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>> So, of course, we will occasionally notice aspects of our world that are not modeled and deserve to be, and there should be a procedure for doing as much. >
by shasta 14y ago
>> So, of course, we will occasionally notice aspects of our world that are not modeled and deserve to be, and there should be a procedure for doing as much.
> That is exactly what the courts do.
Agreed, common law has this capability. I was challenging what seemed to be your assumption that a principled system wouldn't.
>> First, there aren't clean principles to begin with.
> Yes, there are.
You think the US Code of Laws is clean? The one that, according to Wikipedia, is around 200,000 pages long?
> I'm struggling to convey this point. The law is not complex because of the way the law works.
You've conveyed that opinion quite plainly.
> [Rational rules developed from first principles] has been tried. Many times. By many of the greatest minds that have ever lived.
What super rational system developed from first principles by the greatest minds of all time did you have in mind here? I'm well aware that there are legal systems that aren't based on common law.
Let me ask you this: do you think the staggering complexity of a modern OS is essential complexity? Because I don't. And yet there have been many attempts to reinvent from first principles that have failed to gain traction. Many of them, in a quest for simplicity, were overly simplistic in some regard. This isn't myth busters, though. A couple of examples don't translate to a proof.
Your position seems to be that we've stumbled upon a system of law here that introduces very little accidental complexity and that handles well the essential complexity of the real world. I don't really know how you can have that position if you've had exposure to legal reasoning. Have you studied constitutional law?
- jacques_chester 14y ago> What super rational system developed from first principles by the greatest minds of all time did you have in mind here? I was referring more to the presumption that all complex systems, everywhere, can be replaced with a positively designed rational system. This is pretty hard to refute amongst the HN crowd because our entire bread and butter is creating positively designed rational systems. It's what we do. As I said further down, in the limited case of laws, the civil laws have tried to replace a historical patchwork of custom, local rules and decrees by a single, positively designed, single rational system of law. But this still frequently turns out to be inadequate. Injustices and oddities pile up around a glitch, which is modified in isolation; then more small changes occur, until a new pattern is recognised by the legislature and the code is rewritten. Sound familiar? It should: in practice the civil law winds up being adaptive, just like the common law. At least the common law doesn't delude itself into thinking the whole thing could be nutted out from the very beginning. Software engineers should know better. Just look at the archives of the IETF sometime. Here intelligent individuals discuss, design and promulgate the protocols that make the modern world pulse with activity -- the technology that makes it possible for us to retread an argument that is at least several hundred years old. Yet RFCs are periodically deprecated and replaced with updates. Why? Because of unforeseen circumstances, errors, abuses and so forth. No matter how intelligent the designers, they were simply unable to foresee all the possible cases in advance. And the IETF, like the Common law, places intelligent, localised-to-problem adaptation of existing principles at the centre of its mechanism. > Your position seems to be that we've stumbled upon a system of law here that introduces very little accidental complexity and that handles well the essential complexity of the real world. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. The legal system can and does sometimes impose enormous drag. The the extent that laws become onerous and the legal system highly unpredictable, it's necessary to petition to legislature to reform them. Patent law is certainly one such topic. But the complexity of legal reasoning is not accidental complexity, in the sense Brooks was talking about. It is essential complexity. It exists in the problem domain, which is all relations between human beings.
- shasta 14y agoI agree that any good legal system should have the adaptive quality of common law. I'd agree that the major source of accidental complexity in the law is poorly written laws, but I also think that there is significant room for improving the framework in which laws are written, such that many rules (e.g. the rule against Hearsay) that have lots of explicit exceptions would be better served a simpler framework with a few principles from which the exceptions emerge.