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.
"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.
coffeemug|6 years ago
rdiddly|6 years ago
Hard to believe this is 10 years old.
aldoushuxley001|6 years ago
Ironically this post explaining the concept of legibility is pretty opaque itself
jakequade|6 years ago
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.
closeparen|6 years ago
Instead of letting teams invent and adapt their own processes, dictate a unified JIRA workflow based on the needs of your BI tool.
Demand that your org's microservices architecture be simplified until it fits neatly on one Google Slide.
Confuse investment in a report with investment in the subject of the report.
pjc50|6 years ago
"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.
dmvinson|6 years ago
andrewflnr|6 years ago