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So true. It's a fixing the algorithm vs tweaking some parameters situation. PS: if I were to design a state I would make it a part of the constitution that law
by usrusr 5y ago
So true. It's a fixing the algorithm vs tweaking some parameters situation.
PS: if I were to design a state I would make it a part of the constitution that laws must either be written with placeholder variables for any concrete numbers you'd want to put into them or specify only concrete values for those placeholders and nothing else. And no single vote can contain both kinds at once.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bckr 5y agoExpand on this please? What would be excluded in the "nothing else"? And what good would it do to ban single votes on both parameters and constants?
- a1369209993 5y agoBased on pattern-matching on my own political science knowledge, they're saying that a legislative act can either: establish a law, but all numbers must be unspecified placeholder parameters, or: specify the (new) values for the parameters of some existing law, but without changing the text of the law. A single vote cannot apply to both.
- layer8 5y agoParameters vs. algorithms is really a spectrum though. Just ask the lispers. ;)
- clairity 5y agorather than simple placeholder variables, we should employ placeholders for smoothly continuous functions over the relevant parameter space. for taxes, the parameter space might include revenue and profit, over which the tax is smoothly continuous. discontinuities just beg to be exploited.
- specialist 5y agoI eagerly await the broad recognition that economies are non-linear complex adaptive systems.
- clairity 5y agoexactly. social phenomena in general are many orders more complex than physical phenomena for which mathematical models are generally deployed effectively. but even so, a zero- (e.g., a single tax rate) or quasi-first-order (like a limited number of tax brackets) model makes no sense, when we can much better fit the desired effect with a slightly higher-order function for only a small complexity trade-off. better fit means reducing the exploitation surface. tangentially, this is a relevant application of basic linear algebra and calculus to civics, which could be used as concrete motivation in the high school education of those subjects.
- usrusr 5y agoYeah, this is basically what got me to that idea of separating formula from parameter: whenever politics should care about some quality of a formula, it gets completely drowned in the noise of people screaming at each other trying to drag the parameters one way or the other. As evidenced by every single discussion about UBI. Sometimes the formula still turns out ok, but far too often not ok at all. It was in my second or third programming side job when I was asked by the ramshackle finance marketing upstarts I was working for if it was possible to implement the almighty Income Tax Table (in Access, obviously). I had heard scary things about that beast. A few minutes of googling (I think was already Google?) and I realized that the law in question defined a simple linear factor that increases at certain thresholds, with a tax-exmpt base per threshold to correct for any jumps. I was so disappointed! Not so much by a scary mad beast that turned out to be all tame and reasonable but by the professions of finance marketers and tax consultants who routinely acted as if it was some arbitrary monstrosity that could only be dealt with in a lookup table.
- clairity 5y agoyah, the lookup table is just discrete points of a stepwise function, so why not just use the underlying formula instead, and smooth it out while we're at it since it simplifies the calculation? in this era of handheld supercomputers, we're well beyond having to manually multiply out the formulas anyway. and tax forms are already basically one long formula where you just plug in the variable values in a step-by-step manner (and usually have a computer do the math for you).