4 ms·

Interesting but there are many laws worldwide that are ambiguous or subjective, hence the reason why lawyers exist.

gdulli 3mo ago
A big reason that political discussions here get so silly is because so many people here believe that the world can/should work like code, and that the right algorithm/data structures could solve everything. The ambiguity and subjectivity only there because we haven't put programmers in charge of law! The fact that everyone is jumping through so many silly hoops now that they're writing code non-deterministically should serve as a hint, but it doesn't seem to be.
- altairprime 3mo ago
  > should serve as a hint, but it doesn't seem to be Beliefs, unlike theories, are not subject to disproof. There's a well-understood human tendency of people to react to dissonance by denying reality and intensifying their beliefs. This is a large part of why rational science was viewed with such hostility by the church: adopting the scientific method as a belief is a memetic immunization of sorts against belief cults, which depend greatly on self-reinforcing processes triggered by doubt. Teaching people to doubt belief without intensifying it is the ultimate heresy. The U.S. in specific does an atrocious job of teaching critical questioning of beliefs, for various reasons that are subject to their own independent arguments. The U.S. in specific also churns out a great many techies who believe that the law is code, and many of those launch into an Icarus parabola under the unyielding sunlight of judicial discretion. One might evaluate a theory of causation between those two factors by studying whether Stanford explicitly teaches how to apply the Scientific Method to beliefs to Business and Finance graduates, and then contrasting the crash and burn rate of graduates among a representative sample of colleges divided along that line.
codedokode 3mo ago
Very convenient for selective law enforcement.
- alightsoul 3mo ago
  There's also many countries with no clear laws for things as specific as say recording in public or open pit mining so local lawyers have to string together a bunch of tangentially related laws to make a point. And then each of these laws can be seen as subjective.

A big reason that political discussions here get so silly is because so many people here believe that the world can/should work like code, and that the right algorithm/data structures could solve everything. The ambiguity and subjectivity only there because we haven't put programmers in charge of law! The fact that everyone is jumping through so many silly hoops now that they're writing code non-deterministically should serve as a hint, but it doesn't seem to be.

altairprime 3mo ago
> should serve as a hint, but it doesn't seem to be Beliefs, unlike theories, are not subject to disproof. There's a well-understood human tendency of people to react to dissonance by denying reality and intensifying their beliefs. This is a large part of why rational science was viewed with such hostility by the church: adopting the scientific method as a belief is a memetic immunization of sorts against belief cults, which depend greatly on self-reinforcing processes triggered by doubt. Teaching people to doubt belief without intensifying it is the ultimate heresy. The U.S. in specific does an atrocious job of teaching critical questioning of beliefs, for various reasons that are subject to their own independent arguments. The U.S. in specific also churns out a great many techies who believe that the law is code, and many of those launch into an Icarus parabola under the unyielding sunlight of judicial discretion. One might evaluate a theory of causation between those two factors by studying whether Stanford explicitly teaches how to apply the Scientific Method to beliefs to Business and Finance graduates, and then contrasting the crash and burn rate of graduates among a representative sample of colleges divided along that line.

codedokode 3mo ago

Very convenient for selective law enforcement.

alightsoul 3mo ago
There's also many countries with no clear laws for things as specific as say recording in public or open pit mining so local lawyers have to string together a bunch of tangentially related laws to make a point. And then each of these laws can be seen as subjective.