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

He also brings up its implications in the modern tech ecosystem. The Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons are like panoptic overseers that can force legibility even on the most impenetrable, messy datastreams through machine learning algorithms and hyper-scale pattern recognition. The trade-off here may not be conscription (not yet anyway), but there is... See more

But ambiguity, taste, meaning, value, these remain hard to attain within the hierarchy of verifiability. “Intelligence” races ahead wherever the rewards are liquid and the outcome is easy to check, but it lags at the edges: in murky context, slow feedback, or spaces where the answer is more felt than measured.

While it’s tempting to believe a model... See more