Thinking of the (possibly thought-experiment) story about 2 groups of pottery students instructed to go for quantity and quality, respectively, where the quantity group ended up more skilled. So if perfectionism recoils from whatever I might have to say, maybe I can just notice and say it anyway

How can we encourage systems that value the messiness of social experimentation? What would it look like to deliberately expand the scope of personal agency and depth of belonging and mutual responsibility?

Over and over it's the arrogance of these big projects that stands out. The planners who think they know better than the people who will live and work in these places what they need and want, ignoring any complexity or multivalent process that doesn't fit their aims.

More generally, don't we technocrats at all scales of influence do some version of this every time we specify a quantitative objective function to be maximized? So maybe the practice, in working towards greater well-being of a complex system, is paying attention so we use the tools not vice versa.

It's a worldview that has everything to do with power, while being neither left nor right but *modern*, that is outdated in its pure unironic form, but also still very much shaping the conditions of how we frame social problems and possible solutions.

Scott makes the case that the ideological assumptions encoded in the practice of statistics–the representation of people as units of observation with a finite number of discrete or quantifiable properties–sets up an authoritarian tendency in how we relate to the world.

There's a lovely extended example contrasting an old growth forest with a scientifically managed plantation, both historically specific and metaphorically evocative. I had the reaction that taming a forest like that is violent, but of course also useful

The history of units of measurement points out how the question of who decides the standards for quantification has a kind of power they'll generally also use for other kinds of economic exploitation.

And here's 4-3

Here's 8-3