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Fascinating. Last week, I was vibe-coding a project turning the US Constitution into TLA+, but eventually ran out of context window. There is a sense - enginee

Fascinating. Last week, I was vibe-coding a project turning the US Constitution into TLA+, but eventually ran out of context window. There is a sense - engineer's disease - that laws can made better by formal specification, but I've learned that is naive. However, still I believe that laws can be made less prone to abuse by red-teaming them. Even if the laws aren't formally specified, the systems can be and that is valuable in its own way.

drdaeman 2y ago
I'm curious, why have you concluded that it's naive to build a formal model out of a legal document? I'm not sure about making laws better, but surely a machine can replace lawyers for trivial and well-defined things (where you don't really need a lawyer - and there are a lot of such cases), saving time for a layman person finding appropriate clauses and navigating them while investigating some well-defined (minimally ambiguous and least likely to raise any exceptions) happy paths. Some companies make a lot of money from formalizing tax codes, after all.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  To be specific I believe it's naive to think that formally specified laws will be an improvement on the legal system. I believe laws ultimately are subject to Godel's theorem. They can either be complete or consistent, but not both (and likely neither). We should recognize the difference. A complete legal system can render a verdict in every case. A consistent legal system has no contradictions. We prioritize the former. What would it look like for a case to be presented to a judge and for them to respond, "We simply cannot determine if this is legal or not." What would you even do in such a scenario? Rather, we have judges render decisions and deal with the consequences that they are inconsistent and we have further cases to untangle those inconsistencies, in an ever growing patchwork of legal epicycles.
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    Thank you! I'm not sure I agree with the idea of us prioritizing completeness. I don't think the laws can or need to cover any possible life situation. I mean, there aren't any laws about whenever someone can or cannot wave a toy chainsaw or whenever guests of the Oval Office must wear a costume. We just look at this, make our opinions, but when we need to make a legal one we check out that laws say nothing on the matter, then dismiss it as "nothing against the law" (of course, we can always make or amend the new laws if we think we need some). I'm not a lawyer, but from my crude understanding I believe it's rather the norm for the laws to be incomplete and have intentional ambiguity so the lawmakers aren't spending their time down the rabbit hole of determining the theory of truth (which they cannot do, if Godel's theorem is applicable - I'm not entirely sure because laws are not really self-defining and we don't have or need it to be a closed system with its own set of axioms and stuff - that'd probably mess up the reasons we have laws), but rather write something that works for the majority of their intent, and leave the edge cases to whoever hits them and goes to the court or legislators. I'd say the whole legal system is deliberately designed to "crash" at an undefined behavior at any time and require a human in the loop to look at it. So I suspect that consistency makes more sense for a legal system than completeness. We probably want rule of the law to be universal and fair (and thus, more consistent) than complete, because no one needs a law to describe every single life situation. People don't normally think of such law (save for thought experiments), and it would probably violate Kant's categorical imperative (as we'll all become just the means for such law) to design it so. I could argue that it's because life changes with every passing moment, with someone doing something novel and never done before. I hope I understood you correctly (my apologies if I didn't get something right), and my arguments here make sense.
    - kelseyfrog 2y ago
      I want to clarify that I'm considering the legal system as a whole. When I say completeness I'm referring to the legal system's ability to render a judgement: is something legal or illegal? That's different than having a law for every case. We can have ambiguous laws and still have a judge say that something is legal or illegal. What we don't have or can't have is a court case where the judge says, "The legality of this is indeterminate." Our ability to always render a judgement is completeness.
pessimizer 2y ago
> There is a sense - engineer's disease - that laws can made better by formal specification, but I've learned that is naive. We can call it Bentham's disease, and it's what gave everybody civil law outside of the systems descended from the Napoleonic Code (another civil law system.) It's naïve to pretend it's something that can be done in an afternoon, but not to think that it's the ideal we should always be aspiring to. Henry M. Robert, the creator of Robert's Rules of order, was an engineer, not a lawyer. He took Thomas Jefferson's summary and reorganization of English Parliamentary tradition and precedent, extracted the implicit premises from it, then reconstructed a system for deliberative societies from first principles. We use his system now. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dudley_Field_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dudley_Field_II also: "Formalizing Robert's Rules of Order: An Experiment in Automating Mediation of Group Decision Making" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/869694 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/869694

drdaeman 2y ago

I'm curious, why have you concluded that it's naive to build a formal model out of a legal document? I'm not sure about making laws better, but surely a machine can replace lawyers for trivial and well-defined things (where you don't really need a lawyer - and there are a lot of such cases), saving time for a layman person finding appropriate clauses and navigating them while investigating some well-defined (minimally ambiguous and least likely to raise any exceptions) happy paths. Some companies make a lot of money from formalizing tax codes, after all.

kelseyfrog 2y ago
To be specific I believe it's naive to think that formally specified laws will be an improvement on the legal system. I believe laws ultimately are subject to Godel's theorem. They can either be complete or consistent, but not both (and likely neither). We should recognize the difference. A complete legal system can render a verdict in every case. A consistent legal system has no contradictions. We prioritize the former. What would it look like for a case to be presented to a judge and for them to respond, "We simply cannot determine if this is legal or not." What would you even do in such a scenario? Rather, we have judges render decisions and deal with the consequences that they are inconsistent and we have further cases to untangle those inconsistencies, in an ever growing patchwork of legal epicycles.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Thank you! I'm not sure I agree with the idea of us prioritizing completeness. I don't think the laws can or need to cover any possible life situation. I mean, there aren't any laws about whenever someone can or cannot wave a toy chainsaw or whenever guests of the Oval Office must wear a costume. We just look at this, make our opinions, but when we need to make a legal one we check out that laws say nothing on the matter, then dismiss it as "nothing against the law" (of course, we can always make or amend the new laws if we think we need some). I'm not a lawyer, but from my crude understanding I believe it's rather the norm for the laws to be incomplete and have intentional ambiguity so the lawmakers aren't spending their time down the rabbit hole of determining the theory of truth (which they cannot do, if Godel's theorem is applicable - I'm not entirely sure because laws are not really self-defining and we don't have or need it to be a closed system with its own set of axioms and stuff - that'd probably mess up the reasons we have laws), but rather write something that works for the majority of their intent, and leave the edge cases to whoever hits them and goes to the court or legislators. I'd say the whole legal system is deliberately designed to "crash" at an undefined behavior at any time and require a human in the loop to look at it. So I suspect that consistency makes more sense for a legal system than completeness. We probably want rule of the law to be universal and fair (and thus, more consistent) than complete, because no one needs a law to describe every single life situation. People don't normally think of such law (save for thought experiments), and it would probably violate Kant's categorical imperative (as we'll all become just the means for such law) to design it so. I could argue that it's because life changes with every passing moment, with someone doing something novel and never done before. I hope I understood you correctly (my apologies if I didn't get something right), and my arguments here make sense.
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    I want to clarify that I'm considering the legal system as a whole. When I say completeness I'm referring to the legal system's ability to render a judgement: is something legal or illegal? That's different than having a law for every case. We can have ambiguous laws and still have a judge say that something is legal or illegal. What we don't have or can't have is a court case where the judge says, "The legality of this is indeterminate." Our ability to always render a judgement is completeness.

pessimizer 2y ago

> There is a sense - engineer's disease - that laws can made better by formal specification, but I've learned that is naive. We can call it Bentham's disease, and it's what gave everybody civil law outside of the systems descended from the Napoleonic Code (another civil law system.) It's naïve to pretend it's something that can be done in an afternoon, but not to think that it's the ideal we should always be aspiring to. Henry M. Robert, the creator of Robert's Rules of order, was an engineer, not a lawyer. He took Thomas Jefferson's summary and reorganization of English Parliamentary tradition and precedent, extracted the implicit premises from it, then reconstructed a system for deliberative societies from first principles. We use his system now. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dudley_Field_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dudley_Field_II also: "Formalizing Robert's Rules of Order: An Experiment in Automating Mediation of Group Decision Making" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/869694 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/869694