(2024-08-02) Davies Seeing Like A Right Old State

Dan Davies: seeing like a right old state. I found that yesterday’s post on James C Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” was growing out of control. (2024-08-01 DaviesSeeingLikeAStateMachine) I thought I’d do “part 2” of seeing like a state.

taken a rather quick way with asserting that of course a good bureaucracy can deal with information that isn’t quantified and tabulated. Can I defend this?

I think so, by expanding a bit on a point that was left rather deeply implicit in the previous post but which I harp on about endlessly in my book. Basically, good bureaucracies have plenty of metis embedded in them

a functioning bureaucratic state will have layers of commissars, beadles, Mssrs. Les Maires, sheriffs and whatnot, who live among the subjects. They’re consequently aware of the ground truth on which the reports are based.

Most of the time, their presence isn’t an important part of the system, because a well-organised techne will describe the ground truth pretty closely

But functional organisations work on a “management by exception” basis – a well designed bureaucracy has channels for the people who understand ground truth at the highest level of resolution to intervene

Consequently, I think I am, to give a straight answer to Ben’s question, committed to the view that in an important sense, there’s actually no such thing as metis. Just as there’s no real answer to questions like “how long is the coast of Britain?”

“metis”, in my view, really just means “everything that didn’t seem worth the effort to turn into techne”.

A much larger part of the history of bureaucracy is “someone had all the right information, but used it in a dumb way and made a bad decision, but then the mistake was noticed and corrected so nothing too bad happened”, but of course these cases are never recorded. This is close to being a definition of what management cybernetics is all about – the attempt to achieve what Ross Ashby called “ultrastability”, the ability of a system to reorganise itself and return to stability after a shock which was not anticipated by its designers.