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No matter how removed someone is from your field of expertise you should be able to consisely make a case for why you aren't at fault and why. You should also b

No matter how removed someone is from your field of expertise you should be able to consisely make a case for why you aren't at fault and why. You should also be able to demonstrate using basic logic that the simplest components of two source trees (something that is extremely basic) can show resemblance to another extremely basic component. For example the similarity of example code. How many example source files have you downloaded that demonstrate a graphics library by drawing a cube. I bet they share a decent amount of similarity across most engines. That doesn't mean they are copies. It is through logic like this that our courts are meant to function.

Filligree 10y ago
Why? Why is there an assumption that you can explain anything to anyone? There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand.
- gravypod 10y ago
  I'd say there are very few people who are doing things so out there that they cannot explain what they are doing. We aren't that special. We aren't magical unicors who work in all corners of our galaxy. No we are programmers, PhDs, mechanics, engineers. Our jobs share a lot in common with each other and can be easily broken down to their base components. That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely. Frankly for him it's exactly what he's paid to do. > There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand. Unless you think you, or this hypothetical person, is so unbelievably smart that they can operate on a plane so far above that of the common man that they can't explain what they do up there. Then I can see how you can think that way. I personally don't belive that is the case. We as programmers don't do that and very few people do. For example, lets ask this question: How do you advocate for funding for the job you do? You need to market yourself. How do the people you market to market to their bosses? It's not PhDs all the way down the same way it's not turtles all the way down. There is a simple, consise, and understandable explination for every activity that humanity has done since the beginning of time. Wheather I know how to formulate it is one thing but one must exist.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    > I'd say there are very few people who are doing things so out there that they cannot explain what they are doing. So, those very few people out there are basically fucked up with no recourse? How few are they? Anyway, yep, we are normal people. Normal people that spent a decade or four learning something very specialized. Now, why should we take for granted that people that never learned anything in our specialty can understand anything we know in a week?
  - abraae 10y ago
    Spoken like an intellectual (not an insult - an observation). Could John Carmack explain binary space partitioning in an interesting way that made Joe Average feel like he got it? Most likely yes. But would Joe Average really "get it"? Could he make a meaningful judgement as to whether some other piece of software implementing BSP was more or less a copy of some other piece? (just using BSP as an example - not a good one) I sincerely doubt it. As the saying goes, a little knowledge is dangerous. Look at the number of people who claim that global warming is a myth because they saw a snowstorm last week. Its fashionable, and feels liberal, to claim that we're all much the same, but we're not. John Carmack is what many would call a genius, who can conceive of things that are simply beyond the ken of the bulk of society. Sure those people have other skills and virtues - but epecting them to make rational decisions about complex technical matters while two opposing sets of attorneys bark at them is...ridiculous.
    - bshimmin 10y ago
      a little knowledge is dangerous The quote from Alexander Pope is actually "A little learning is a dangerous thing". People often get this wrong, which is probably a tiny bit ironic.
      - abraae 10y ago
        Touché! I stand mortified and corrected.
  - ctdonath 10y ago
    That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely. To machines and to fellow experts, yes - but not to the general population, and not to people who may be persuaded to jail him, or fine him at tremendous expense, if he doesn't adequately explain it while someone else is being paid big money to obfuscate his explanation. This isn't advertising or fundraising. This isn't helping people understand who have an ulterior motive for understanding. This is a hostile environment trying to convict him, an environment that leverages ignorance. And the complex topic at hand isn't sufficiently explained to ordinary people in a matter of hours, he'd have to put them thru a complete "high school thru post-doctoral education" process and bring them up in the vicinity of his level as an "among the greatest of all time in the field". When learning about a particular topic, I was directed to keep notes in a safe-deposit box precisely so if I was ever criminally charged for related reasons, I could literally put the entire jury thru the full education on the subject - and that would take about a month of courtroom time. I can't imagine Carmack's lawyer arranging to put a jury of commoners thru arithmetic-to-post-doctoral-rendering to "explain what he's doing". I've heard it said that the simple (in rules) game of Go can be so complex that it takes mastery of seventh-level skills just to comprehend what ninth-level skills are doing. You can't just take someone who barely learned the rules and explain, in a short time, what the grandmasters are doing to win.
- Retric 10y ago
  Do you have an actual example of this? Contracts get really complex in the same way programs get complex. But, juries have mediated contract disputes for a very long time.
  - geofft 10y ago
    Only because judges get to tell the jury what certain phrases in the contract mean, because judges are experts at understand contract complexity. We don't actually expect juries to learn contract law; the judge interprets the relevant parts of the contract for the jury, and tells the jury to decide whether it was broken.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Meaning what? Jury's can decide complex issues if there is a neutral expert on complex topics? If anything that sounds like a complaint about expert witnesses not juries.
      - maxlybbert 10y ago
        A judge can appoint a special master for situations like this. For instance, Lawrence Lessig's role in the Microsoft antitrust trial. However, as far as I know, juries don't have the option of asking a special master's opinion, because there is a big risk juries would just defer to the special master instead of actually trying to judge the case.
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Because the verdict boils down to something simple: guilty or not guilty. To get to that conclusion requires the distillation of complex circumstances into a simple binary outcome.
  - ctdonath 10y ago
    The problem is that making a mistake on that outcome isn't a matter of disinterest or lost sales, it can result in destroying lives.
- RobertoG 10y ago
  My personal impression is that when people of average intelligence can't understand something is because the concepts that make that thing are outside their expertise, not because they are not able to. They are missing the parts, so, understanding the total is impossible. People of exceptional intelligence is able to learn new things and think through a problems easily, but what makes a real difference is if you already own the building blocks of the new idea or not. A transpiration vs. inspiration kind of thing. Anyway, I think the argument is that you should be judge by average and impartial persons (a jury or a judge) because, otherwise, you are not in a egalitarian society. Somebody could argue that an egalitarian society is not efficient, but history teach us where that finish: there is always people on the ready to declare themselves above the others. So we have to aim to some kind of balance.
  - fjdlwlv 10y ago
    You think the average person could meaningfully review graphics rendering code?
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      That's not the part they most need to be able to do. They merely need to be able to understand an argument without getting distracted by tricks. The actual analysis of the code is something that they could then listen to expert findings about.
    - RobertoG 10y ago
      I'm saying that you can teach the average person to swim if you teach them all the proper techniques, in the proper order, before the competition. I'm not saying that you can do the average person perform like a world-class champion.
erikbye 10y ago
Average Joe does not know what source code is, nor is he able to tell one piece of source code or one programming language apart from another, it is all gibberish to probably the majority of the jury. Hell, a few years back most Americans did not know that McDonald's was unhealthy, they had to be told this...
- bshimmin 10y ago
  Let me share a conversation I had with a family friend a bit ago: she peers over my shoulder at my monitor, which has (let's say) a screenful of some Ruby on Rails app in Sublime Text Her: "Is that... code?" Me: "Yep, that's right. It's the code for a web site." Her: "Wow, your code is so beautiful!" Me (surprised): "Really? What makes you say that?" Her: "All those lovely colours! I didn't know you were so artistic - did you do the colours yourself?"
  - DiabloD3 10y ago
    That is terrifying.
  - erikbye 10y ago
    Right. Actually had something similar happen. An acquaintance of mine glanced at a monitor with Sublime and Monokai theme (don't like it, just happened to be on) and went "Wow, that looks really heavy [as in complicated], cool colors too!" Obviously it was nothing "heavy", just code, but all code would have looked complicated to him.
- josu 10y ago
  To further your point, the expert had to use Harry Potter as an analogy. In my opinion, analogies should be banned from courtrooms. They are fine for casual discussions, but they are often misleading.
  - abraae 10y ago
    Slugulus Eructo!
  - 10y ago
nitwit005 10y ago
How much time does it take to understand something with sufficient depth to make a sound judgement? It would be nice if the answer could somehow always be a short expert witness testimony, but the reality seems to be that in some areas it's months or years of study. In your example, you'd have to explain what source code is, what a graphics library is, methods of representing and comparing source code, and how the applicable laws are supposed to function. Sure, you could probably give them a vague impression in a short time, but not enough to decide something complex.
- toufka 10y ago
  That's precisely why the experts are asked their opinion. And a jury takes that opinion into account. "Dr. Soandso, do you believe, based on your experience, that such an action would constitute a flagrant abuse? Of a kind that is unprecedented? And such an action would damage the reputation of many, you say? And were such an action to take place it would cause harm to the industry for decades?" The jury needn't be an expert to make sound judgements. Expert witnesses do actually need to socially regarded as experts, and lawyers on both sides of this adversarial system should do everything they can to undermine those experts who are not impartial. And if each player in that system does their job well a layman should certainly be able to make a reasonably founded decision.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    But then aren't you just expecting the Jury to trust the expert? How does the Jury tell two experts apart, while one says Yes and the other No?
    - fjdlwlv 10y ago
      Which one has a nicer looking face is more honest.
  - nothrabannosir 10y ago
    This thread is now so far removed from the original article, it has gone full circle. The article is, literally, about this not working.
grovegames 10y ago
If this were true of human nature, we would not have creationism.
sqeaky 10y ago
> demonstrate using basic logic that the simplest components of two source trees (something that is extremely basic) If you think that is "extremely basic" I think you may be overestimating how poorly 1 in 12 people understand computer related concepts. I suspect it is far more, but I am biased. Before software development I worked tech support. I have heard some nightmarish misunderstandings. I have had people who literally thought files in the computer were tiny pieces of paper (and just magnified or something, this person's view was not logically coherent). When explained otherwise many met my explanation with conspiracy theories, disbeliefs, explanation of the physical impossibility of solid state transistors and sometimes, the very best of times, interest and a promise to do extra research on the the off chance I might be right. I have conversed with many, perhaps hundreds who literally could not understand the concept of a file. They knew that inside the magic box was 1s and 0s. In general they even had the vaguest idea that electrons or magnetism somehow stored those 1s and 0s, but the idea they could be organized into a into units smaller and more discrete that "the magic box" was so alien and unacceptable to their world view that they could not or would not accept it. Many simply didn't want to know, but a few brave souls tried and sometimes got themselves in to great trouble needing many help tickets to undo the results of their learning experiments. There were several people who thought there computers were terminals to some server somewhere and could not accept that their information was stored locally. No amount of explanations that the C: Drive was a device in their computer could shake the notion that Earthlink or whoever else I was working for had the files. These people wanted so badly to believe their lives where so simple (or whatever they wanted to believe) that they could not possibly have a device the size of a laptop that was powerful to hold the contents of a bookshelf filled with novels and reference material. Maybe these people were just too confused about where facebook (myspace back then) posts went and could not compare that to where ms word documents went. Then there were people who could never learn to navigate file tree. People, hundreds and hundreds of people, who could save and open documents, but when they accidentally clicked and dragged a document lost the moved document forever despite it just being in the wrong subfolder. These sad people would often have 10 versions of a document sometimes in the same folder with subtlety different names and they could never quite understand what they were looking when presented with the list of files produced by their misguided instruction. At least one such person is in my immediate family, I no longer do tech support for only because she has medical conditions that prevent computer use entirely, but after 15 or so years she never gained and understanding of file tree. You want to explain to a group of 12 with no guarantee of prior knowledge how two files trees can be alike, yet not be so similar as to be copyright infringement. I commend you for your effort, I consider it a heroic task, and entirely possible if the 12 people all take to your explanation. I think it is more likely to fail entirely for some amount of those people.

Filligree 10y ago

Why? Why is there an assumption that you can explain anything to anyone? There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand.

gravypod 10y ago
I'd say there are very few people who are doing things so out there that they cannot explain what they are doing. We aren't that special. We aren't magical unicors who work in all corners of our galaxy. No we are programmers, PhDs, mechanics, engineers. Our jobs share a lot in common with each other and can be easily broken down to their base components. That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely. Frankly for him it's exactly what he's paid to do. > There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand. Unless you think you, or this hypothetical person, is so unbelievably smart that they can operate on a plane so far above that of the common man that they can't explain what they do up there. Then I can see how you can think that way. I personally don't belive that is the case. We as programmers don't do that and very few people do. For example, lets ask this question: How do you advocate for funding for the job you do? You need to market yourself. How do the people you market to market to their bosses? It's not PhDs all the way down the same way it's not turtles all the way down. There is a simple, consise, and understandable explination for every activity that humanity has done since the beginning of time. Wheather I know how to formulate it is one thing but one must exist.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > I'd say there are very few people who are doing things so out there that they cannot explain what they are doing. So, those very few people out there are basically fucked up with no recourse? How few are they? Anyway, yep, we are normal people. Normal people that spent a decade or four learning something very specialized. Now, why should we take for granted that people that never learned anything in our specialty can understand anything we know in a week?
- abraae 10y ago
  Spoken like an intellectual (not an insult - an observation). Could John Carmack explain binary space partitioning in an interesting way that made Joe Average feel like he got it? Most likely yes. But would Joe Average really "get it"? Could he make a meaningful judgement as to whether some other piece of software implementing BSP was more or less a copy of some other piece? (just using BSP as an example - not a good one) I sincerely doubt it. As the saying goes, a little knowledge is dangerous. Look at the number of people who claim that global warming is a myth because they saw a snowstorm last week. Its fashionable, and feels liberal, to claim that we're all much the same, but we're not. John Carmack is what many would call a genius, who can conceive of things that are simply beyond the ken of the bulk of society. Sure those people have other skills and virtues - but epecting them to make rational decisions about complex technical matters while two opposing sets of attorneys bark at them is...ridiculous.
  - bshimmin 10y ago
    a little knowledge is dangerous The quote from Alexander Pope is actually "A little learning is a dangerous thing". People often get this wrong, which is probably a tiny bit ironic.
    - abraae 10y ago
      Touché! I stand mortified and corrected.
- ctdonath 10y ago
  That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely. To machines and to fellow experts, yes - but not to the general population, and not to people who may be persuaded to jail him, or fine him at tremendous expense, if he doesn't adequately explain it while someone else is being paid big money to obfuscate his explanation. This isn't advertising or fundraising. This isn't helping people understand who have an ulterior motive for understanding. This is a hostile environment trying to convict him, an environment that leverages ignorance. And the complex topic at hand isn't sufficiently explained to ordinary people in a matter of hours, he'd have to put them thru a complete "high school thru post-doctoral education" process and bring them up in the vicinity of his level as an "among the greatest of all time in the field". When learning about a particular topic, I was directed to keep notes in a safe-deposit box precisely so if I was ever criminally charged for related reasons, I could literally put the entire jury thru the full education on the subject - and that would take about a month of courtroom time. I can't imagine Carmack's lawyer arranging to put a jury of commoners thru arithmetic-to-post-doctoral-rendering to "explain what he's doing". I've heard it said that the simple (in rules) game of Go can be so complex that it takes mastery of seventh-level skills just to comprehend what ninth-level skills are doing. You can't just take someone who barely learned the rules and explain, in a short time, what the grandmasters are doing to win.
Retric 10y ago
Do you have an actual example of this? Contracts get really complex in the same way programs get complex. But, juries have mediated contract disputes for a very long time.
- geofft 10y ago
  Only because judges get to tell the jury what certain phrases in the contract mean, because judges are experts at understand contract complexity. We don't actually expect juries to learn contract law; the judge interprets the relevant parts of the contract for the jury, and tells the jury to decide whether it was broken.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Meaning what? Jury's can decide complex issues if there is a neutral expert on complex topics? If anything that sounds like a complaint about expert witnesses not juries.
    - maxlybbert 10y ago
      A judge can appoint a special master for situations like this. For instance, Lawrence Lessig's role in the Microsoft antitrust trial. However, as far as I know, juries don't have the option of asking a special master's opinion, because there is a big risk juries would just defer to the special master instead of actually trying to judge the case.
jjawssd 10y ago
Because the verdict boils down to something simple: guilty or not guilty. To get to that conclusion requires the distillation of complex circumstances into a simple binary outcome.
- ctdonath 10y ago
  The problem is that making a mistake on that outcome isn't a matter of disinterest or lost sales, it can result in destroying lives.
RobertoG 10y ago
My personal impression is that when people of average intelligence can't understand something is because the concepts that make that thing are outside their expertise, not because they are not able to. They are missing the parts, so, understanding the total is impossible. People of exceptional intelligence is able to learn new things and think through a problems easily, but what makes a real difference is if you already own the building blocks of the new idea or not. A transpiration vs. inspiration kind of thing. Anyway, I think the argument is that you should be judge by average and impartial persons (a jury or a judge) because, otherwise, you are not in a egalitarian society. Somebody could argue that an egalitarian society is not efficient, but history teach us where that finish: there is always people on the ready to declare themselves above the others. So we have to aim to some kind of balance.
- fjdlwlv 10y ago
  You think the average person could meaningfully review graphics rendering code?
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    That's not the part they most need to be able to do. They merely need to be able to understand an argument without getting distracted by tricks. The actual analysis of the code is something that they could then listen to expert findings about.
  - RobertoG 10y ago
    I'm saying that you can teach the average person to swim if you teach them all the proper techniques, in the proper order, before the competition. I'm not saying that you can do the average person perform like a world-class champion.

erikbye 10y ago

Average Joe does not know what source code is, nor is he able to tell one piece of source code or one programming language apart from another, it is all gibberish to probably the majority of the jury. Hell, a few years back most Americans did not know that McDonald's was unhealthy, they had to be told this...

bshimmin 10y ago
Let me share a conversation I had with a family friend a bit ago: she peers over my shoulder at my monitor, which has (let's say) a screenful of some Ruby on Rails app in Sublime Text Her: "Is that... code?" Me: "Yep, that's right. It's the code for a web site." Her: "Wow, your code is so beautiful!" Me (surprised): "Really? What makes you say that?" Her: "All those lovely colours! I didn't know you were so artistic - did you do the colours yourself?"
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  That is terrifying.
- erikbye 10y ago
  Right. Actually had something similar happen. An acquaintance of mine glanced at a monitor with Sublime and Monokai theme (don't like it, just happened to be on) and went "Wow, that looks really heavy [as in complicated], cool colors too!" Obviously it was nothing "heavy", just code, but all code would have looked complicated to him.
josu 10y ago
To further your point, the expert had to use Harry Potter as an analogy. In my opinion, analogies should be banned from courtrooms. They are fine for casual discussions, but they are often misleading.
- abraae 10y ago
  Slugulus Eructo!
- 10y ago

nitwit005 10y ago

How much time does it take to understand something with sufficient depth to make a sound judgement? It would be nice if the answer could somehow always be a short expert witness testimony, but the reality seems to be that in some areas it's months or years of study. In your example, you'd have to explain what source code is, what a graphics library is, methods of representing and comparing source code, and how the applicable laws are supposed to function. Sure, you could probably give them a vague impression in a short time, but not enough to decide something complex.

toufka 10y ago
That's precisely why the experts are asked their opinion. And a jury takes that opinion into account. "Dr. Soandso, do you believe, based on your experience, that such an action would constitute a flagrant abuse? Of a kind that is unprecedented? And such an action would damage the reputation of many, you say? And were such an action to take place it would cause harm to the industry for decades?" The jury needn't be an expert to make sound judgements. Expert witnesses do actually need to socially regarded as experts, and lawyers on both sides of this adversarial system should do everything they can to undermine those experts who are not impartial. And if each player in that system does their job well a layman should certainly be able to make a reasonably founded decision.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  But then aren't you just expecting the Jury to trust the expert? How does the Jury tell two experts apart, while one says Yes and the other No?
  - fjdlwlv 10y ago
    Which one has a nicer looking face is more honest.
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  This thread is now so far removed from the original article, it has gone full circle. The article is, literally, about this not working.

grovegames 10y ago

If this were true of human nature, we would not have creationism.

sqeaky 10y ago

> demonstrate using basic logic that the simplest components of two source trees (something that is extremely basic) If you think that is "extremely basic" I think you may be overestimating how poorly 1 in 12 people understand computer related concepts. I suspect it is far more, but I am biased. Before software development I worked tech support. I have heard some nightmarish misunderstandings. I have had people who literally thought files in the computer were tiny pieces of paper (and just magnified or something, this person's view was not logically coherent). When explained otherwise many met my explanation with conspiracy theories, disbeliefs, explanation of the physical impossibility of solid state transistors and sometimes, the very best of times, interest and a promise to do extra research on the the off chance I might be right. I have conversed with many, perhaps hundreds who literally could not understand the concept of a file. They knew that inside the magic box was 1s and 0s. In general they even had the vaguest idea that electrons or magnetism somehow stored those 1s and 0s, but the idea they could be organized into a into units smaller and more discrete that "the magic box" was so alien and unacceptable to their world view that they could not or would not accept it. Many simply didn't want to know, but a few brave souls tried and sometimes got themselves in to great trouble needing many help tickets to undo the results of their learning experiments. There were several people who thought there computers were terminals to some server somewhere and could not accept that their information was stored locally. No amount of explanations that the C: Drive was a device in their computer could shake the notion that Earthlink or whoever else I was working for had the files. These people wanted so badly to believe their lives where so simple (or whatever they wanted to believe) that they could not possibly have a device the size of a laptop that was powerful to hold the contents of a bookshelf filled with novels and reference material. Maybe these people were just too confused about where facebook (myspace back then) posts went and could not compare that to where ms word documents went. Then there were people who could never learn to navigate file tree. People, hundreds and hundreds of people, who could save and open documents, but when they accidentally clicked and dragged a document lost the moved document forever despite it just being in the wrong subfolder. These sad people would often have 10 versions of a document sometimes in the same folder with subtlety different names and they could never quite understand what they were looking when presented with the list of files produced by their misguided instruction. At least one such person is in my immediate family, I no longer do tech support for only because she has medical conditions that prevent computer use entirely, but after 15 or so years she never gained and understanding of file tree. You want to explain to a group of 12 with no guarantee of prior knowledge how two files trees can be alike, yet not be so similar as to be copyright infringement. I commend you for your effort, I consider it a heroic task, and entirely possible if the 12 people all take to your explanation. I think it is more likely to fail entirely for some amount of those people.