Most people don’t associate aviation and oral traditions. After all, aviation is very much about technology and machinery, especially once you start flying airliners and other jets or “just” multi-engine aircraft. And since powered, controlled flight began in 1903, that’s well after oral-traditions and oral history were important.In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott makes the point that the evolution of the powerful centralized State has been marked by a steady progression of the State making its denizens more legible, that legibility is a key feature of modernity.
Most people would be in for a bit of a surprise.
You learn what the FAA and laws of physics require in order to safely operate an aircraft. And then you absorb, if you are fortunate, the tips, subtleties, tricks, and horrible warnings from other pilots. Some are told as stories, some arrive while watching someone else, or looking at aircraft on the ramp, but all are transmitted from pilot to pilot through speech, not printed text.
How do you land a twin-engine plane in a screaming cross wind, especially one with relatively low-mounted wings? For pistons and some turbo-props, you can use differential power, tapping the “pull power” of one engine to help hold the plane straight so you don’t have to lower the up-wind wing so much. I learned this from men who had flown DC-3s, Beech 18s, and other tail-wheel twins. It also works for nose-wheel planes. I have never seen it mentioned in books or magazine articles, and when I quiz younger pilots, they’ve not heard of the skill. Purely oral-tradition today.
Other information is explained in order to keep the new pilot from learning something the hard way. There are certain high-performance planes that are less tolerant in “slow flight” than are others. My commercial instructor walked me around one or two that were visiting Little Muni Field and explained what the quirks were, why, and the warning signs. I’d never get a chance to try slow flight in that kind of plane at Little Muni, but I now had information that served me very well at a later point in time.
Legibility entails such things as standardizing language, standardizing measurement systems, standardizing weights, standardizing corpora of knowledge, standardizing forms, standardizing processes and procedures, standardizing laws, etc. For example, a census of the population does not just tell you how many citizens you have, it potentially tells you where they are, what they are doing, with whom they are related, how much they are earning, the value of their possessions, what it is that they own, etc. When you conduct a census, the legibility of the citizens to the state increases dramatically.
This mental model of the importance of legibility has a lot of application because it encapsulates an inherent conflict of interests. In any complex system, you typically have a three-way trade-off between efficiency, effectiveness, and resilience. Success depends on a supple evolution of the balance between the three goals.
A simplistic example. You run a call-center. You have efficiency goals to handle a certain number of calls per hour. You can hire 100 customer service representatives to handle the call volume or you can invest in various customer care call systems to automate portions of the process and hire fewer people. People representative a high variable cost. Information systems represent a high fixed cost. You are trying to optimize the balance between those two.
In addition to your efficiency goals (number of calls per hour, cost per call, etc.) you also have some effectiveness goals. Customers have to be happy with the experience, you want to gain ancillary information from customers beyond the purpose of their call for new product development purposes or marketing, you want to increase customer loyalty, etc. Efficiency and effectiveness are usually in tension with one another. A highly efficient process (low cost) rarely also yields high effectiveness (happy, loyal customers).
In addition, you have to build your process with resilience in mind. Exogenous conditions are always changing, often in unexpected ways. Whatever the optimized balance between efficiency and effectiveness might be today, may not be the same a year or five years from now. You optimize your call center with a heavy reliance on technology and then, all of a sudden, your company enters the international market and you have to handle calls in multiple languages. The balance between efficiency and effectiveness has shifted.
Which is all to say that complex systems are evolving systems and that the balance between efficiency and effectiveness is always shifting. There has to be play in the system to adapt to new circumstances.
Overly engineered systems or public policies fail because they are built for static conditions and fail to evolve. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed documents a litany of State failures arising from the fact that increased legibility almost always leads the state to build new deterministic systems and policies for complex systems which are not fully understood and which, as the complex system evolves, then fail.
Legibility is thus a two edged sword. Increased legibility offers the promise of greater efficiency, usually waffles on effectiveness and almost always fails on resilience and adaptability.
And that is the heart of the paradox. In order to evolve, systems have to have variability. There have to be some loose tolerances in the system. But variability is the enemy of efficiency. Efficiency requires maximum legibility. We need to be able to define all inputs, all actions and all outputs and design the system so that there is no waste between minimum input and maximum output. A maximally efficient system is rarely effective and never resilient. The more efficient, almost always, the more fragile.
We see this in the law all the time. We are constantly introducing new laws to address exceptional circumstances despite the legal maxim that hard cases make bad law. We know we shouldn't do it but we do it anyway.
In the past twenty years we have more and more frequently tried to legislate manners in the populace. That is the heart of hate speech and hate crimes. Instead of focusing on the crime and the consequences, we are trying to punish the motivation of the crime. Using hateful language becomes illegal. It sounds too absurd to be concerned about but the EU court decision this month illustrates that there is nothing that is too absurd that the Mandarin class won't choose to implement it. In the EU people are now going to jail for expressing opinions (not actions) that others find insulting to their feelings.
In trying to make a more civil society, the State is seeking greater legibility, and with that legibility, they are trying to legislate nice behavior so that no one's feelings are hurt.
We see it with the Title IX Kangaroo courts as well. In the worthwhile pursuit of reducing sexual assault, universities, at the instigation of the State, are trying to legislate courtship by making intent manifest (making it more legible) at every stage of social interaction to the point of absurdity. Beyond the affront to the concepts of freedom and sovereign citizenship protected from the intrusion of the State, it is manifestly failure in the making.
Humans are the ultimate generators of system variance. You cannot have a free and individual peoples and also have maximally all actions prescriptively specified. But that is what we keep trying to do. We are trying to legislate good manners.
Boykin's point about the importance of oral tradition fits in with this mental model of legibility. We want an educated populace. We have spent five decades trying to specify with extreme legibility what people ought to know and untold billions trying to ensure they know that corpus of knowledge but with a notable lack of efficiency or effectiveness.
Knowledge is like social interactions is like the economy is like the law. There has to be variance for the system to evolve. Just as manners are the informal intermediary between law and chaos, oral knowledge is likewise the intermediary between formalized knowledge and chaos.
It manifest in many different ways. I attended one of the most prestigious MBA programs in the eighties. A school with just about the best education could be expected to offer. And for all the fine lecture rooms, the infusion of technology, the world-class lecturers, I learned just about as much, if not more, from socializing with my fellow-students. Extremely bright, hugely divergent paths to that point in their career, highly variable interests, you could even begin to think about how to formalize into a classroom structure.
Oral knowledge is also about uncertainty. On any system, we can put a couple of standard deviations on the process. This is usually what happens given X, Y, or Z, and that covers 95% of the scenarios under a steady state. Oral knowledge (and practice) usually fills in the balance of the 5%. In a steady state.
But we cannot assume that the system is indeed in a steady state and therefore the two-standard deviations is not a reliable measure.
Oral knowledge, institutional memory, cultural lore - They are anathema to the determinists because they are indeed variable and unreliable but these are critical elements that have to be there in an education process to fill in the blanks between deterministic efficiency and real world variability.
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