"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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I think this leads to uncritical lindyism and it becomes gradually impossible to do anything new at all as the incumbent systems become too incomprehensible to grok at all, which means impossible to justifiably displace. I prefer the Gordian knot as the right right allegory here.
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Right, this was the source of my skepticism. It came off like they were endorsing it by suggesting that even planning cultures that swear by the "model ≠ territory" gospel (in theory) like choice architecture are still high modernist auth.
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So, in practice, no matter the methodological principles they avow, we better assume they're overwriting coherence with legibility—a dangerous practice. I was skeptical but thought you had some reason left unsaid.
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I think there's a basic risk to evolution/growth relative to prior knowledge that cannot be designed out. Growth is risk. Growth is fragile. They are not reasons to not grow. Even when the risks are existential, the preferability of stasis is not 100%.

