Seeing Like a State

What Hacker News says

1. tomjakubowskiOct 2026
   Seeing Like A State is essential reading, especially for anyone working in software or operations for a corporation.
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2. rdohertySep 2026
   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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3. siddbootsSep 2026
   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.

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4. eykanalAug 2026
   If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S...). It talks about why land parcels are squares (instead of strip farming, where fertile land was shared by many families), how we arrived at current measurement units and not "a basketful of grapes", standardization of monetary units, and a ton more. Excellent book.
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5. hibikirMay 2026
   Visibility doesn't always get you value though. See the many companies that unify their ticketing to something like Jira, and end up running reports on in. The actual accuracy of the aggregates is rarely great, and instead leads to people doing "jira optimization" to make reports look good.

   I once worked at a place where VPs were looking at sprint burndown charts, and asked what happened if the line didn't look a lot like the line expected by JIRA. The telemetry is therefore often a curse, as any metric becomes a target. How many companies today have KPIs about having automated code reviews, which are then ignored by the devs, because said reviews are just wrong on almost everything?

   The learnings of Seeing Like A State don't apply just to governments.

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6. tamadApr 2026
   > But before we do that, we should think for a moment about what streetnames are for. They are for helping people navigate the city.

   People name streets (and other things) for other reasons too, often for internal or local reference. This perspective reduces the meaning of naming to a single focus, like saying we name dogs only to allow our guests to refer to them as needed when visiting our homes. We name things for many reasons, and those reasons are more about endearment and culture building at the local level. I recommend Seeing Like a State by James Scott for more discussion, including about street names, exploring this perspective.

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