Not seeing the forest for the trees: Legibility and Analytics

March 27, 2023 | Reading Time: 9 min

Can there be downsides to making a system more measurable? It seems like such a central assumption in analytics that better measurability is always better, but can it lead to a system being worse off? To answer this question, I want to draw on some ideas from James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State. The book is about how schemes introduced to measure behaviour have changed the societies that they’ve been applied to, and the major idea Scott introduces from the study of these schemes is the idea of legibility.