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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks)
James C. Scott • 1 highlight
amazon.com
Legibility is a concept from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State . It’s not a book that lends itself well to one-sentence summaries, but my attempt is “we assume that only what we can measure is real and everything that is real can be measured.”
The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here ... See more
The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here ... See more
taylorpearson.me • The Illegible Margin: Profiting From the Gap Between the Map and the Territory
Scott details a pattern of disaster that repeatedly manifests around legibility. His opening example is from the late-18th century discipline of “scientific forestry”.
A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this... See more
A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this... See more