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James C. Scott, author of Seeing Like a State, has died
- anna4151 2y ago[flagged]
- speckledben 2y ago"Seeing Like A State" is a superb book, but I'll always remember Scott for "The Art of Not Being Governed." I was a history major in college, and seeing history from the point of view of non-state peoples was revelatory for a young student. I greatly enjoyed it, truly one of those experiences in life where my mind was opened and expanded in a new direction. I'll forever remember him for that, and be grateful for his contribution to my way of viewing the world.
- dbuxton 2y ago+1. I had simply never considered that one reason to not be a user of the dominant technology (writing, agriculture) was that adopting would mean losing control over one’s group’s destiny. Gives you a different lens on enterprise software adoption and implementation!
- pm3003 2y agoSeeing like a State sadly has some badly written chapters, including some of those not written by him. This makes the book quite a tedious read overall, alternating between deep analysis and highschool level history refresh. The Art of noy being governed is better in this regard.
- sriacha 2y agoInteresting, do you have a source of the chapters not written by him?
- toomuchtodo 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott
- beedeebeedee 2y agoI met him once but never took a class. I wish I had because I enjoyed listening to him. Deeply knowledgeable and great intellect. We spoke mostly about the Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, which is worth reading by everyone in the US and UK (and elsewhere). The other great book by James C. Scott is Weapons of the Weak.
- josephcooney 2y agoSeeing like a state is a very though-provoking book which I thoroughly enjoyed. I should give it a re-read.
- sameoldtune 2y agoThe concepts in Seeing Like A State are very relevant to programmers and to anyone trying to “change the world” with technology. One of the main points is that for a state to manage many people it tends to use power (hard and soft) to homogenize the populace. My belief is that tech necessarily does the same thing. Everyone in your app has permissions defined by some enum, a limited number of actions available, content moderation machinery. This has effects that are inescapable, especially in the fields of medicine, mental health, education, social engagement. Tech makes our levers to move the Earth more efficient, but at the cost of a lack of diversity of thought, lifestyle, and value.
- jagged-chisel 2y agoDiversity in [the featuresets of] software systems has led to reduced security. The only systems without the “rails” to keep the user on-track and out of danger zones are those that provide the user with the ability to program it themselves. Must it be this way? Can we provide the complexity of flexibility while protecting our users’ finances and other important information? I don’t know if we can, but our track record isn’t good.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago> Diversity in [the featuresets of] software systems has led to reduced security citation needed. one anecdote that comes to mind, the gnu build system had an odd assortment of machines. when they were hacked (very targeted attack) they only noticed because the malware crashed on a R6000 mips cpu or something.
- SoftTalker 2y agoThat's also a good reason to make your code portable to other architectures, even if you don't intend to support them. Doing so can shake out bugs that would otherwise not be so apparent.
- jagged-chisel 2y agoI think anyone in the industry would agree that at some point, the increase in exposed surface area provided by the addition of features (and the complexity to support them) has indeed decreased security at least once in the history of software. My statement doesn't say that it always leads to reduced security. I would, however, posit that it's pretty darn close to "always."
- recursivedoubts 2y agoTwo Cheers For Anarchism was a book that challenged my priors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Cheers_for_Anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Cheers_for_Anarchism I'm not an anarchist, but it's a wonderful read and includes a quote that has shaped my life ever since: > “One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”
- wayathr0w 2y agoScott wasn't an anarchist either - hence "Two Cheers" instead of three. He worked for the CIA in the 1960s, self-identified as a "crude Marxist" at best, didn't believe it was possible or necessary to eliminate the state - which he described as a rare but potential force for good - and was a frequent donor to the Democrats. http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/536292 http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/536292
- recursivedoubts 2y agointeresting perspective, thank you!
- vundercind 2y agoA play on EM Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy I suppose. (Only Love the Beloved Republic—in Forster’s words—deserves three cheers)
- sriacha 2y agoSad news. Highly recommend his "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States".
- kdamica 2y agoSame. Such an incredible book.
- elevaet 2y agoThis was a great book. It seems less well-known in the HN-sphere than Seeing Like A State, but it's at least as good IMHO. It really changed my mental model of the dynamics of early states and "barbarians", and how agriculture interplayed with the story of how it all unfolded. My one criticism was that when answering the question "why did people start eating grains", he never seemed to consider that it could simply be that people enjoy eating them.
- sriacha 2y agoI like that theory, its like how people today can't stop eating junk food even though they know its bad for them :) Maybe it was a plot by Uruk's Big-Ag pushing subsidized barley porridge on the masses and hijacking their gut-brain axis so they left their epicurean utopia in the marshes.
- sriacha 2y agoNow that I think about it a little more, that general idea fits into Scott's framework of the how the constraints of cultivation, specifically that what we cultivate domesticates us in turn. Specifically grain being so calorie dense and pleasurable that we end up becoming beholden to its growth, with significant cost. Look at all the ideas permeating these days about dangers of high carb diets, this book [1] suggesting they make us stupid for example. Or about the link between metabolic disfunction and mental disorders [2] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333302-grain-brain?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=b48Q9b3tlJ&rank=1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333302-grain-brain?fro... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjEFo3a1AnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjEFo3a1AnI
- oezi 2y agoLong interview with Scott linked from the nitter poast: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3e05xm1jb7cd79kge7vio/Scott_Peasants-Power-and-the-Art-of-Resistance_2007.pdf?rlkey=hht91f34qpb84txt6agoy6yax&e=2&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3e05xm1jb7cd79kge7vio/Scott_P...
- ggm 2y agoIronic to see paper publishing of radical state analytics: those papers demanded a highly structured state exist, to allow complex modern phototypesetting and distribution systems to exist, and the underpinnings of mechanical, electrical and computational engineering which make it possible to mass produce books. In order to document the state, it is necessary to at least partially exist inside the state. In order to critique the state, you depend on the state to provide the means of production of that critique. If not one state, then another. And so in like terms, your critique will be co-opted for somebody else's benefit. Thats the nature of states. Scott was not Ayn Rand. She was apparently lucid enough to realise her core dependency on the state, and had a complex end, in state provided health care.
- kragen 2y agomass production of books originally in china was with the blessing of the state. mass production of books in europe, centuries later, started in the places with the weakest states and often over the protest of those states i feel like the fundamental discoveries of radio, information theory, error correction coding, automata theory, language theory, type theory, mathematical logic, instruction set design, compiler optimization, etc., which form a much better medium for distribution of books than hot lead ever could, are fundamentally not that dependent on states and mass production. yes, there is a huge difference between the billion-transistor chip i'm running this browser on and the 3500-transistor cpu in a commodore 64. but the commodore was already a weapon of mass instruction, as anyone who used commodore bbses in the 80s knows if states collapsed, would we still be able to make computers? i suspect we would, though we'd have to do a lot of innovation to adapt to the radical new environment
- FranzFerdiNaN 2y agoYou are the guy in the well in this comic: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
- alpaccount 2y agoI bought seeing like a state and never got around reading it, perhaps I should actually do it now, rip.
- red_admiral 2y agoReview / summary of - seeing like a state: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ - the art of not being governed: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-art-of-not-being-governed both worth reading if you have the time.
- mkl 2y agoClickable: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik..., https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-art-of-not-being-governed https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-art-of-not-being-gov...