by ilex

zebra2, this one's for you.

Thoughts on Seeing Like a State

Scott distinguishes between metis and epistemic knowledge. Epistemic knowledge is from the state, and it’s often called “rational”. It’s based in scientific or “scientificish” knowledge. It’s so general as to apply everywhere, which means it kind of winds up applying nowhere. Sometimes this looks like farming techniques that are great in theory, but in practice are incapable of adapting to any single locale. Other times it looks like geometric land distribution that ignores local conditions.

I think legibility is a useful idea to have on hand especially in the face of increased computerization that only works inasmuch as we can measure things. It's easy to assume that because you have some measurements you're more right than someone without, but that's not always the case -- and it's impossible to measure abstract concepts anyway; if the thing you measure aligns with the concept well, then you might get by alright but if it's a more loose approximation, god help you.

And then you have the modern-day phrenology types who think that if you just feed enough labeled data into a machine learning algorithm, you'll get a good predictor for whatever it is you want. Predictor not so good in practice? More data, brah!

Critically, this analysis is somewhat predicated on the idea that plans require power, often in the form of state power. This is a good starting point for thinking about 99% of what has happened in large scale social projects, but it might be interesting to ask whether there are ways of abdicating power to communities and allowing them to pursue your plans -- for example, Venezuela enabled local communes to take over abandoned properties in order to expand housing.