Ancient religious practices have this interesting natural tension between legibility and mysteries. Legibility emphasizes making yourself predictable and pleasing to others. Mysteries emphasize private personal improvement, which makes you less predictable. 1/

Christianity is a very legibility-focused religion, and spent a lot of energy rooting out nearby mystery traditions in the form of witch-hunting. Almost any occult tradition you can think of is mystery based; the term itself means 'hidden or partially obscured'. 2/

A lot of real destruction -- the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Inquisition -- arose from that tension. Yet despite Catholicism's often bloody successes, there are still forms of mystery tradition practiced within it: Benedicaria and most of Stregoneria, in Italy. 3/

This tension shows up in more mundane settings, too. Basically, there is a core problem in human nature:

"Self-improvement is abnormal"

Which is to say that the process of following mysteries is divergent, not convergent. Learning things makes you weird. 4/

The weirder you become from your learning, the less predictable you become to your neighbors. You also often become more capable than them, in ways that may well matter. This presents a psychological double-threat that most people react poorly to. 5/

Yet this poor reaction is not unmerited! Legibility is powerful too, for reasons that many mystery followers are not well-equipped to appreciate:

"I can't follow you if I can't follow you"

Legibility allows coordination. Without coordination, human effort is transient. 6/

Coordination is what allows us to build the (terribly fallible) institutions that lifted our species out of the mud. No powerful mystery can survive without at least some of it, because without it we're all starting from first principles in the mud. 7/

But mysteries and their pursuers are who pulled us from the mud in the first place. Neither side can work well without the other, and neither be pure of the other.

The modern equivalent, for me, is the tension between "engineering" and "marketing". 8/

I'm an engineer, which is a secular mystery tradition. Much of my life has been shaped by that tradition's direct distaste for the demands and behaviors of marketing.

And yet I find that, in trying to do good engineering, I absolutely cannot ignore the marketability. 9/

In fact, one of the truest and harshest criticisms of engineers is often how complex they make things. It's true that sometimes they can be no simpler. Too often, however, we glory in our ability to apprehend the mysteries hidden from others. 10/

And when we do that, the marketers and the common people who they speak to start asking "if so much is hidden from us, how trustworthy are those hiding it?" We already see some of that with the denigration of "tech-bros". 11/

If we want to avoid a nasty world where meaning-makers and thing-makers are constantly at odds, those of us accustomed to mystery will have to learn to make ourselves more understandable.

(Marketing-minded folks also have their work, but I wouldn't presume to dictacte it.) 12/

tl;dr: If you want your engineering to be good, it needs to be simple and legible. These are known to be good for making tools that work well, but they are also good for making tools that are well known and well liked.

We have literally millenia of case-studies as to why.

(fin)