Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
From: kwee@oracle.uucp (Karl Wee)
Subject: Re: The Problem is the Law (Was Re: "Full Employment Act"....)
Reply-To: kwee@oracle.uucp (Karl Wee)
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Belmont, CA
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 17:36:25 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by an unauthenticated user
              at Oracle Corporation.  The opinions expressed are those
              of the user and not necessarily those of Oracle.

nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes:
>
>      ....One of the things you notice about many
>      tribal and traditional societies, and even many preindustrial 
>      western societies, is the very complex set of obligation inter-
>      relationships which exist in such communities.  Just trying to
>      follow such things, especially in some tribal contexts, can
>      really make your head spin.   Human beings are surprisingly
>      adept at internalizing these rules, especially if they are part
>      of an internalized cultural framework.    So it may be that the
>      problem with law is not its complexity per se, but rather that
>      it is arbitrary, relative to what (very) few cultural rules
>      westerners manage to internalize.
>
>      Also, legal complexity to a very real extent reflects the actual
>      complexity of the real world.  Even as it is, judges and juries
>      constatnty faced with having to decide how a particular laws maps
>      to some real world problem, a situation which would suggest the
>      need for more and more detailed laws, not fewer.   But we are modern,
>      or post-modern, people.  Rather that trying to simplify, (no doubt
>      "oversimplify") these things, we should embrace the very complexity
>      and uncertainty of all this, and find ways to deal with it.  The way
>      the technology is going I don't imagine it will be too long, a few
>      decades or so, before we can have our own personal electronic
>      legal advisors which we can carry around in our shirt-pockets.

It is true that the real world is complex and the rules have to reflect that.
However it is UNNECESSARY complexity (arbitrariness) in the rules
that we have to get rid of.  Human beings have a finite capacity to process
and store information, and one set of rules is objectively better than
another (that causes the same behavior) if it requires less effort to
manage and to follow.

The very reason for the existence of rules is to SIMPLIFY the management of
society.  This is why people are punished for breaking laws, whether or not
their actions have been beneficial to society.  We have rules for individual
behavior precisely because we simply cannot, as judges and as individuals,
deal with the complexity of judging all actions and combinations of
actions by their ultimate effects on whatever goals we set for society.

Given a set of goals for society and the capability of people (plus their
computers) to process information, the simpler the rules, the better.  However,
you're right that given a set of goals and rules, the more capable the
players are, the better.

It would generally be OK to do the obvious thing of adding or refining rules
whenever we see a new situation.  However we've been doing this for too long
and the system of information has gotten out of hand to a point where the
nation is controlled, exploited and kept backward by special interest groups
and people with specialized knowledge not in how to build better products but
about arbitrary rules.  Now is the time to think "architecturally" about our
system of information.

We may have to completely overhaul our rules and redefine the responsibilities
of individuals.  I wouldn't be surprised at all if our responsibilities
increase as a result, effectively lowering our standard of living, everything
else being constant.  However we will come to a point where we'll have no
choice but to do this SIMPLY TO KEEP OUR RULES MANAGEABLE.  We'll realize
sooner or later that having this mess is simply not acceptible.  The earlier
we start doing it, the less destructive this process will be and the more
opportunity people have to understand it.  (In practical terms,
remember when things got so bad that dictators rose in a wave of public
sentiment for order and end to chaos, in spite of intellectual-liberal types
who didn't like dictatorships?  This is not as far-fetched as it sounds,
given the huge financial mess the government is in and the gradual erosion
of public respect in any law.)

Computerizing laws is essentially equivalent to simplifying them anyway since
people would be able to get information simply by using keystrokes that they
know.  This, however, requires that people at least know the overall structure
of the law and how it is computerized, and brings up a host of implementation
problems.  Not the least of which is whether the structure of law at present
allows it to be computerized as you describe at all.

It doesn't matter how much we internalize and computerize our information.  It
is a most fundamental fact that the complexity cannot exceed our capacity to
handle it AT ANY TIME.  (At present it is crossing that threshold.  Remember
the story of the smart and sociopathic inmate who gets all kinds of special
privileges in prison and bullies prison authorities just by knowing the details
of prison laws?) If it does, we're defeating the whole purpose of
having rules by going back to the laws of the jungle where specialized
knowledge of arbitrary rules takes the place of the muscle as the tool of
gaining advantage and causing unproductive competition.
Xref: sparky talk.politics.theory:3846 misc.legal:16391