that they think quantitatively; if tests prove they can’t think quantitatively, well, the real point is so they can “learn how to learn”. Every child needs to learn how to write in cursive; if no adult actually requires cursive for anything, well, then, it’s still very important to teach it because it makes children develop fine motor skills, which was really the whole point all along. (Yes, people have really said that as a justification for cursive, and they were being serious.)
The Rationalist Conspiracy 