Relevant: a review of Seeing Like a State (again :-D).
In particular, this part:
Scott distinguishes between metis and epistemic knowledge. Epistemic knowledge is from the state, and it’s often called “rational”. It’s based in scientific or “scientificish” knowledge. It’s so general as to apply everywhere, which means it kind of winds up applying nowhere. Sometimes this looks like farming techniques that are great in theory, but in practice are incapable of adapting to any single locale. Other times it looks like geometric land distribution that ignores local conditions.
Metis is much more ambigious, a strange mix of hyper-empiricism and tradition and encoded ritual that has adapted to produce best results within a specific context. The origins of it would take a whole other book (presumably filled with Darwinian metaphors), but the point is that it works. It’s a reason that (using repeated examples of Scott’s) small village farms tend to vastly out-produce large epistemic plots;
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In general: people have a reason they do things the way they do. The issues that arise aren’t just “humanitarian” in the sense of “people don’t like it. They’re actually pretty pragmatic, and governments that fail to recognize this (or ignore concerns as merely “petty humanitarianism”) tend towards economic and agricultural chaos. Disrupting this from the outside normally means that you don’t actually understand them. Almost always, that hubris will make life less productive and less enjoyable.
Relevant: a review of Seeing Like a State (again :-D).
In particular, this part:
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