# A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article3.5c705a01b476.png)

## Metadata
- Author: [[Xianhang Zhang]]
- Full Title: A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/

## Highlights
- The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible. Or at least more legible to the all-seeing statist eye in the sky (many of the pictures in the book are literally aerial views) than to the local, embedded, eye on the ground.
- The Napoleanic era saw the spread of the metric system; again an idea that is highly rational from a centralized bird’s eye view, but often stupid with respect to the subtle local adaptions of the systems it displaced. Again this displaced a good deal of local power and value, and created many injustices and local irrationalities, but the shift brought with it the benefits of improved communication and wide-area commerce.
- The high-modernist reformer does not acknowledge (and often genuinely does not understand) that he/she is engineering a shift in optima and power, with costs as well as benefits. Instead, the process is driven by a naive “best for everybody” paternalism, that genuinely intends to improve the lives of the people it affects. The high-modernist reformer is driven by a naive-scientific Utopian vision that does not tolerate dissent, because it believes it is dealing in scientific truths.