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Comment by 0xWTF | Hacker News Reader

How 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...

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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.

This is one of my favourite books.

Covid response is a perfect modern day example.

This book also convinced me that all that net zero interventions and other related exercises will end in a disaster.

> will end in a disaster

Sadly, not before migration of earnings and control.

early stringent covid responses(such as in China) probably saved millions of lives in the responsive countries, but i guess post-covid will be litigated with vibes not numbers

We have enough cross-sectional variation in response and results that disprove your claim. So, no!

> cross-sectional variation in response and results that disprove your claim

What do you mean? The spread was low enough during the period where it was high mortality that in China, we can lower bound at 1 million even with best case assumptions about mortality compared to the US that likely wouldn't have been true in a still developing country.

as much as I enjoy Patrick's writing, i was assuming it was solely a reference to Seeing Like a State. and yes it's a cult classic among the bay area rat/libertarian-esque folks, had never heard of it before coming here

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