I also found that his idea of legibility crystallized something I kind of knew before, but not particularly in words. Basically, you have some stuff that follows rules imposed on it (legible) and things that arose organically with lots of local adaptations, that is much harder to understand. Legibility is in the eye of the beholder, and learning thoughts or having particular ideas can make some things legible that weren’t before. If you optimize too hard for one particular thing, you get something that’s legible but largely useless, if you don’t try to impose order its difficult to manipulate.
I’d take issue with the phrase “his idea of legibility”. What Rao is doing in that post is summarizing Scott’s excellent book on that same topic; it is of course a valuable service to intelligently summarize a book, but it’s hardly the same as coming up with the idea in the first place. (I was turned on to that book by a guy named Michael Bolton, who I think is a pretty extraordinary thinker in his own right. Rather than write a post about Scott’s book he’s only been going around ordering everyone he knew to read the book.)
This post about a LW meetup that he attended is probably relevant.
I personally find Venkatesh’s blog very interesting, but am somewhat skeptical of a lot of his particular ideas. He has very cool posts about some historical things, like the importance of modern shipping containers, history of the corporation, and the importance of barbarians. Those are all seriously awesome, IMO.
I also found that his idea of legibility crystallized something I kind of knew before, but not particularly in words. Basically, you have some stuff that follows rules imposed on it (legible) and things that arose organically with lots of local adaptations, that is much harder to understand. Legibility is in the eye of the beholder, and learning thoughts or having particular ideas can make some things legible that weren’t before. If you optimize too hard for one particular thing, you get something that’s legible but largely useless, if you don’t try to impose order its difficult to manipulate.
I’d take issue with the phrase “his idea of legibility”. What Rao is doing in that post is summarizing Scott’s excellent book on that same topic; it is of course a valuable service to intelligently summarize a book, but it’s hardly the same as coming up with the idea in the first place. (I was turned on to that book by a guy named Michael Bolton, who I think is a pretty extraordinary thinker in his own right. Rather than write a post about Scott’s book he’s only been going around ordering everyone he knew to read the book.)
True.
So yeah, not his idea. He uses it a lot but didn’t originate it.
The linked post has prominent first-graf credit to Scott’s book.
Yup. Which would make “Scott’s idea of legibility” more accurate than “his (Rao’s) idea of legibility”.
Yeah, I missed something subtle: atucker, not VR, was claiming too much credit for VR, probably because you went on to contrast Bolton against VR.
We should expect narrative thinkers to riff on each others’ themes.
Some would say that legibility is James Scott’s idea.
Oh cool—thanks for the reply and examples!
Which of his ideas are you skeptical about?