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This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control becomes far too complex to manage. Thus, the simplification becomes a mandate, even at the cost of great inefficiencies.

What makes the book particularly interesting is the many different historical examples of this phenomenon, across a wide array of human endeavors.

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scarecrowbob 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.

That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.

I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.

I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.

But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.

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kevinventullo 2 days ago | parent [-]

Thank you for the reply!

I don't want to make any strong claims here, but my gut reaction to your first comment is that what one manager calls “allowance for illegibility”, another might call “trust in my reports”.

	▲	scarecrowbob a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, at the end of the day it's necessary to have some amount of "trust" in the people doing the work. Which is good- you can try to avoid that but if it didn't happen very little would get done.
	▲	weard_beard a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Everything rots, everything changes. Investors want to know how long you're going to keep making them money. They don't like surprises. Really, I think what we need are new ways for investors to participate and understand and structure their investments that don't have negative downward consequences for the structure of businesses.

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sidewndr46 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.