True, but the main difference is one of choice: You get to choose what contracts you sign, but not what laws you follow. If you get screwed by a misinterpreted contract, well that's sad, but you are partially responsible for it, as you can view what happened as a slip in your foresight, you made a mistake, didn't plan for this eventuality, and you paid the price for that slip-up.
On the other hand, if it's a law, some dolt in wherever the capital of your country is made the mistake, but you have to suffer the consequences. You see the difference? If someone makes a bad choice and hurts themselves, it is sad, and they learn for next time, but it is an accepted basic moral fact that ultimately people should be able to make their own choices, for good or ill.
Maybe it's just me being too free market/libertarian, but it feels a lot sadder when someone screws something up for others then if that person makes a mistake that only hurts themselves.
I'm not trying to criticize your libertarian argument - I'm actually fairly sympathetic to those types of policy arguments. It's just that interpretive difficulty isn't a difference between statute and contract.
Writing text with a clear and unambiguous meaning is hard, even if one desires to write clearly. And the causes of interpretive difficulties are strongly parallel:
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
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