4 ms·

>people who draft laws are very, very smart I think, I am smart when it comes to web and software, but I know little about electricity or cooking or 1000 other

by dorgo 8y ago

>people who draft laws are very, very smart I think, I am smart when it comes to web and software, but I know little about electricity or cooking or 1000 other things. The people, you call smart, proposed to place stop-signs in the web - which sounds good and familiar to general public, but stupid to people who knows how web works. It is not enough to be smart.

derefr 8y ago
Maybe the word I should use is clever. The people who draft laws are very, very clever. This means that they know exactly how to manipulate language and the courts to get the effect they want. Whether the effect they want is a sensible effect—that has nothing to do with whether they're clever. A person with a genie in a bottle is normally just "doomed", because genies exploit loopholes. If the person is an experienced, clever lawyer, though, then they're not doomed; they're actually quite powerful. That doesn't mean they'll use their wishes to accomplish anything good for the world, or even good for them personally. They're still a regular, irrational human being with irrational desires—desires for status among their peers, for adoration and worship by the public, for renown and legacy. Etc. I'm pretty sure that the people who proposed to "place stop-signs in the web" knew what they were doing, and knew what it would accomplish, and wanted to accomplish exactly what the law-as-drafted would accomplish if signed into law. "But it would just make everything worse!" Not for them. Not for their voter-base, at least from the perspective of voting for them again. Not for their lobbyists. Etc. It might make the Internet work objectively worse—but whoever said that politics was about making things better? Regulation mostly serves to make various processes more inefficient and to give those processes higher barriers-to-entry—in a way that makes them safer, or less prone to abuse, or whatever else. Politicians are always thinking in that mode: "something might get worse, but it's a compromise for everyone else—some good, some bad—and a win for me personally!"

by dorgo 8y ago

derefr 8y ago

Maybe the word I should use is clever. The people who draft laws are very, very clever. This means that they know exactly how to manipulate language and the courts to get the effect they want. Whether the effect they want is a sensible effect—that has nothing to do with whether they're clever. A person with a genie in a bottle is normally just "doomed", because genies exploit loopholes. If the person is an experienced, clever lawyer, though, then they're not doomed; they're actually quite powerful. That doesn't mean they'll use their wishes to accomplish anything good for the world, or even good for them personally. They're still a regular, irrational human being with irrational desires—desires for status among their peers, for adoration and worship by the public, for renown and legacy. Etc. I'm pretty sure that the people who proposed to "place stop-signs in the web" knew what they were doing, and knew what it would accomplish, and wanted to accomplish exactly what the law-as-drafted would accomplish if signed into law. "But it would just make everything worse!" Not for them. Not for their voter-base, at least from the perspective of voting for them again. Not for their lobbyists. Etc. It might make the Internet work objectively worse—but whoever said that politics was about making things better? Regulation mostly serves to make various processes more inefficient and to give those processes higher barriers-to-entry—in a way that makes them safer, or less prone to abuse, or whatever else. Politicians are always thinking in that mode: "something might get worse, but it's a compromise for everyone else—some good, some bad—and a win for me personally!"