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wedrifid comments on (Virtual) Employment Open Thread - Less Wrong
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I think it is more likely that you lack knowledge of the domain Will mentions. People with guns really don't care much about Piracetam. It would be outright foolish not to 'check laws'... the laws regarding which category a given nootropic fits in in any given jurisdiction vary arbitrarily.
Nothing in what Will said remotely suggests wildly false belief about people with guns. It's the whole different kind of crazy thinking done by people with desks that is relevant.
It was not helpful for me to mention guns. My point was to mention people. What is important is what people care about and what they will do. It is very difficult to predict this based on reading laws. In particular, the recent change of the FDA's interest in piracetam has nothing to do with laws.
Except in as much as laws are in place to allow the enforcement of various levels of restriction of pharmacologically active substances. Laws which allow the drug authorities of various jurisdictions to choose which bucket to put things like piracetam in (depending, largely, on where the money is). Even when importing substances for personal use it is rather helpful to do your research and work out just what you are permitted to do (as well as typical enforcement procedures and relevant penalties as appropriate.)
If you have a good model of what law is and does, then it is useful to look at it. I think most people here have terrible models of what law is. The phrase "technically legal" suggest that the speaker thinks law is precise and the choice of bucket is a technical one. As I said in my immediate followup, I don't think Will makes the these mistakes, but I think most people here would be better off assessing what they are permitted by custom than by what (they think) they are permitted by law. In theory, more information is useful, particularly for extrapolating to new areas, but I think a lot of people, particularly of the type common here, have their models of the world damaged by reading laws.