We should adopt an acronym: YASLASR, yet another seeing like a state review. And we are crossing into the meta-reviews territory already. To be frank, I’ve never understood the wide appeal that the book enjoys. Sure, it’s an important lesson that implicit knowledge sometimes is less wrong than scientific knowledge, but we (should) already know: it’s in Jaynes (about the peasants believing that meteors were rocks falling from the sky) and it’s in the metaphor of evolution as the mad god Azatoth (referenced here many times). Perhaps is less surprising to aspiring rationalists because we already know the limitation of scientific knowledge.
I can gesture in the direction of some points that make it appeal to me:
I like the concept of legibility. It’s a new one for me and I find it useful
I like the lack of clear-cut heroes and villains—it is complicated
I like the attention paid to what can be expressed in what language and the observation that there are real concerns which cannot be readily expressed in the language of rationality
I like the recognition of the role that power plays in social arrangements, regardless of what’s “rational” or not
I like the pushback against the idea—very popular among rationalists, mind you—that we have a new shiny tool called math and logic which will solve everything so we can ignore the accumulated local knowledge deadwood
All in all it’s smart book written by someone on the other side of the ideological fence (AFAIK James Scott is a Marxist, though not entirely an orthodox one) which makes it very interesting.
We should adopt an acronym: YASLASR, yet another seeing like a state review. And we are crossing into the meta-reviews territory already.
To be frank, I’ve never understood the wide appeal that the book enjoys. Sure, it’s an important lesson that implicit knowledge sometimes is less wrong than scientific knowledge, but we (should) already know: it’s in Jaynes (about the peasants believing that meteors were rocks falling from the sky) and it’s in the metaphor of evolution as the mad god Azatoth (referenced here many times). Perhaps is less surprising to aspiring rationalists because we already know the limitation of scientific knowledge.
I can gesture in the direction of some points that make it appeal to me:
I like the concept of legibility. It’s a new one for me and I find it useful
I like the lack of clear-cut heroes and villains—it is complicated
I like the attention paid to what can be expressed in what language and the observation that there are real concerns which cannot be readily expressed in the language of rationality
I like the recognition of the role that power plays in social arrangements, regardless of what’s “rational” or not
I like the pushback against the idea—very popular among rationalists, mind you—that we have a new shiny tool called math and logic which will solve everything so we can ignore the accumulated local knowledge deadwood
All in all it’s smart book written by someone on the other side of the ideological fence (AFAIK James Scott is a Marxist, though not entirely an orthodox one) which makes it very interesting.
Goodness, you said something definite! :)
Ooops, sorry ma’am, won’t happen again :-P