Seeing Like a Data Structure
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Seeing Like a Data Structure
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Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#2[deleted]
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#3Useful framing of quantification. A few excerpts:
The power to see like a state was intoxicating for government planners, corporate efficiency experts, and adherents to high modernism in general. But modern technology lets us all see like a state. And with the advent of AI, we all have the power to act on that seeing.. like a data structure.. built for and within a set of societal systems—and stories—that can’t cope with nebulosity.. things are continuous spectra, not discrete categories.. avoid being fragmented into nanogenres.
While large organizations can exist, they can’t be the only ones with access to, or ability to, afford new technologies.. We can create new “federated” networks of organizations and social groups, like we’re seeing in the open social web of Mastodon.. where local groups can have local rules that differ from, but do not conflict with, their participation in the wider whole..
The idea of having multiple identities.. some of us have gotten used to having a “portfolio career” that is not defined by a single hat that we wear. While today there is often economic precarity involved with this way of living, there need not be, and the more we can all do the things that are the best expressions of ourselves, the better off society will be.
Think of how we use weather apps, fitness apps, or self-guided museum tour apps to improve our lives. We need more tools like this in every context to help us to understand nuance and context beyond the level we have time for in our busy lives.. A tool is controlled by a human user, whereas a machine does what its designer wanted. As technologists, we can build tools, rather than machines, that flexibly allow people to make partial, contextual sense of the online and physical world around them.
> Unlike epistemic knowledge, which tends to be standardized and centralized, metis is characterized by its adaptability and diversity. It arises from the accumulated experiences of individuals within specific contexts, leading to a rich tapestry of localized knowledge systems. This inherent flexibility allows metis to evolve and respond to changing circumstances, making it highly relevant in various practical domains.
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#4Well written and engaging, but I think there is a lot more room to really explore what the sociological, techno-economic, power dynamic etc ramifications are of specific data structures. This doesn’t go too far beyond the surface level notion of data, and there are plenty of discussions of the historical significance of taxonomizing and “objectifying” and archiving and surveilling the world into data from Foucault to Gitelman to Hui to Galloway and more.
With a title like the one given, it would be nice to see the authors try to tease out what the political implications of a linked list, a heap, a stack a directed acyclic graph or a cyclic one, a tree, a FIFO queue, a hash table, a point cloud, a data lake, actually are… it can be difficult to really wrestle with these on an interdisciplinary and simultaneously technical & sociological/organizational level, but seems worth doing.
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#5Well written and engaging, but I think there is a lot more room to really explore what the sociological, techno-economic, power dynamic etc ramifications are of specific data structures. This doesn’t go too far beyond the surface level notion of data , and there are plenty of discussions of the historical significance of taxonomizing and “objectifying” and archiving and surveilling the world into data from Foucault t…
I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and CLRS.
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#6Well written and engaging, but I think there is a lot more room to really explore what the sociological, techno-economic, power dynamic etc ramifications are of specific data structures. This doesn’t go too far beyond the surface level notion of data , and there are plenty of discussions of the historical significance of taxonomizing and “objectifying” and archiving and surveilling the world into data from Foucault t…
Word salad.
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#7Ted Nelson was talking about this decades ago. Prophetic.
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#8The one data structure that crops up again and again when looking at complex systems is the graph. Nodes on the graph represent the components and elements like state variables (e.g. population, resources, temperature, servers and clients, etc.) of the system, and edges between nodes represent interconnections, e.g. flows of matter, energy or information between nodes.
A good introduction to this way of looking at the world is "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows. Important concepts include analyzing systems to determine their relative robustness or fragility under stress, the nature of the feedback loops in the system (possibly some nodes are connected by partially directed edges, so flows in one direction are easy but not in the other), what kind of temporal delays matter the most (e.g. how long does it take between creating a change and seeing the result of that change), and so on.
Given the natural utility of graphs in modeling systems, it's really a bit strange that graph theory really only developed in the 20th century, with some minor exceptions like Euler and Kirchhoff. It's interesting to think about an alien civilization whose mathematics began with graphs and how it might have developed.
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#9How much you want to bet one or both of these folks saw patio11's Seeing Like a Bank here on Hacker News a few months ago, read it, then read Seeing Like a State, and then wrote this?
Because I did the same thing (my version for my problem still in draft)
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38180477
Also, Seeing Like a State seems to be something of an cult classic on this forum: https://www.google.com/search?q=seeing+like+a+state+site%3Ay...
Re: Seeing Like a Data Structure
#10How much you want to bet one or both of these folks saw patio11's Seeing Like a Bank here on Hacker News a few months ago, read it, then read Seeing Like a State, and then wrote this? Because I did the same thing (my version for my problem still in draft) https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38180477 Also, Seeing Like a State seems to be something of an cult…
We started writing this essay about 3 years ago (and first read Seeing Like a State about 15 years ago -- it's a book that should be read and re-read many times). It takes time to write something this long, and if I could have I would have kept editing it for another year.