- The key for understanding this is that Legibility is a precondition for control over a system.
- The underlying experience we prefer having and making us more likely to believe an argumentation is called cognitive ease. Our brains try to minimise surprisal.
- Somehow wishful thinking plays into this. Wishful thinking stems from an impulse to minimise surprisal. We don’t want to be surprised by how a system looks and we are an entity that sees itself as governing the system. Therefore we start to design a “better” version that is more legible
- From https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/
collapsed:: true
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The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure
Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).
Here is the recipe:
- Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
- Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
- Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
- Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
- Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
- Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
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The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.
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