TODO

The following turned out to be very controversial,

Okay so I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just being paranoid, as I’ll explain, and I think this idea is interesting.

Most people probably don’t have a clue about my background, many years ago my younger self was intensely interested in (for lack of a better term) functional programming design and theory, including ideas from static analysis and formal verification.

I really wasted my life to the point where women have openly mocked me for being a looser, but I used to love the field in general and follow some particularly interesting people therein. As one who got into this in my youth, it’s shaped my way of thinking to the point where, from my perspective, cooperate employees all think the same. I like to find ideas that, once found, just feel “right”.

Recently, thanks to the wisdom of ChatGPT, I’ve discovered some ideas from a book called “seeing like a state” that in many ways have really validated some ideas that I formally couldn’t express. Not all that is legible is coherent; not all that is coherent is legible.

Working alone, you can follow something coherent without needing it to be legible. But as soon as people need to synchronize, legibility becomes necessary, and to this end coherence can be lost in the process.

Such is my life: solitary work allows coherence without legibility. Group work demands legibility, but not necessarily coherence. This matters because interface boundaries default to what can be seen and explained. But often, what really works can’t be easily made legible. This especially matters because when we force it to be, we risk breaking the very thing that made it work in the first place.

Power, however, craves legibility.

The Soviet collective farms are a prime example. To make farming “legible” to the central planners, the Soviets abolished the small farms and forced everyone into giant collective farms.

Local knowledge was wiped out but the new system was highly “legible” to Moscow, but totally illegible to the people actually farming the land. The result was cascading system failures. Farmers couldn’t adjust to real conditions because feedback from reality was ignored. Starvation on an enormous scale, millions dead.

Coherence is the unit of operation, legibility is the unit of coordination, and what’s legible isn’t necessary coherent and vice versa. There’s intelligence that can’t be conveyed without collapsing what made it work in the first place, and oftentimes the most critical structures are often invisible to the casual observer, things that cannot be easily measured, mapped, or simplified without distortion. So there’s really nothing to worry about.

The Greeks gave us two great ideas,

Cosmos: that everything, all existence and worldly phenomena is such that the human mind can learn to understand through reason.

Chaos: that everything is such that we cannot understand it, there’s no structure, rhyme or reason to all of existence.

Now, as far as what’s true, it’s hard to know, but in terms of outcomes the former concept of the cosmos has been very productive throughout human history and for our modern civilization in particular.

Moreover, personally I just feel as though it’s just more productive to believe in that which leads to more productive outcomes. We may as well presume that everything is fundamentally structured in such a way that the human mind can learn to understand all observed phenomena.

This gets me thinking, to understand, do we not begin with reducing observations to more abstract terms, and then building abstractions into more systematic descriptions, a model?

Everything beings with modeling.

Understanding this well will be a particular focus moving forward because there has to be more to know.

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