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Curious: I often hear illegibility associated to the post-rat community. What are the canonical refs? I'm asking specifically for canonical within the post-rat community, not the much broader literature. Maybe:
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In the same sense as, say, "Meditations on Moloch" is canon within the rationality community. Of course, the ideas in it come out of (IIRC) Hobbes, Rousseau, Olson, and many others - ideas about collective action and its difficulty, about systems, and so on.
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I'm not asking to be pointed to "Seeing Like a State". I assumed this was obvious, but I guess not I asking which post-rat writing on legibility is canon within the post-rat community, & which non-post-rat writing (apart from SLaS) is canon for the post-rats.
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Someone saying the essay I linked is the conventional reference (+Scott, of course) twitter.com/The_Lagrangian It's a lovely essay, but I'm surprised there's not more. (Yes, yes, everyone can now fill in self-reference jokes. Funny the first time, after that it's a high bar...)
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
I think that is accurate as the canonical source, or at least was a couple years ago
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A curious thing is the _personal value_ that many post-rats seem to place on personal illegibility - as something desirable. This is (mostly) absent from both 's essay and Scott's book, at least in my reading. So I'm curious how it arose!!??
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Put another way: certainly you can read both essay and book as being in praise of certain kinds of illegibility to large systems (eg government). But that doesn't imply illegibility all the way down, so to speak.
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In 2006 I coined for myself what I call "Groucho's Law": twitter.com/michael_nielse It's tongue-in-cheek: never work on any project for which you can get funding (roughly: fundable means your idea is already legible to institutions, & you're skating to where the puck once was)...
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Replying to @michael_nielsen and @DavidDeutschOxf
I call this Groucho's law: you should never work on any project for which can get funding. Tongue-in-cheek, but there's a grain of truth to it: the easier funding is to get, the more likely something like it would have happened anyway.
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Replying to
Not sure of how postrats got into it, but we were using legible/illegible as shorthand in discussions around the blog for a few years before they emerged. But not in the aspirational sense except ironically, as a joke. I hadn’t noticed the unironic postrat use actually.
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I bump into it quite a bit - enough that eventually I realized "oh, all these people using 'legible' casually may have something in common". They did, & it wasn't that they all had polisci degrees....
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