[James Scott] points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light. - Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”

I expect that for some of you, that quote speaks deeply to very angry parts of your souls. Feel free to skip the rest of this post. If you’d like to hear me rant, or you reacted to that quote by thinking, “well yeah, they really should have led with ‘we can make things more productive’”, read on.

It turns out that it is not true that Scott Alexander has never read a leftist. In this blog, he reads and reacts to James Scott’s fantastic book “Seeing Like a State”. If you haven’t read this book, you can find a free pdf copy online without too much trouble. Or, if you’re short on time, Alexander’s summation in parts 1-6 of his review (actually it’s I-VI, because status signalling) hits the high points fairly well. In brief: ad hoc, local systems of (everything) are often well-tuned to their specific environment, but tend to be resistant to external control, because they rely on knowledge and experience (metis) that’s largely informal and inaccessible to bureaucrats and outsiders. Politicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs like to impose standards and regulations on these systems - in the forms of uniform methods of measurement, naming, living, etc. - so the systems become more ‘legible’ to those who wish to exploit them for profit/tax collection/resource acquisition. Such schemes often fail in predictably dramatic ways. Examples: ‘scientific’ forestry, forced adoption of family names, High Modernist urban planning, Tanzanian farming, more. I recommend reading the book, even if you only have time for a chapter or two - James Scott does a great job of bringing out the details of these historical moments in a very engaging manner.

In section 7 - er, VII - we get to see what our friend Scooter has gotten out of all this. We start by dismissing the whole book out of hand:

…Scott basically admits to stacking the dice against High Modernism and legibility. He admits that the organic livable cities of old had life expectancies in the forties because nobody got any light or fresh air and they were all packed together with no sewers and so everyone just died of cholera. He admits that at some point agricultural productivity multiplied by like a thousand times and the Green Revolution saved millions of lives and all that, and probably that has something to do with scientific farming methods and rectangular grids. He admits that it’s pretty convenient having a unit of measurement that local lords can’t change whenever they feel like it. Even modern timber farms seem pretty successful. After all those admissions, it’s kind of hard to see what’s left of his case.

Okay, good. But while James Scott is basically wrong, Scooter manages to concede that maybe sometimes James Scott is right that scientists ruin things due to their arrogance, like when progressives do it:

The closest analogy I can think of right now – maybe because it’s on my mind – is this story about check-cashing shops. Professors of social science think these shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don’t foolishly shoot themselves in the foot by going to them. But on closer inspection, they offer a better deal for the poor than banks do, for complicated reasons that aren’t visible just by comparing the raw numbers. Poor people’s understanding of this seems a lot like the metis that helps them understand local agriculture. And progressives’ desire to shift control to the big banks seems a lot like the High Modernists’ desire to shift everything to a few big farms. Maybe this is a point in favor of something like libertarianism?

Maybe indeed - I have always admired the rationalist ability to perform the libertarian equivalent of “this is good for Bitcoin”. So the leftist is wrong about technocrats ruining things, except maybe when the technocrats are progressive, therefore libertarianism: all in all, a strong effort from Mr. Alexander. But to wrap it up is the punchline, the quote from the top:

[James Scott] points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.

Why didn’t the natives just explain to me that I could make more money by doing things their way? If they did that before I tried doing things my way, we could have skipped all the bad parts of colonialism - stupid natives.

In case this does get back to /r/ssc or even Scott himself, let’s just spell it out:

The point of the book is not to point and laugh at the technocrats who failed to squeeze the most X out of Y because they didn’t listen to the noble savages. The point is that ‘how do we squeeze the most X out of Y’ is a bad way to position yourself in relation to your surroundings. The point is that technocrats often succeed in squeezing more X out of Y over a relevant period of time via their techniques, but that treating a forest like a timber-maximizer is already missing the fucking point because a forest is also a home for woodland creatures, and a source for medicinal herbs and fruits and berries, and a nice place to take a hike and stare at the stars. The point is that the mistake was not made at the level of what was implemented, the mistake was made at the level of was was valued, and the implementation mistake was an inevitable downstream consequence of that. The point is that even if traditional Tanzanian farming methods didn’t produce more crops per acre, they might still be preferable, because they are more sustainable or less time-intensive or etc, but that these benefits become unintelligible to the technocrat who has already committed to a value system where land is only judged by its yield per acre. THE POINT IS THAT YOU AND YOUR RATIONALIST BUDDIES ARE HAPPILY MAXIMIZING FOR YOUR VALUES OF PROFIT AND IQ AND FROZEN PEACHES, AND JUSTIFYING A SYSTEM OF RUNAWAY CONSUMPTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION AND GLOBAL EXPLOITATION ON THE GROUNDS OF THESE LIMITED VALUES, BECAUSE YOUR VALUE STRUCTURE ISN’T CAPABLE OF ACCOUNTING FOR THE INCALCULABLE DAMAGE YOU’RE DOING TO YOUR FELLOW HUMANS AND TO THE PLANET. You are Bill Hicks’ advertisers. You are the paperclip maximizer of your nightmares. You have convinced yourself of the righteousness of your few terminal values and are now incapable of seeing outside that narrow cone of human existence.

This was the Scott Alexander post which finally closed the door on my positive hopes for the rationalist community. I used to think that by engaging with these clearly intelligent people, it would be possible to have productive debates, learn things, and maybe expose them to some new perspectives. I am no longer so positive. Scott Alexander clearly took time to read this dense, 350+ page book and wrote a solid summary of it for his readers. He immersed himself in the point, he reproduced the point, he spent thousands of words on his blog bashing himself and his readers over the head with the point…and then missed the point. So hard, it actually fucks with my head.

I can’t really accurately express how this book review makes me feel. It kinda makes me wanna laugh/cry/vomit/headdesk into eternity. How can one react to this? How can you engage with somebody who has clearly gone out of their way to immerse themselves in educational material, and come out the other end with less than nothing?

I suppose all you can do is sneer.