3 ms·

So obvious next question is how does reading the law compare?

by wizardforhire 6y ago

klyrs 6y ago
Yeah, laws and contracts are basically pseudocode; I'd expect it to be much more similar to code than literature.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  > Yeah, laws and contracts are basically pseudocode; Are they? Do you say this as someone who is familiar with actual laws? Genuinely asking. Because I know that engineers (my past self included) like to imagine formalizing laws and turning them into code, which is extremely naive, once you see actual laws and how much human common sense judgment is needed to decide on them, including inferring intent, judging potential consequences, interpreting imprecise terms, etc. Perhaps a part of the tax code is like code. But a lot of laws are far from it. It's more formal than novels but it's firmly natural language that you need to understand as a human.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    "Basically" was sharing some heavy lifting with "psuedo" on that sentence. Tell ya what, I've got gobs of experience with pseudocode, and much of it requires tons of common sense judgement, inferring intent, judging runtime and memory management consequences, interpreting imprecise terms, etc.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Agreed. Vague pseudocode and fairly narrowly focused laws are quite similar in nature. I'd also compare these two to mathematical proofs written in natural language in textbooks or academic papers. They have recurring structures and patterns, but are not formalized proofs, leave things explicitly or implicitly as an exercise to the reader or assume cases as trivial. (The gap to a formal representation is often nontrivial effort and has never been totally done for most of math) But then again, we have lots of similar things. Household equipment user manuals, revenue reports, soccer match descriptions in newspapers, stock market updates, phone calls to make an appointment at the dentist, etc. Lots of things on various points of the structured/formal/closed -- unstructured/informal/open spectrum.
- wahern 6y ago
  In general the law is absolutely not so rigorous. It's more like general philosophical literature in terms of logical rigor--diverse, disjoint, etc. But certain subdomains of the law can be closer to a formal system. The French tax code is peculiar (though I'm not sure its unique) in literally being defined by the rules encoded in an official program. A recent paper on a new language for compiling those rules, "A Modern Compiler for the French Tax Code" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07966.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07966.pdf, via HN a couple of weeks ago), contains a blurb at the very end, > Closer to the topic of this paper, the logical structure of the US tax law has been extensively studied by Lawsky [18, 19], pointing out the legal ambiguities in the text of the law that need to be resolved using legal reasoning. She also claims that the tax law drafting style follows default logic [24], a non-monotonic logic that is hard to encode in languages with first-order logic (FOL). This could explain, as M is also based on FOL, the complexity of the DGFiP codebase. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_logic and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic But note that it's written in that "style", not that it's done consistently or correctly. Unfortunately I couldn't easily find a copy of the cited papers, but I made a note for later reference. EDIT: I once took a class in law school taught by a Professor of Systems Engineering from the parent university. I forget why, but long ago he took an interest in the rules of evidence in the common law. While the rules evolved organically over more than a thousand years, they actually strongly reflect a formal system of abductive reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning. And there's significant, hidden rigor. In one project he had everyone in class create a tree consisting of evidence (e.g. size 7 shoe) at the leaves, with the branches as inferences all the way up to the top, which was the core legal claim--1) Jim did 2) break and 3) enter into 4) said building.... Anyhow, being a programmer I decided to create my tree using the DOT language and render it using Graphviz. While I was doing that it occurred to me that some of the more esoteric, technical rules of evidence, such as that any piece of evidence can only be used to prove a single element, actually ensures that the tree is an acyclic graph. I'm not sure precisely why (perhaps the professor had more insight), but I believe it's because the rules are in part crafted to ensure that the finder of fact is presented with a tractable problem to solve. The process would get too confusing (and possibly logically inconsistent?) if you didn't keep the tree of evidence and inference simple. No judge or lawmaker likely ever had in mind the literal shape of the evidence tree. In fact, AFAIU nobody thought to represent it as a tree until the late 19th century, when the famous scholar of common law evidence, John Wigmore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Wigmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Wigmore), developed a system for analyzing and preparing trial evidence in that manner. Anyhow, a proper and infinitely more rigorous treatment of this is presented in the book, "Analysis of Evidence, 2nd Ed." by Terence Anderson, David Schum, and William Twining. (Schum taught the class.) A large part of the book explores and explains the law of evidence as a system of Bayesian reasoning. (Oh, that's why! I think Prof. Schum first stumbled into the legal realm after he got the idea of using Bayesian statistics to resolve historically famous and contentious legal trials.)

So obvious next question is how does reading the law compare?

klyrs 6y ago

Yeah, laws and contracts are basically pseudocode; I'd expect it to be much more similar to code than literature.

bonoboTP 6y ago
> Yeah, laws and contracts are basically pseudocode; Are they? Do you say this as someone who is familiar with actual laws? Genuinely asking. Because I know that engineers (my past self included) like to imagine formalizing laws and turning them into code, which is extremely naive, once you see actual laws and how much human common sense judgment is needed to decide on them, including inferring intent, judging potential consequences, interpreting imprecise terms, etc. Perhaps a part of the tax code is like code. But a lot of laws are far from it. It's more formal than novels but it's firmly natural language that you need to understand as a human.
- klyrs 6y ago
  "Basically" was sharing some heavy lifting with "psuedo" on that sentence. Tell ya what, I've got gobs of experience with pseudocode, and much of it requires tons of common sense judgement, inferring intent, judging runtime and memory management consequences, interpreting imprecise terms, etc.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Agreed. Vague pseudocode and fairly narrowly focused laws are quite similar in nature. I'd also compare these two to mathematical proofs written in natural language in textbooks or academic papers. They have recurring structures and patterns, but are not formalized proofs, leave things explicitly or implicitly as an exercise to the reader or assume cases as trivial. (The gap to a formal representation is often nontrivial effort and has never been totally done for most of math) But then again, we have lots of similar things. Household equipment user manuals, revenue reports, soccer match descriptions in newspapers, stock market updates, phone calls to make an appointment at the dentist, etc. Lots of things on various points of the structured/formal/closed -- unstructured/informal/open spectrum.
wahern 6y ago
In general the law is absolutely not so rigorous. It's more like general philosophical literature in terms of logical rigor--diverse, disjoint, etc. But certain subdomains of the law can be closer to a formal system. The French tax code is peculiar (though I'm not sure its unique) in literally being defined by the rules encoded in an official program. A recent paper on a new language for compiling those rules, "A Modern Compiler for the French Tax Code" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07966.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07966.pdf, via HN a couple of weeks ago), contains a blurb at the very end, > Closer to the topic of this paper, the logical structure of the US tax law has been extensively studied by Lawsky [18, 19], pointing out the legal ambiguities in the text of the law that need to be resolved using legal reasoning. She also claims that the tax law drafting style follows default logic [24], a non-monotonic logic that is hard to encode in languages with first-order logic (FOL). This could explain, as M is also based on FOL, the complexity of the DGFiP codebase. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_logic and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic But note that it's written in that "style", not that it's done consistently or correctly. Unfortunately I couldn't easily find a copy of the cited papers, but I made a note for later reference. EDIT: I once took a class in law school taught by a Professor of Systems Engineering from the parent university. I forget why, but long ago he took an interest in the rules of evidence in the common law. While the rules evolved organically over more than a thousand years, they actually strongly reflect a formal system of abductive reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning. And there's significant, hidden rigor. In one project he had everyone in class create a tree consisting of evidence (e.g. size 7 shoe) at the leaves, with the branches as inferences all the way up to the top, which was the core legal claim--1) Jim did 2) break and 3) enter into 4) said building.... Anyhow, being a programmer I decided to create my tree using the DOT language and render it using Graphviz. While I was doing that it occurred to me that some of the more esoteric, technical rules of evidence, such as that any piece of evidence can only be used to prove a single element, actually ensures that the tree is an acyclic graph. I'm not sure precisely why (perhaps the professor had more insight), but I believe it's because the rules are in part crafted to ensure that the finder of fact is presented with a tractable problem to solve. The process would get too confusing (and possibly logically inconsistent?) if you didn't keep the tree of evidence and inference simple. No judge or lawmaker likely ever had in mind the literal shape of the evidence tree. In fact, AFAIU nobody thought to represent it as a tree until the late 19th century, when the famous scholar of common law evidence, John Wigmore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Wigmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Wigmore), developed a system for analyzing and preparing trial evidence in that manner. Anyhow, a proper and infinitely more rigorous treatment of this is presented in the book, "Analysis of Evidence, 2nd Ed." by Terence Anderson, David Schum, and William Twining. (Schum taught the class.) A large part of the book explores and explains the law of evidence as a system of Bayesian reasoning. (Oh, that's why! I think Prof. Schum first stumbled into the legal realm after he got the idea of using Bayesian statistics to resolve historically famous and contentious legal trials.)