Scott calls all this stuff high modernism, but how does the mid century modernism relate to the Victorian progressive techno-optimism Progress MOC
An example of legibility is the evolution of the a-f grading system in schools - see Schneider and Hutt paper, making the grade.
Rigidity in intellectual systems is linked to exchange rates and a lack of incompatible tradeoffs. Centralisation too? How does objectivity fit in?
Cadastral maps emerged early in netherlands because of their being needed for land speculation w/ reclaiming lands. Shows legibility and simplification of maps goes with foreign intervention which packs local knowledge, seen in colonies too.
Colonies were often mapped before their metropoles because of their weakened civil societies
Daoism may be a response to growing need for legibility among chinese beauracracies Daoism
Legibility is a CIG in amy competitive environment that engenders more complex means, e.g. pre-modern to modern states
Whats the relation of legibility, salience, and to-handedness. Consider apps and advertising from pov of custoner vs corporation. Consider the different kinds of agents firms/states and individuals are, one vast, slow, low res, synoptic, and the other the opposite. Consider disease-like agents vs. counter-disease like agents, deleuze seems relevant.
Qin 老百姓 was a project of legibility, led to creation of patrilineal families among commoners
Resistant territory like a feudal populati9n required more rigid/authoritarian ways of knowing it
Stable systems of legibility are those where identification becomes incentivised, e.g. to avoid being double-taxed.
As more and more affordances and resources are reached via state institutions, the facts on paper of the state shape the facts on the ground of the people. What started as an unnaturally simple map of property ownership produces a simplified system of actual property ownership through successive instances of sale and purchase.
Idea of society as an objevt seperate to the state is a late modern idea? What about the body politic? Society as something to be worked on by the state is a modern idea certainly.
When do people try to make themselves legible? Why would they have statish desires to do so? How might their subagents respond? What seemingly rational actions of self-transparent agents are actually attempts to make themselves legible? Also legible to others cf. Persons
More generally, how do we connect individual ideas like metis with market design/cultural evolution to figure out when top down vs. bottom up approaches produce better equilibria?
Wasnt the meiji restoration a great success of bulldozing civil society and making it legible? (SSC). Also plenty of legibility projects go well, like the green revolution, (though these dont have all 4 risk factors scott mentions)
Joseph Henrich, whose books Jane has reviewed here and here, has a bit about how soothsaying, auguries, and the casting of lots can be seen as a strategy for committing to randomized decision-making, which is optimal in certain game theoretic setups. The extreme superstitiousness of the Appalachians, which is mirrored in a lot of other hill people, got me wondering if superstition in general might be an individual-level version of that. If your beliefs about the supernatural make your actions less predictable, that can only be good for your ungovernability. (John P Smith on Appalachia book)