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There should be a counterpart to this, "the tyranny of trying to encode an entire human mind in procedure."

As well as, "the tyranny of pretending that rules are much more absolute than their authors." :-)




Probably "Seeing Like a State", no?


I had thought that the thesis of seeing like a state is that when you attempt to rationalize a complex system, you necessarily simplify it and sometimes destroy the value in it. E.g. If a government wants to raise money via taxes on food production, growing food becomes disincentivized. Or the simple fact that maps can't show everything about the piece of land they represent.

I think the opposite of the tyranny of structurelessness looks more like our legal + regulatory system where sometimes you need a team of experts to tell you where you can build a building, or the military where everything is so regimented so that you need to fill out forms to buy toilet paper.


fwiw, the us government has given meat producers over $2 billion to cull animals infected with h5n1. seems like the government giving money to food production is working quite well.


That was a hypothetical of a government taxing production. Of course in practice they tend to do the opposite, subsidizing food production quite heavily.


oop you're right, i misread.


Law is the ruling over the living by the dead.


“Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man’s mind.”




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