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Dealing with people you discover that all the weird rules are there because somebody or a situation made them necessary. For every well meaning well behaving i

Dealing with people you discover that all the weird rules are there because somebody or a situation made them necessary. For every well meaning well behaving individual there is another that will park his car in your freaking back yard if you don't fence your property. Would you raise a building while taking into account the surrounding people and context? Well, perhaps. But many others will absolutely destroy the location in all concerns and just maximise square footage. This problem has no solution! Whatever set of rules you agree upon, somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added. Then people will complain why so many rules.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added. Rules can be rewritten in a cohesive way or rules can be written as just an endless series of if statements which may contradict with other if statements. It would be useful for laws to have an automated test suite so that known good uses cases wouldn't be broken down the road.
- fierarul 6y ago
  I agree that laws could / should approach software. But we've been having bugs and exploits in software since the beginning. And law has to cover an even wider field of situations.
  - dataduck 6y ago
    No way. Software works for predictable inputs producing well-defined desired outputs. Reality is nothing like this. Actually good rule systems are ambiguous or weak enough that when someone tries to abuse edge cases, people can turn round and say "no" and the rules don't get in the way.
    - josinalvo 6y ago
      (mostly) Everyone likes this flexibility. The question is some people find the cost too much. Maybe it is better to have a law that is explicitly dumb, in exchange for fast, cheap and predictable (kinda like computers, if you think about it)
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Humans are not machines, language is not code, and the real world is not binary. An automated test suite for laws is NP-hard.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
BurningFrog 6y ago
> Dealing with people you discover that all the weird rules are there because somebody or a situation made them necessary. Some are. But many rules are there because someone with power benefits from them.
jaredklewis 6y ago
Perhaps the parent is too critical of the rule makers, but you are far too forgiving. Laws in the US happen like this: someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws. I'm not a big fan of philosopher Michael Huemer, but he makes an interesting metaphor regarding laws. He compares society with the human body and laws with medicine. For a long time medicine wasn't based on empirical evidence, but on logic and "common sense." Most medical advice from before the scientific method was more harmful than helpful. The human body is such a complex and delicate system that almost all interventions are more harmful than helpful. Even in the presence of a medical issue, unless there is evidence that a given medical intervention is more helpful than harmful, no medical intervention is probably better than an unproven one. Just because a societal ill exists, doesn't mean that the first legal remedy that pops into someone's head is a good idea. Even if that idea solves the problem (a big if), will its second and third order effects cause more damage than the original problem? American political discourse is dominated by a desire to "take action." But unless lawmakers are willing to start consulting economists and domain experts, no action at all is probably better. You seem to think that endless sets rules is a necessary evil, but my intuition is the opposite: for every US law that makes for a better society, there are ten which are holding us back.
- fierarul 6y ago
  I agree that doing something just so something is done about it is not a solution and it generally produces a worse outcome. Ultimately I started questioning a lot of these rules and discovered in time what I said in the original post: a lot of people need to be forced with (new) rules because they will not think of anybody else or even actively try to workaround the rules. And I'm not forgiving of rule makers: I think they are really bad at what they do, both in how they reach consensus and how they codify it in law, but I understand the general need they fill, so to say.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws. Or, "someone owns a small house and one or two cars and finds they can't park because the neighbors have six roommates with one car each", or "developer builds 50 units without parking expecting the neighborhood to absorb the cars".

MattGaiser 6y ago

> somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added. Rules can be rewritten in a cohesive way or rules can be written as just an endless series of if statements which may contradict with other if statements. It would be useful for laws to have an automated test suite so that known good uses cases wouldn't be broken down the road.

fierarul 6y ago
I agree that laws could / should approach software. But we've been having bugs and exploits in software since the beginning. And law has to cover an even wider field of situations.
- dataduck 6y ago
  No way. Software works for predictable inputs producing well-defined desired outputs. Reality is nothing like this. Actually good rule systems are ambiguous or weak enough that when someone tries to abuse edge cases, people can turn round and say "no" and the rules don't get in the way.
  - josinalvo 6y ago
    (mostly) Everyone likes this flexibility. The question is some people find the cost too much. Maybe it is better to have a law that is explicitly dumb, in exchange for fast, cheap and predictable (kinda like computers, if you think about it)
gamblor956 6y ago
Humans are not machines, language is not code, and the real world is not binary. An automated test suite for laws is NP-hard.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

BurningFrog 6y ago

> Dealing with people you discover that all the weird rules are there because somebody or a situation made them necessary. Some are. But many rules are there because someone with power benefits from them.

jaredklewis 6y ago

Perhaps the parent is too critical of the rule makers, but you are far too forgiving. Laws in the US happen like this: someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws. I'm not a big fan of philosopher Michael Huemer, but he makes an interesting metaphor regarding laws. He compares society with the human body and laws with medicine. For a long time medicine wasn't based on empirical evidence, but on logic and "common sense." Most medical advice from before the scientific method was more harmful than helpful. The human body is such a complex and delicate system that almost all interventions are more harmful than helpful. Even in the presence of a medical issue, unless there is evidence that a given medical intervention is more helpful than harmful, no medical intervention is probably better than an unproven one. Just because a societal ill exists, doesn't mean that the first legal remedy that pops into someone's head is a good idea. Even if that idea solves the problem (a big if), will its second and third order effects cause more damage than the original problem? American political discourse is dominated by a desire to "take action." But unless lawmakers are willing to start consulting economists and domain experts, no action at all is probably better. You seem to think that endless sets rules is a necessary evil, but my intuition is the opposite: for every US law that makes for a better society, there are ten which are holding us back.

fierarul 6y ago
I agree that doing something just so something is done about it is not a solution and it generally produces a worse outcome. Ultimately I started questioning a lot of these rules and discovered in time what I said in the original post: a lot of people need to be forced with (new) rules because they will not think of anybody else or even actively try to workaround the rules. And I'm not forgiving of rule makers: I think they are really bad at what they do, both in how they reach consensus and how they codify it in law, but I understand the general need they fill, so to say.
nitrogen 6y ago
someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws. Or, "someone owns a small house and one or two cars and finds they can't park because the neighbors have six roommates with one car each", or "developer builds 50 units without parking expecting the neighborhood to absorb the cars".