Is it just me or is [il]legible the word of the month somewhere? I suddenly keep seeing this word pop up in contexts I would not normally associate it with.
James C Scott, a Yale political scientist with an interest in agrarian societies, wrote a book Seeing Like A State in 1998. He was interested in why state-scale, “scientific” and “rational” schemes often fail to improve the outcomes they nominally set out to address (and often make them worse).
The book traced a number of case studies supporting the notion that large enough systems of control require some degree of standardization to implement—for example, to tax stuff, you have to know how much stuff there is. Village life might tend to have advantages for human well-being, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get that result by sending out troops to force everybody out of their traditional structure and into village footprints.
If you’re tallying up a nation’s agricultural capacity, “Farmer John’s got a nice-sized patch that’s extra fertile but he’s lazy” doesn’t add as well as “corn, 5 acres, Grade B”.
In that way of thinking, complexity, nuance, or localized idiosyncrasies—where a lot of useful information lives, but outside of the standardized spec—essentially becomes invisible to the system. Even though it’s essential to the social phenomenon the system is setting out to regulate.
It’s illegible to the centralized governance mechanism, so it may as well not exist, as far as that mechanism is concerned. No National ID number? You’re not a person, go away.
Sean Goedecke recently wrote a blog [1] applying that idea to software companies, I imagine that’s where the resurgence is coming from in these parts :)
Thank you for the detailed explanation. In that case it makes sense because it was actually writing or recordkeeping done by a human hand that failed to communicate some pertinent bits of information (though in a more abstract sense than being physically unable to read the glyphs).
Extending it to observations of natural or emergent phenomena seems like a reach for fanciness when "inscrutable," "unclear," "murky," or "poorly understood" would be more accurate to me.
Edit: Upon further review, I am coming around to it a bit, in the sense of performance reviews looking for the wrong thing, but I still think the larger point is about something more complex that poor evaluation metrics are just a symptom of rather than the cause.
It's used here as a specific term from Seeing like a State[1][2], which is one of those books that got popular with a specific set of online tech folks. "Legibitility" in that particular sense is a very useful concept with no other convenient word, so I'm not too surprised it caught on.
To this point, it is actually wild how we each see a different projection of the chamber depending on which articles and threads we dive into. As much as I feel like I "know" HN, I do marvel at the entire subsections of the discourse I'm completely oblivious to, and this is an interesting cross-pollination.
