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Comment by rdoherty | Hacker News Reader

I love reading, here's a few meatier books I've read recently:

* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at

* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents

* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.

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I'm also reading Seeing Like a State, and finding it fascinating. A lot of Scott's theory seems to apply equally well to any large organisation, like a corporation. I think it is fundamentally about how in any unwieldy system, the people in charge tend want to have some sort of comprehensible map of that system to make decisions, and they also want more effective apparatuses of power in order to steer the system, and the fundamental complexity of reality has to be smoothed over to achieve those things.

For example, business intelligence systems provide ways to impose consistent measures on an organisation, which makes the org more legible to executive decision makers, but that consistency also tends to erode local team autonomy and undermine specialist knowledge. This type of tension shows up everywhere once you start noticing it.

Very facinating book.

It helps me when thinking about how to present information to a decision maker - what level of abstraction does this perspective actually care about? Why? Both in programming and in life.

I enjoyed the book too, but as I read it, I felt more and more like he could have just as easily found examples where making a system simpler and more legible led to massive improvements.

"Normal Accidents" is a profound, mind-bending book. I lectured on it during Anesthesiology Grand Rounds [University of Virginia School of Medicine], using it as an armature with which to view the making of disasters in the OR.

Seeing like a state is my next book to read. Weirdly, I cannot recall the chain of interests that led me to it.

P sure mine was Dawn of Everything + Why Nations Fail

I loved normal accidents. Probably even got the recommendation from hn

I’m also reading Seeing Like a State!

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