The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a large, centralized institution. Since large, centralized institutions tend to be biased towards legibility, it is worth asking if this exists in Mormonism. I try to avoid value judgements here and allow you to decide if less legible institutions are better or worse for the Church.
Scott describes mētis and science as two distinct but complemented forms of knowledge with different methods and goals. If he were more familiar with practicing scientists, he would have thought that they are less distinct.
Here are some things that I found interesting online last month.
Grains – wheat, barley, millet, rice, and corn – are the dominant food in all of the earliest states because they are the easiest to collect taxes on, not because they are the best for the people who farmed them.
Scott’s expertise is the history of the people living in the hills of Southeast Asia. This people have been in contact with the largest state-building project in history (China) for thousands of years. They have arranged their societies to be anti-legible: to make it as hard as possible for the state or any large institution to establish itself.
