James C. Scott, metis, and why motivated reasoning is a good thing
Metis, legibility, miscellany
James Scott has died
The intellectual world, particularly the slice concerned with collective action, public choice, and information problems, is deeply indebted to Scott. I am extraordinarily so.
There have been a number of good posts inverting the sadness of this inevitable event into lines of thought worthy of his memory:
Henry Farell: “Scott wrote far more beautifully than political scientists are supposed to write and his ideas and work were too big to fit into any discipline…Seeing Like a State is important because of how it sets up the problem of modernity. Scott was a critic of the vast impersonal systems - bureaucracies and markets - that modern society depends on. He believed that they prioritized the kind of thinking that comes easily to engineers over the kind that comes readily to peasants and craftsmen, and that we had lost something very important as a result.”
Dan Davies (and one): “The central problem of Seeing Like A State is recognisable as what I’ve argued in the past is the central problem of all management theory – that of “getting a drink from a firehouse”, or of attenuating the flood of information coming out of the system in order to, literally “make it manageable”.”
James Plunkett: “[T]he point is just that there are are deep epistemological differences between techne and metis, related to what it means to know something and how we relate to things in the world. And so when the customs of metis are transcribed into techne these differences are lost in translation in a way that it not just information-lossy but dangerously distorting.”
If you have not already explored Scott’s work, I do implore you to. My own personal most efficient compression is Seeing Like A State, the first two and the last one. With just that your world will be enriched.
Always more to say, but let me join James on a point:
To me, metis stands strong today as a durable concept, one not overtaken by information systems improvements since.
The great insight of metis is that it is practical knowledge. I think that sometimes gets lost in translation. In being practical it truly means knowledge that you can only gain through practice. This has many implications.
One is that the notion of a scientific or academic “impartial” lens is itself lossy at a structural level. Engaging in practice is to eschew impartiality. Practitioners have goals!
Another way: metis tells us that “motivated thinking,” far from its common negative connotation, is a deep source of knowledge. Yes! The information you gather through the motivation of being an actual actor in a system, as opposed to an observer, is distinct and often pronounced in its value.
(This is also where I disagree with Dan Davies a bit. I do not think cybernetics a la Stafford Beer presents a meaningful theory for how to get this local knowledge into the center of the apparatus. The reliability of knowledge, it turns out, is endogenous to the reward system behind such knowledge generation.)
One final point on metis: I do not find it in opposition to techne per se. I view it as having complementarity, and relative returns (say “alpha” if you want to lure the fintwits in.)
A system almost exclusively dependent on techne knowledge (say, a government agency-style study) will likely get huge returns from integrating a modicum of metis
A system mostly making sense using metis can improve quite a lot with just a splash of techne (think)
I read a core difference in Scott’s attitude toward the two as being more about the authoritarian high modernism that fans of techne prefer.
A local practitioner, given a bit of techne knowledge, is more likely than not to be somewhat skeptical, and to try it themselves on a small portion of their proverbial portfolio. “This soil additive? Okay, sure, but I’m not converting everything tomorrow.”
However the techne crowd tends to employ, ahem, different modes of utilization of knowledge. “This additive is shown to be the best. It is therefore perfectly right and just and for the good of all of society that I enforce by threat of use of the state monopoly on violence that all crops shall use it.”
And that’s the thing: I never read Scott as against techne. I read him as pointing out that hyper-scientific knowledge will always by necessity leave certain things out (legibility) and so is always a form of lossy compression, despite how lossless the Experts™ will claim it is.
And so, you know, maybe don’t act on such knowledge in irreversible manners at scale where if there turn out to be gaps then millions of people die. (My hot take: reasonable!)
Sunday miscellany
On the topic of practical knowledge, I spotted this nice nugget on the /r/foodstamps subreddit:
I am ready to burn down the government because in NONE of the paperwork, Googling, phone calls-nothing does it say that. In 4 minutes on Reddit a week’s worth of frustration is alleviated.
There’s so much good to unpack here, but let me say to all those SEO folks complaining about Reddit going up in rank, and to anyone who might think in passing, “well the official government page should be the top result, every time” — knowledge is so much more complicated than either.
I plan to discuss this more in a real tour de force post that has nothing but a title yet (“Seeing SNAP Like A Search Engine”)
Related: Google’s AI generated answers are really having particular negative effects on SNAP related queries.
But a big reason for this? Garbage in, garbage out.
To wit — this very official answer that Google privileges because it’s a very high authority source (Benefits.gov) will hopefully finally go away soon:
Why? Because Benefits.gov is being shuttered:
In my more generous moments I would complicate this and talk through all the wicked problems that led to such a page staying up for so long and Google putting it right there as the answer (wrong, and dangerously so because it dissuades eligible people) but after a week of sick baby, sick dog, as a solo dad, I’ll just say — good riddance.
Let’s hope USA.gov does better. The problem? The dynamics are deeper than one team or one agency. I hope the public servants who inherit this are thinking about how they are defending against the dynamics behind the first site. Absent a tractable theory of breakout there, things tend to converge back.
With that, my timebox is reached. Thanks for reading. Be well.
(Oh, well one last fun aside: I very much did not expect a request for 2 reports to be 4,000 pages…)
