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It’s an intractable problem, that’s why we haven’t solved it. Crimes were intended to be serious transgressions worthy of the government spending untold sums en

It’s an intractable problem, that’s why we haven’t solved it. Crimes were intended to be serious transgressions worthy of the government spending untold sums enforcing for the good of society. Thus all of the expensive due process; it’s a serious transgression that carries serious penalties, so it’s important to be correct. The system was never intended to handle an explosion in regulations to the point where the average person accidentally routinely commits felonies. The world’s judicial systems are collapsing because we are unwilling to admit that the judicial system would need to be like a quarter of our society to actually enforce all the laws we have, and we’re also unwilling to repeal laws to a subset we could actually effectively enforce.

trimethylpurine 2y ago
I think automation can help, and that it is an inevitability.
- everforward 2y ago
  I’m skeptical; we’re already automating as hard as possible by extorting defendants to not exercise their right to a trial. E.g. a typical court case will involve a plea deal for X days in jail, with the prosecutor threatening to argue for 10*X days if the defendant goes to trial. 98% of federal cases never make it to trial. Most states have rates above 90%. Some counties haven’t had a case go to trial in like a decade, everyone pleas out. To be clear, we have already gutted everything not strictly necessary from the judicial system, and it’s faltering even under the ‘crisis mode’ operations they’ve been pursuing. There’s a latent black swan event waiting to happen there. If defendants ever band together and collectively refuse to take plea deals, our judicial system would cease to function almost overnight. We barely have enough judges for the couple of percent of cases that actually go to trial; we would be talking an order of magnitude or two more cases. More generally, I think the complexity of law grows exponentially based on the size of the corpus that makes it up. The laws interact with each other, so the number of interactions grows exponentially rather than linearly. Our ability to automate grows quickly, but not as quickly as that exponent.
  - trimethylpurine 2y ago
    That's all human element, so it's true, we can't automate that part. A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right? The current limit to the number of judges is artificial. Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job. That's not a lot of incentive to remain a judge. Those are easily fixable if legislators choose to fix them. Instead, Congress seems to be hoping they can get Facebook to make the problem go away, ignoring the root cause.
    - everforward 2y ago
      > A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right? In a sense, though there's also some intersecting concerns. E.g. judges and lawyers aren't economically productive in the "creating things that we can sell or export" sense. That presents an opportunity cost, because it means we are pulling people out of roles that are economically productive and into roles that are not. E.g. the general cost of labor would probably rise if the judicial system started employing full percentage points of the US population more than they currently do. Likewise, I suspect GDP would drop since we are pulling people out of "making things" and into "regulating things". We would just be literally making fewer things, since we had fewer people employed "making things". > Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job. One of the issues here is that the government (state or federal) is both the prosecutor and the source of funding for the defendant's lawyer. E.g. here's a fun tidbit for California: a prosecutor's average salary range is $98k-$132k while a public defender's average salary range is $89k-$119k. Even among jobs working for the government, it's about a 10% pay cut to defend people instead of prosecuting them. Across the country there are roughly twice as many employed in prosecutorial roles as there are in defense roles (funding roughly matches that, with prosecutor's offices getting funded at ~180% the rate of public defenders). In 2018, there were 372 arrests per attorney in public defender's offices but only 260 per attorney in district attorney offices. Prosecutors can afford to spend ~150% of the time on a case that public defenders can, and can afford to spend far more per case on expert opinions, lab results, etc. The government wants it that way, because it feeds into the "efficiency". People are far more likely to take a plea deal when they know their public defender is overworked, underpaid, and under-resourced compared to the prosecutors. Funding defense attorneys makes cases take longer to get through court, because people would be more likely to reject plea deals and the public defenders would have more time to formulate legal arguments. Anecdotally, you can see this first hand in video from court cases. It's not unusual for there to be 3 attorneys sitting behind the prosecutor's table, and a single attorney behind the defendant's. The prosecutors are just that much more well-resourced; they can afford to send a trio of attorneys to double-check each other. Meanwhile the public defenders are scrambling with stacks of folders trying to figure out which one is for their next defendant.
- mikrotikker 2y ago
  Better yet copy the minds jury system, if you flag a post or series of posts as harrassment, and hit a submit button, 1000 random users vote if it's harrassment or not and and I'd so then the person gets banned or temp banned from their account... However Facebook and the ad driven socials won't dare do that because even harassers have eyeballs to view ads with. Ads are the cause of all this evil, really.
  - trimethylpurine 2y ago
    Well, aside from bots, 1000 real people would easily downvote a video of a guy eating a hamburger. Let's not get carried away with our faith in humanity.

trimethylpurine 2y ago

I think automation can help, and that it is an inevitability.

everforward 2y ago
I’m skeptical; we’re already automating as hard as possible by extorting defendants to not exercise their right to a trial. E.g. a typical court case will involve a plea deal for X days in jail, with the prosecutor threatening to argue for 10*X days if the defendant goes to trial. 98% of federal cases never make it to trial. Most states have rates above 90%. Some counties haven’t had a case go to trial in like a decade, everyone pleas out. To be clear, we have already gutted everything not strictly necessary from the judicial system, and it’s faltering even under the ‘crisis mode’ operations they’ve been pursuing. There’s a latent black swan event waiting to happen there. If defendants ever band together and collectively refuse to take plea deals, our judicial system would cease to function almost overnight. We barely have enough judges for the couple of percent of cases that actually go to trial; we would be talking an order of magnitude or two more cases. More generally, I think the complexity of law grows exponentially based on the size of the corpus that makes it up. The laws interact with each other, so the number of interactions grows exponentially rather than linearly. Our ability to automate grows quickly, but not as quickly as that exponent.
- trimethylpurine 2y ago
  That's all human element, so it's true, we can't automate that part. A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right? The current limit to the number of judges is artificial. Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job. That's not a lot of incentive to remain a judge. Those are easily fixable if legislators choose to fix them. Instead, Congress seems to be hoping they can get Facebook to make the problem go away, ignoring the root cause.
  - everforward 2y ago
    > A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right? In a sense, though there's also some intersecting concerns. E.g. judges and lawyers aren't economically productive in the "creating things that we can sell or export" sense. That presents an opportunity cost, because it means we are pulling people out of roles that are economically productive and into roles that are not. E.g. the general cost of labor would probably rise if the judicial system started employing full percentage points of the US population more than they currently do. Likewise, I suspect GDP would drop since we are pulling people out of "making things" and into "regulating things". We would just be literally making fewer things, since we had fewer people employed "making things". > Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job. One of the issues here is that the government (state or federal) is both the prosecutor and the source of funding for the defendant's lawyer. E.g. here's a fun tidbit for California: a prosecutor's average salary range is $98k-$132k while a public defender's average salary range is $89k-$119k. Even among jobs working for the government, it's about a 10% pay cut to defend people instead of prosecuting them. Across the country there are roughly twice as many employed in prosecutorial roles as there are in defense roles (funding roughly matches that, with prosecutor's offices getting funded at ~180% the rate of public defenders). In 2018, there were 372 arrests per attorney in public defender's offices but only 260 per attorney in district attorney offices. Prosecutors can afford to spend ~150% of the time on a case that public defenders can, and can afford to spend far more per case on expert opinions, lab results, etc. The government wants it that way, because it feeds into the "efficiency". People are far more likely to take a plea deal when they know their public defender is overworked, underpaid, and under-resourced compared to the prosecutors. Funding defense attorneys makes cases take longer to get through court, because people would be more likely to reject plea deals and the public defenders would have more time to formulate legal arguments. Anecdotally, you can see this first hand in video from court cases. It's not unusual for there to be 3 attorneys sitting behind the prosecutor's table, and a single attorney behind the defendant's. The prosecutors are just that much more well-resourced; they can afford to send a trio of attorneys to double-check each other. Meanwhile the public defenders are scrambling with stacks of folders trying to figure out which one is for their next defendant.
mikrotikker 2y ago
Better yet copy the minds jury system, if you flag a post or series of posts as harrassment, and hit a submit button, 1000 random users vote if it's harrassment or not and and I'd so then the person gets banned or temp banned from their account... However Facebook and the ad driven socials won't dare do that because even harassers have eyeballs to view ads with. Ads are the cause of all this evil, really.
- trimethylpurine 2y ago
  Well, aside from bots, 1000 real people would easily downvote a video of a guy eating a hamburger. Let's not get carried away with our faith in humanity.