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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - LessWrong
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Interesting. There are famous cases of self-taught lawyers from previous centuries.
I wonder if this says something bad about the modern legal system. Maybe the modern legal system is less about making arguments based on how the law works (or should work) than about the lawyer signaling high status to the judge so that he rules in your favor.
I don't think I have good reason to think this is the case. At any rate, it's clear enough that the prestige bit seems to come in heavily in hiring decisions, so let's just talk about that. How, in the ideal case, do you think lawyers would be evaluated for jobs? Off hand, I can't think of anything a lawyer could produce to show that she's a good hire.
I'm not a lawyer, and English law is different from American, but I reckon that I can tell the difference between good and bad lawyers by talking to them for a while about various cases in their speciality and listening to them explain the various arguments and counter-arguments.
I've heard people who make a good living from the law make incoherent wishful-thinking type arguments about which way a case should have gone, when I can see perfectly well how the judge was compelled to the conclusion that he came to. I wouldn't want such a person defending me.
Presumably if you are yourself a good lawyer, it shouldn't be too difficult to do this. The law is fairly logical and rigorous.
Well, if his "reality distortion field" was powerful enough to also affect judges.
There are famous cases of self-taught specialists in scientific fields, too. There aren't so many of them nowadays. That's because both the law and science are in a state where a practitioner must know a lot of details that didn't exist as part of the field in earlier days.