>Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it.
This is (at least partially) why other people's code often looks like a mess, or rephrased, it is illegible. Until you understand the organising principles, it will appear unorganised.
Oof, that recipe cited, looks so much like the pattern that can occur when a comsultant comes in to build a shiny new workflow based around IT. I may have even have been guilty myself in years gone by.
Attempts to make a system more 'legible' often ignore (or don't fully comprehend) why they exist in a certain way. Remaking the system without understanding these aspects leads to something that makes more sense 'on paper', but undermines the complexities and nuances of the original system.
Example (from the text):
- British implementation of a 4-tier caste in India, as their way of comprehending what was (allegedly) a much more complex social structure. It's now the default caste system in the nation.
- Turning forests into agriculture-like rows of trees creating a fatal monoculture.
- Spanish colonization of the Philippines. In an effort to make records/taxes easier, the Spanish created the "Alphabetical Catalogue of Surnames", restricting the number of assumed names. This countered Filipino culture, which had both assumed Christian names, and siblings having different last names.
Exactly, legibility is an explanation for why such practices are adopted. They kill morale and productivity yet they must be optimizing for something or else nobody would do them. That something is legibility.
This is a very confusing conversation with a lot of ambiguous referents.
I think Scott's theory, as outlined in the OP, is for why the sorts of practices closeparen listed (KPI's etc) won't work well, will have problems. Scott does not advocate for them, but against them.
Whereas closeparen's comment may have implied the opposite. I'm not sure if it's (eg) "KPIs" or "mushy human judgement" you are calling a "tired, old, worst practice".
Apparently it is me that was was still ambiguous and unclear.
> > [closeparen]: Instead of management by mushy human judgement, hold people accountable for KPIs.
> [coldtea]: So it mostly advises for tired, old, worst practices?
I believe closeparen meant that (and the other examples), of what Scott's legibility theory is _critiquing_, not advising for. Using KPIs instead of human judgement is an example of what Scott's theory says will have problems, not examples of what Scott's theory calls for or advises people to do. (I agree with that read of Scott's theory).
But I believe coldtea was calling (eg) KPIs a "tired old practice", and misreading to think closeparen was saying Scott's theory advised for them. (Although I may have this backwards?)
Perhaps it is me who is misreading? It is hard to be sure, because closeparen wasn't clear on if those were examples of what Scott was calling for or critiquing (I can see how it would be 'unambiguous and clear' to read it as saying Scott's theory called for using KPIs instead of "mushy human judgement", but since I am familiar with Scott's argument, I doubt closeparen meant it that way, since it's not Scott's argument); and then coldtea wasn't clear on whether it's the left or right clauses in the sentances they were calling "tired, old practices".
And this is now entirely too many words about this.
"Demolish the centre of Paris and replace it with tower blocks" is exactly the sort of failure of high modernism that the article talks about.
Present day examples of legibility center around ID (cards, Aardhar, biometrics, cameras etc) but also financial legibility (KYC), surveillance, and so on.
Scott's book is about how bottom-up complex systems are destroyed and reconstructed as top-down centrally planned organized systems in order to become more "legible" for the destroyer (the state). The general theme is the state can't understand how certain traits of the system are actually adaptive because it views from the outside. These traits are seen as irrational, so the state destroys the system and rebuilds it in order to make it rational, and thus understandable and legible in order to optimize for extracting a resource of some sort. Legibility in this context is used almost pejoratively to say most beneficial elements have been destroyed to optimize for one parameter, often ineffectively in the long term. Scott Alexander has a pretty good review if you want a deeper dive into the book's examples of this process.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
IIUC legibility of a system is pretty much understandability of that system with a focus on the "purposes" of the components. There's some subtext (which is why it's its own word) but that's my reductionist version.
It's common to ignore / demolish things which seem futile or even interfering, while in reality they are just not understood in the first place.