Short things. Reactions to what I'm reading, arguments I want to remember, and thoughts too small to be a note.
Someone at the seminar today argued that qualitative work should be preregistered like experiments. I keep turning this over. Preregistration exists to stop you claiming you predicted what you only noticed afterwards — but noticing afterwards is most of what interviewing is.
The honest version might be to preregister the sampling frame and the stopping rule, and leave the coding open. That still catches the bad practice without pretending the method is something it isn’t.
Response rates on general-population surveys have collapsed almost everywhere over thirty years, and the standard reassurance is that weighting fixes it. Weighting fixes the demographics you measured. It does nothing about the thing that made people answer in the first place, which is precisely what you cannot observe.
Rereading Seeing Like a State after five years. The argument I remembered was “top-down planning fails.” The argument that’s actually there is narrower and better: legibility is a precondition for administration, and the act of making something legible destroys the local knowledge that made it work.
That second version is much harder to wave away, and much more uncomfortable for anyone doing survey research.
Three weeks of writing 300 words every morning before reading anything. The words are mostly bad. But I’ve stopped opening documents and feeling nothing, which was the actual problem.