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> It definitely provides a pretty picture, but just wanted to emphasise the map !== territory addage. You're right — my map does not necessarily represent the
by ubutler 3y ago
> It definitely provides a pretty picture, but just wanted to emphasise the map !== territory addage.
You're right — my map does not necessarily represent the underlying semantic structure of Australian law, it is an approximation, one that is biased by the data I used (which as I mentioned, is missing laws and cases from a number of jurisdictions), the embedding model I selected and the dimensionality reduction model I used to project my embeddings into a two-dimensional space, to name a few.
Because I was writing for both legal and data science audiences, I tried to avoid sounding like my inferences are anything more than just inferences but without getting too technical and explaining the inherent limitations of any attempt to semantically map knowledge with today's technology.
I will just say though that, having studied law myself, Australian case law is indeed somewhat of a continuum. A single case may touch on many areas of law and there are no restrictions in terms of subject matter on what precedents a judge may draw upon in reaching a decision, apart from that they are both relevant and binding (or, if they are not binding, are not treated as such).
It was also interesting to observe how the final clusters that developed were uncannily similar to the way in which I was taught law at university. It goes to show, there's a lot of thought put into the design of our legal courses here in Australia. In fact, there are 11 subjects that are mandatory, known as the Priestley 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priestley_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priestley_11. All of those are reflected on the map, although some have been rolled up into larger categories or divided by other means.
- mistermann 3y agoI think it can sometimes be useful to take this map != territory concept further - all instances of map != territory are not equal, some have the potential for higher utility than others. And, I would estimate that concepts/methodologies like this (anything that provides humans new ways to examine and conceptualize important matters) almost certainly have higher potential than standard, run of the mill instances of map != territory (the likelihood of us being able to find and harvest that utility is another layer of complexity, but then so is the notion that utility is often found not only in the destination, but also in the journey). (Unfortunately, modal logic notation seems to currently have no support for describing these sorts of concepts, at least according to ChatGPT). The "so what?" of it is that if people (particularly smart ones) exclude these additional concepts from their logical consideration, it is possible that the idea could be dismissed, or have its potential importance estimated to be lower than it actually/potentially is, potentially leading to an outcome whereby this map or the underlying methodology (applied to other domains) is not maximally exploited to achieve positive outcomes.