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TimS comments on Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees - Less Wrong
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Comments (57)
Well, yes. The precise definition of line-item is an essential issue for implementing a "line-item" veto. It's different in different jurisdictions, and I don't know what the federal definition was.
In Wisconsin, the veto was apparently letter by letter - so a patient governor (or staffer) could totally change a provision by hunting for the appropriate letters. Funding the arts via a bill intended to provide farm aid and suchlike. (How that complies with the concept of separation of powers boggles my mind, but that's policy, not letter of the law).
It gets worse (better?): in a computerized world, patience is irrelevant. Suppose we have a letter-item veto on Title I of the U. S. Code, and we think it would be better if, instead of all those boring "general provisions" and "rules of construction", this document codified into law P. C. Hodgell's maxim that "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be." Then, casting a spell like this---
---we learn that all we have to do is veto all characters except the fourth, 408th, 409th, 502nd, 510th, 705th, 894th, 895th, 936th, (more numbers redacted ...), and 8786th.
And here's the generalized lesson =)
I...
But that --
You mean....
* whimpers and hides *
Example
Law, as an area of practice, is made of Hidden Complexity of Wishes issues.
"I try to be cynical, but it's hard to keep up."
I read the example and my first instinct was to check whether it was actually an article on The Onion. But apparently it is not. (Cries.)
Holy crap... This must be the most shocking thing I've seen in a while.
How poetic. Well said.
I was wondering how someone managed to end up as God-Emperor of Wisconsin.
Letter by... BWA?!?!
How, how did a line item veto law that allows letter by letter editing get passed?
That couldn't possibly be "oh, we didn't imagine that'd be exploitable." If they knew they were passing the power to actually slice a passed bill letter by letter, then they had to know they were essentially giving the governor arbitrary power.
I wish I shared your confidence in the coherence of legislators. My guess is that someone wanted to turn a plural into a singular or something relatively innocuous like that, and genuinely didn't think of the "ransom note" use case.
But... even given them not being that clever, you'd think they'd know that the ability to arbitrarily slice and dice a bill would be too much. (I know I may be displaying hindsight bias, but... they're politicians! They have to have had experience with, say, people taking their (or colleagues') words out of context and making it sound like something else, or they themselves doing it to an opponent, right?
ie, the ability to slice and dice some communication into something entirely different would be something you'd think they'd already have personal experience with. At least, that's what I'd imagine. Though, still, Hanlon's Razor and all that.
Many many years ago, I was contacted by a coworker for an estimate of what it would take to modify our tax-calculation code to support a new law recently passed by the Texas legislature, which specified that the first $25 of Internet charges for Texas-residential subscribers was free of state taxes.
I asked "Well, that depends. What does 'first' mean? If they mean that on every bill we should reduce the taxable basis by $25, we can do that easily. If they mean that on every bill we should chronologically sort all the charges and then exclude those charges from taxation, that's far more complicated, and if tax rates vary depending on the charge the result will be different. If they actually mean the first $25 for each subscriber rather than on each bill, that's easier (but different from the first two options)."
The coworker said "Excellent question. I'll ask the client."
A week later, she forwarded me email from the client rep, saying "Excellent question. I've asked our lawyers."
A month later she forwarded me email from the client rep forwarded from the lawyers saying "Excellent question. We've asked the State Legislature."
Several months later, the consensus seemed to be that the State Legislature had never given any thought to what they meant by "first".
My confidence in politicians' taking care about what they mean is very low.
Ouch.
That depends. They could make the bills really, really short.
"I can make this code compile really fast!"
"Oh? How?"
"Well, all I have to do is just mark every line as being a comment...."
:)
FYI, according to wikipedia this was changed in 1990
But the governor could still veto individual words in order to create unrelated sentences?
Walker has the broadest veto powers of any governor nationwide, allowing him to strike out entire provisions of the budget or rewrite sections by selectively crossing out words.
You know, I'm not actually sure...
While I was looking for a specific example, I found references to its recent repeal. But my example is from ~2005, so there's some inconsistency somewhere.
I couldn't find the wikipedia article you are citing - are you sure it was about Wisconsin?
What was repealed seems to have been the ability to veto individual letters (creating new words). This was a laughably incomplete solution, as instead of vetoing individual letters to create whatever wording the governor liked (as it was before), he's now limited to vetoing lots and lots of words until he finds the exact wording he wanted. Hence why the example looks like lots and lots of words crossed out, instead of specific letters crossed out. The power involved is quite similar, but it's somewhat more tricky to use if you're restricted to whole words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_of_Wisconsin