= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Costanza comments on Rational Repentance - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (150)
I think this must apply to every legal system which has governed humans so far. If laws are to be made known to everyone, and generally comprehensible, then they can't be too complicated. As it is, they tend to be plenty complicated. Even so, great numbers of people in aggregate are still far, far more complicated than any human system of laws. They will do things unanticipated by the lawmakers, and not exactly covered by the words of the lawmakers. Then, a court of law may be required to decide whether or how an inherently ambiguous law applies to an unanticipated fact pattern.
I agree, and it's factually true; my concern was that if training on Halachic law was good practice for common law, then our legal systems suffer too much from complications. I think the Halachic system is bad, and to the extent that our legal system resembles it enough to measurably advantage Halachic scholars, our legal system is bad too.
There was a move at one point to write laws in Python or some other programming code; I would then argue that if thinking like a programmer made you a better jurist or legal scholar, it says good things about both systems.
I am seriously interested in more information about this approach. I think that right now, there are two modern systems of law: Roman-derived law and English-derived, or "common" law. Sharia law might count as a close runner-up. I think Halacha is well-developed, but not widely-enforced, so I would not count it as a major modern legal system. With that said, and admitting I don't know much about civil law or the religious laws, my impression is that all the above are similarly complicated, and have been for centuries. I am in doubt that human behavior and its ambiguities could be simplified by being encoded in Python. I think it's a really, really hard problem, at least as long as humans remain as unpredictable as they do.
Off-topic: Why does everyone on lesswrong say Python when they need to mention a programming language?
Rule 46b:: I will not turn my programming language into a snake. It never helps.
It has a very high ease of learning to usefulness ratio?
edit: It seems to come highly recommended as a first programming language (certainly it was such to me).
Do you mean a high usefulness to difficulty of learning ratio?
Atari BASIC had a nearly infinite ease of learning to usefulness ratio. :)
Right.
Python is my first (and currently only) programming language. It's easy to read, easy to learn, and useful.
Python code is also reasonably easy to read. It's sometimes called executable pseudocode.
I did a Google duel - and it appears that "Java" beats "Python" for mentions around here.
I don't get it either I'm more of a C guy.
David Friedman has taught a course in "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" in both 2008 and 2010. See these course pages: [1] [2]
I think the Python thing was just for the payoff functions of securities, not for laws as such.
That is disappointing. Lawmakers who think like programmers seems like it would be a huge improvement on the current system.
Lawmakers who think like programmers might be an improvement. But I'm not sure.
On Less Wrong, this almost reads as "if only lawmakers were more like me, things would be okay." I'm skeptical.
It would probably have to be coupled, though, with a state where laws are actually enforced consistently, and can be changed quickly if they end up screwing things up massively.