8 ms·

Laws are the source code of society; built up over dozens of generations by thousands of people who all had a different idea of what the finished product should

by hpoe 6y ago

Laws are the source code of society; built up over dozens of generations by thousands of people who all had a different idea of what the finished product should look like and what algorithms to use. In addition most of these people never communicated and there is a ton of legacy functionally that is still in there that needs to be gotten rid of, but nobody wants to go through the trouble of submitting a change request to get the old cruft out. Beyond all of that bug fixes get pushed through without any real analysis and consideration for their consequences or to make the product better, but instead for the Project Manager to get a chance to show how great they are. Feel free to add to the analogy.

rubidium 6y ago
It’s just a poor analogy for the law. It’s what programmers turn to but it doesn’t work. The law is a fundamentally human executable. Code is fundamentally computer executable.
- scollet 6y ago
  Is it wrong that my utopia includes a VCS where PRs are submitted by constituents and implemented by incumbents?
  - anticensor 6y ago
    You will need a TCP-like self-stabilising algorithm to rate-limit code changes.
    - scollet 6y ago
      Pushing the hypothetical, what does TCP have to do with this? I may be missing a joke.
      - anticensor 6y ago
        It is designed to maximise the global packet flow while preserving reliability. A similar system for society would maximise the societal output while preserving conformity.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's not a poor analogy. It works extremely well. In law there are as many interpreters as there are humans.
yboris 6y ago
I keep wanting every new law being added to the books to require a "reason for this" section. When debugging and throwing out old laws it would be easier when the reasons for their addition are clearly stated. Also it would make the judges' decisions easier in certain cases.
- eru 6y ago
  Those reasons are often known. Though you can't always trust them. Even the titles of laws are often the opposite of what the law is accomplishing; and that's intended.
  - snowwrestler 6y ago
    In the U.S., at least at the federal level, laws don’t have titles. Bills (legislation) have titles but those are not the laws; they merely direct the government how to change the laws. The law at the federal level is simply called the U.S. Code. It is divided into sections with very plain and obvious names.
    - eru 6y ago
      Sorry, what I said mostly applies to bills. Though laws also sometimes come with justifications. Eg > Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” In my book, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" sounds like they wanted to explain what that piece of law was supposed to be good for. But whether handing out monopolies actually promotes progress of science and arts is very much a factual question open to factual enquiry. And so is the question whether this wording really has anything to do with why the legislators come up with that clause. It's perhaps more well-analysed for the second amendment to the American constitution. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United... The text itself provides some form of justification for reasons, but from history we know that there were different factions involved all with their own different reasons, and what's written in the law is a compromise. A compromise with rather idiosyncratic phrasing.
cogman10 6y ago
The law is less like source code and more like bytecode with the legal system working as a constantly changing interpreter. Sure, the bytecode gets updated. However, in this case, the interpreter is more often updated than the bytecode. Take, for example, the recent Title IX case in the US which ruled that someone being trans is protected under title IX. When the law was first written, that certainly wasn't the intention. Yet, the law was written in regards to sex. Something that we as a society have had an evolving view on. AFAIK, most legal systems (at least based on the British legal system) operate in a very similar manner. Laws may be written, but ultimately the courts have to decide what they mean. New laws can be written to correct for a courts opinion, yet the courts are free to evolve what they think things mean over time. Laws are pretty much never as black and white as you might consider. There's the text of the law, which matters, but theirs also the courts understanding of the law, which also matters. In fact, prior court rulings on a law often matter MORE than the actual text of the law.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  I'd say the trans protections are one in a long-running series of examples of US law being written in a clear-cut way that should have protected a given group from the start, but nonetheless 'obviously' didn't at the time because everyone knew what the lawmakers involved 'really' meant. This dates all the way back to the Constitution, which from the very start had a plain-text reading incompatible with slavery, and yet had a Bill of Rights conveniently not applied to slaves because everybody knew what the writers really meant by 'people'.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    The constitution as originally written was explicitly in favor of state's being allowed to legalize slavery if they wished. Tons of aspects, the 3/5 compromise, the electoral college, etc were very intentional pieces of the system to say 'oh don't worry, you as a state will have federal representation even if you don't consider a large portion of your population to really be full people'. It very plainly allowed for slaves; no reading between the lines necessary.
bananamerica 6y ago
> Laws are the source code of society They really aren’t. Society doesn’t really have a source code. The concept is not useful to enlighten that phenomenon.
chmod600 6y ago
Laws are the tip of the iceberg. Many other things have a bigger impact on society, such as culture, religion, and family. The source code analogy falls apart when you consider what would happen if two countries decided to swap laws.
akira2501 6y ago
> In addition most of these people never communicated and there is a ton of legacy functionally that is still in there that needs to be gotten rid of, but nobody wants to go through the trouble of submitting a change request to get the old cruft out. To me, this makes the law more apt to an analogy of genetics than of software. Laws are the genes of society. They're expressed differently under different circumstances, they're prone to degradation by way of malnutrition, and can create confusing and contradictory messaging pathways.. and when removed from the mechanism of apoptosis, it becomes indistinguishable from a cancer.
082349872349872 6y ago
For less legacy cruft, try a code system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_code
- KSteffensen 6y ago
  Or a mandatory sunset clause on all laws, say 10 years.
- anticensor 6y ago
  Civil law has its own case law too, just in a different form. A fully-codified civil law where legislative and judiciary are one and the same might eliminate that kind of cruft, like the old Turkic two-power system. But that would not work in the current society.
rebuilder 6y ago
You can not compile a society's laws and get a full description of how that society functions and what it will collectively do in any given situation. Much more goes into that than just legislation.
iamgopal 6y ago
Test cases. Most of the court works on previous verdicts, which is analogous to test cases.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  This is actually not true for the majority of the world's legal systems. Previous verdicts are something that matters for a _Common_ Law legal system, which is only a small part of the world's legal systems. (See the pink countries in the world map referenced [0]) The majority of the world's countries follow a _Civil_ Law system, where verdicts are based on the court's judgement against the written law, civil law is a sort of descendent of the Roman law system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#/media/File:Map_of_the_Legal_systems_of_the_world_(en).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#/media/File:Map_of_...
snidane 6y ago
And as any large software project eventually collapses on its own weight of complexity, so do societies when their tax and law codes become too complicated for citizens to comprehend and only clerks, priests and lawyers can be hired to help them navigate the code of the organization. Complexity slowly kills organizations and whole civilizations. If there ever is a silver bullet, it would be aggressive pursuit of simplicity of systems.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  "Aggressive pursuit of simplicity of systems" is part of that whole Enlightenment slide Napoleon had in his pitch deck. I think most of the parts of the former empire kept many of the simplifications, even if they weren't too fond of the aggressive pursuit part. (The swedes kept yet more: they still have Bernadottes.) Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_9CiNkkn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_9CiNkkn4
- sjy 6y ago
  I think you might be right, but do we have any examples of this happening to a real legal system yet?
- jandrese 6y ago
  I'd argue that the complexity of the laws is a tree. It looks enormous, but it's about splitting the hairs finer and finer on edge cases. Simple laws are just laws that are less completely specified. So the real complexity only grows at a log factor with the total size of the law.
jariel 6y ago
Civics, Morality, Humanity, Spirituality are the 'foundations' of society. Laws are just a rough, codified implementation of those. It's an odd misconception that we believe laws govern society, they're mostly just there around the edges. If the 'laws against murder' were really the only thing keeping us from murdering, we'd have all been dead long ago. Making something 'illegal' doesn't necessarily change civil society a whole lot. What 'changes' us are our beliefs and ultimately behaviours.
feralimal 6y ago
They are not the source code of society, they are the source code of the system. Big difference. Without any laws, you would probably have a very equitable situation, based on 'treating others as you would like to treat others'. Its very simple. It is possible to conceive of a (better) society existing. How we could get to that from where we are now, where most people are incapable of managing themselves, and instead demand to be managed by system, is a different question. If, on the other hand, you want to enforce your advantage over others, to make them do things that they do not want to do, you need a system.
- daedalus_f 6y ago
  Pretty much the entirety of human history stands in contradiction to the idea that if we were each left alone to make up our own rules we would all just be nice to each other, even if you go back to Rousseau’s state of nature [1]. You say I need a system to enforce an advantage over you but, without it, all I need is force of arms. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
  - feralimal 6y ago
    But then, history is written by the victors. The system would certainly write a history that appears supportive of its own necessity. History is an 'interpretive' act. It is does not accurately relay the truth. You have absolutely no idea about what transpired in the past, except what you have been taught. And you were taught within the system. Perhaps you should watch 'The Village' :)
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Most of the human history was illiterate, hungry, supersticious, and suffering from tapeworms. You can't project ancient barbarians onto modern people as any kind of proof. There is a great book, called "better angels of our nature".
- feralimal 6y ago
  I meant: 'treat others as you would like to be treated yourself'!
JdeBP 6y ago
> there is a ton of legacy functionally that is still in there that needs to be gotten rid of, but nobody wants to go through the trouble of submitting a change request to get the old cruft out. Nonsense. Go and learn about things known as law commissions, and the work that they've been doing for a long time, now. The Law Commission of India, for example, has existed since the middle 19th century, and is currently in its 21st incarnation since 1955. Go and look at the several Statute Law (Repeals) Acts that have been enacted in the U.K. from the 1960s onwards. Law reform commissioners were appointed ad hoc for a century before formal standing commissions, moreover. In Australia and Canada, for instance, they were appointed by Letters Patent at least as far back as the 1870s. (One example: Adam Wilson QC, appointed in Ontario in October 1871.) If you project software engineering onto how law works, you are going to get twaddle.
thechao 6y ago
Texas ‘borrowed’ a large chunk of its municipal water district code from New York - there are still references in the TX code stating that certain issues can only be resolved in Albany.
oalae5niMiel7qu 6y ago
If software ran like law, sometimes you'd get EPERM trying to run a program you have execute permission on, and to get it to work, you'd have to go to an IRC channel and beg the op for mercy. Other times, trying to run that program would result in "rm -rf ~" being executed instead. Apple would insist that it's your fault your home directory got deleted, and tbey'd refuse to fix your computer or sell you a new one.
fsckboy 6y ago
> "Laws are the source code of society; built up over dozens of generations by thousands of people who all had a different idea of what the finished product should look like and what algorithms to use." you just described technical debt

by hpoe 6y ago

rubidium 6y ago

It’s just a poor analogy for the law. It’s what programmers turn to but it doesn’t work. The law is a fundamentally human executable. Code is fundamentally computer executable.

scollet 6y ago
Is it wrong that my utopia includes a VCS where PRs are submitted by constituents and implemented by incumbents?
- anticensor 6y ago
  You will need a TCP-like self-stabilising algorithm to rate-limit code changes.
  - scollet 6y ago
    Pushing the hypothetical, what does TCP have to do with this? I may be missing a joke.
    - anticensor 6y ago
      It is designed to maximise the global packet flow while preserving reliability. A similar system for society would maximise the societal output while preserving conformity.
imtringued 6y ago
It's not a poor analogy. It works extremely well. In law there are as many interpreters as there are humans.

yboris 6y ago

I keep wanting every new law being added to the books to require a "reason for this" section. When debugging and throwing out old laws it would be easier when the reasons for their addition are clearly stated. Also it would make the judges' decisions easier in certain cases.

eru 6y ago
Those reasons are often known. Though you can't always trust them. Even the titles of laws are often the opposite of what the law is accomplishing; and that's intended.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  In the U.S., at least at the federal level, laws don’t have titles. Bills (legislation) have titles but those are not the laws; they merely direct the government how to change the laws. The law at the federal level is simply called the U.S. Code. It is divided into sections with very plain and obvious names.
  - eru 6y ago
    Sorry, what I said mostly applies to bills. Though laws also sometimes come with justifications. Eg > Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” In my book, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" sounds like they wanted to explain what that piece of law was supposed to be good for. But whether handing out monopolies actually promotes progress of science and arts is very much a factual question open to factual enquiry. And so is the question whether this wording really has anything to do with why the legislators come up with that clause. It's perhaps more well-analysed for the second amendment to the American constitution. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United... The text itself provides some form of justification for reasons, but from history we know that there were different factions involved all with their own different reasons, and what's written in the law is a compromise. A compromise with rather idiosyncratic phrasing.

cogman10 6y ago

The law is less like source code and more like bytecode with the legal system working as a constantly changing interpreter. Sure, the bytecode gets updated. However, in this case, the interpreter is more often updated than the bytecode. Take, for example, the recent Title IX case in the US which ruled that someone being trans is protected under title IX. When the law was first written, that certainly wasn't the intention. Yet, the law was written in regards to sex. Something that we as a society have had an evolving view on. AFAIK, most legal systems (at least based on the British legal system) operate in a very similar manner. Laws may be written, but ultimately the courts have to decide what they mean. New laws can be written to correct for a courts opinion, yet the courts are free to evolve what they think things mean over time. Laws are pretty much never as black and white as you might consider. There's the text of the law, which matters, but theirs also the courts understanding of the law, which also matters. In fact, prior court rulings on a law often matter MORE than the actual text of the law.

crooked-v 6y ago
I'd say the trans protections are one in a long-running series of examples of US law being written in a clear-cut way that should have protected a given group from the start, but nonetheless 'obviously' didn't at the time because everyone knew what the lawmakers involved 'really' meant. This dates all the way back to the Constitution, which from the very start had a plain-text reading incompatible with slavery, and yet had a Bill of Rights conveniently not applied to slaves because everybody knew what the writers really meant by 'people'.
- monocasa 6y ago
  The constitution as originally written was explicitly in favor of state's being allowed to legalize slavery if they wished. Tons of aspects, the 3/5 compromise, the electoral college, etc were very intentional pieces of the system to say 'oh don't worry, you as a state will have federal representation even if you don't consider a large portion of your population to really be full people'. It very plainly allowed for slaves; no reading between the lines necessary.

bananamerica 6y ago

> Laws are the source code of society They really aren’t. Society doesn’t really have a source code. The concept is not useful to enlighten that phenomenon.

chmod600 6y ago

Laws are the tip of the iceberg. Many other things have a bigger impact on society, such as culture, religion, and family. The source code analogy falls apart when you consider what would happen if two countries decided to swap laws.

akira2501 6y ago

> In addition most of these people never communicated and there is a ton of legacy functionally that is still in there that needs to be gotten rid of, but nobody wants to go through the trouble of submitting a change request to get the old cruft out. To me, this makes the law more apt to an analogy of genetics than of software. Laws are the genes of society. They're expressed differently under different circumstances, they're prone to degradation by way of malnutrition, and can create confusing and contradictory messaging pathways.. and when removed from the mechanism of apoptosis, it becomes indistinguishable from a cancer.

082349872349872 6y ago

For less legacy cruft, try a code system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_code

KSteffensen 6y ago
Or a mandatory sunset clause on all laws, say 10 years.
anticensor 6y ago
Civil law has its own case law too, just in a different form. A fully-codified civil law where legislative and judiciary are one and the same might eliminate that kind of cruft, like the old Turkic two-power system. But that would not work in the current society.

rebuilder 6y ago

You can not compile a society's laws and get a full description of how that society functions and what it will collectively do in any given situation. Much more goes into that than just legislation.

iamgopal 6y ago

Test cases. Most of the court works on previous verdicts, which is analogous to test cases.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
This is actually not true for the majority of the world's legal systems. Previous verdicts are something that matters for a _Common_ Law legal system, which is only a small part of the world's legal systems. (See the pink countries in the world map referenced [0]) The majority of the world's countries follow a _Civil_ Law system, where verdicts are based on the court's judgement against the written law, civil law is a sort of descendent of the Roman law system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#/media/File:Map_of_the_Legal_systems_of_the_world_(en).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#/media/File:Map_of_...

snidane 6y ago

And as any large software project eventually collapses on its own weight of complexity, so do societies when their tax and law codes become too complicated for citizens to comprehend and only clerks, priests and lawyers can be hired to help them navigate the code of the organization. Complexity slowly kills organizations and whole civilizations. If there ever is a silver bullet, it would be aggressive pursuit of simplicity of systems.

082349872349872 6y ago
"Aggressive pursuit of simplicity of systems" is part of that whole Enlightenment slide Napoleon had in his pitch deck. I think most of the parts of the former empire kept many of the simplifications, even if they weren't too fond of the aggressive pursuit part. (The swedes kept yet more: they still have Bernadottes.) Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_9CiNkkn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_9CiNkkn4
sjy 6y ago
I think you might be right, but do we have any examples of this happening to a real legal system yet?
jandrese 6y ago
I'd argue that the complexity of the laws is a tree. It looks enormous, but it's about splitting the hairs finer and finer on edge cases. Simple laws are just laws that are less completely specified. So the real complexity only grows at a log factor with the total size of the law.

jariel 6y ago

Civics, Morality, Humanity, Spirituality are the 'foundations' of society. Laws are just a rough, codified implementation of those. It's an odd misconception that we believe laws govern society, they're mostly just there around the edges. If the 'laws against murder' were really the only thing keeping us from murdering, we'd have all been dead long ago. Making something 'illegal' doesn't necessarily change civil society a whole lot. What 'changes' us are our beliefs and ultimately behaviours.

feralimal 6y ago

They are not the source code of society, they are the source code of the system. Big difference. Without any laws, you would probably have a very equitable situation, based on 'treating others as you would like to treat others'. Its very simple. It is possible to conceive of a (better) society existing. How we could get to that from where we are now, where most people are incapable of managing themselves, and instead demand to be managed by system, is a different question. If, on the other hand, you want to enforce your advantage over others, to make them do things that they do not want to do, you need a system.

daedalus_f 6y ago
Pretty much the entirety of human history stands in contradiction to the idea that if we were each left alone to make up our own rules we would all just be nice to each other, even if you go back to Rousseau’s state of nature [1]. You say I need a system to enforce an advantage over you but, without it, all I need is force of arms. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
- feralimal 6y ago
  But then, history is written by the victors. The system would certainly write a history that appears supportive of its own necessity. History is an 'interpretive' act. It is does not accurately relay the truth. You have absolutely no idea about what transpired in the past, except what you have been taught. And you were taught within the system. Perhaps you should watch 'The Village' :)
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Most of the human history was illiterate, hungry, supersticious, and suffering from tapeworms. You can't project ancient barbarians onto modern people as any kind of proof. There is a great book, called "better angels of our nature".
feralimal 6y ago
I meant: 'treat others as you would like to be treated yourself'!

JdeBP 6y ago

> there is a ton of legacy functionally that is still in there that needs to be gotten rid of, but nobody wants to go through the trouble of submitting a change request to get the old cruft out. Nonsense. Go and learn about things known as law commissions, and the work that they've been doing for a long time, now. The Law Commission of India, for example, has existed since the middle 19th century, and is currently in its 21st incarnation since 1955. Go and look at the several Statute Law (Repeals) Acts that have been enacted in the U.K. from the 1960s onwards. Law reform commissioners were appointed ad hoc for a century before formal standing commissions, moreover. In Australia and Canada, for instance, they were appointed by Letters Patent at least as far back as the 1870s. (One example: Adam Wilson QC, appointed in Ontario in October 1871.) If you project software engineering onto how law works, you are going to get twaddle.

thechao 6y ago

Texas ‘borrowed’ a large chunk of its municipal water district code from New York - there are still references in the TX code stating that certain issues can only be resolved in Albany.

oalae5niMiel7qu 6y ago

If software ran like law, sometimes you'd get EPERM trying to run a program you have execute permission on, and to get it to work, you'd have to go to an IRC channel and beg the op for mercy. Other times, trying to run that program would result in "rm -rf ~" being executed instead. Apple would insist that it's your fault your home directory got deleted, and tbey'd refuse to fix your computer or sell you a new one.

fsckboy 6y ago

> "Laws are the source code of society; built up over dozens of generations by thousands of people who all had a different idea of what the finished product should look like and what algorithms to use." you just described technical debt