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It's easy to conflate "things don't make sense to us" with "things don't make sense [full stop]". Often enough things make sense for many purposes while not making sense /to/ observers (planners, critics, theorists).
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When things don't make sense to observers, they tend to groundlessly take that to mean those things don't make sense [full stop]. So the observers suppose that the things have to be replaced with things that do make sense both /to/ the them and /for/ those many purposes.
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But in reality, it was a groundless conflation, those things already made sense /for/ those many purposes, they just didn't make sense /to/ them.
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In reality, they'll be replacing the old things with new things that make more sense /to/ them but less sense /for/ those many purposes. They'll reliably make more sense /to/ the observers, but they won't reliably make any sense (mildly or catastrophically) /for/ those purposes.
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"making sense to observers" is what they mean by "Legibility"... "Effectiveness" might be the counterpart "making sense [full stop]". i wonder if id've gotten something meatier if i actually read the book
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Meatier takeaway: it's Chesterton's fence with much heavier constraints. Social & ecological systems are the result of at least thousands of years of evolution, and evolution is likely to produce systems that are very effective in very illegible ways.
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So by default, we should expect that significant interventions in these systems that undermine evolved processes will result in poorer outcomes, and wherever the bar for intervention is, it ought to be correspondingly higher.
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It's quite wrong actually. Illegibility/authoritarian high modernism is a critical-analytical lens, not a normative one. I think Chesterton's Fence (which is basically what you're talking about with 'higher bar') is basically wrong.
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But the opposition to high modernism you describe has to be justified by Chesterton's Fence (or this stronger version of it) doesn't it?
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Meatier takeaway: it's Chesterton's fence with much heavier constraints. Social & ecological systems are the result of at least thousands of years of evolution, and evolution is likely to produce systems that are very effective in very illegible ways.
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Otherwise, why trust that the system as it is (i.e. its natural status quo) is more reliable for your purpose (e.g. welfare, stability) than some legible alternative a planner comes up with?
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