Sean Lynch seanl at literati.org
Mon Sep 26 12:38:26 PDT 2016


On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Stephen D. Williams <sdw at lig.net> wrote:

> On 9/26/16 11:35 AM, Sean Lynch wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Xer0Dynamite <dreamingforward at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Like Lessig's "Code is Law".   LAW is also CODE:  it's the Operating
>> System for your Government.  Presently:  bloated and with a few design
>> flaws.   Fortunately, it's Open Source.  Muhahhhwhahaaa
>>
>>
> This is almost worthy of being called THE "Geek Fallacy." It is why people
> who seem otherwise smart are so often statists. They love systems and they
> make the mistake of thinking government is just a machine and that all it
> needs is better code. But that's totally false. Human organizations are NOT
> MACHINES, at least nothing nearly so simple as a computer. They are run not
> by code but by people responding to incentives. If you want to see what
> their programming is, look not at the laws but at the incentives people are
> responding to. "Programming" such a beast looks far more like biological
> evolution than it does like programming a computer.
>
> This, by the way, is why our legislation is so complex. You cannot tell
> the goal of a piece of legislation by reading it. You can watch it in
> operation and see what happens, and you can try to understand the
> incentives of the people who wrote it and voted on it, but that's it. For
> the most part, if a law gets passed and then doesn't get changed, in all
> probability the intent of the law is precisely what its effect is.
>
>
> All of that is still programming.  Parenting is programming.  Culture is
> programming.  A speech is programming.  Up to a certain age / experience /
> introspectiveness it is hard to see various things as programming people,
> but eventually it becomes obvious how much that is true.  Certain people
> are naturally (or through happenstance become advanced) in understanding
> and manipulating others, or at least being able to if and when the need or
> desire to.  Many use this sparingly and for the good of those people;
> others take advantage of others.  The skill and related contexts are real.
> The TV series "The Mentalist" is completely about this.
>
> I generally agree about intent of laws, although some percentage of time
> unintended consequences, good or bad from various points of view, can lock
> in a law that ended up much different than the original intent.  Some very
> good laws were partly passed after key provisions were added that were
> expected to be outlandish enough to kill it, but passed anyway.
>

My problem with viewing any of this as programming is that you can look at
a computer's code and predict what it will do. You cannot do that with any
of the other things you're calling "programming" there. The closest analogy
might be trying to program a broken computer built by an insane genius in a
language you don't actually understand but that looks like English. You
know what the words mean but you have no idea what will happen when they're
actually run. Oh, and by the way, there's a bunch of extra firmware there
you have no access to and that's changing all the time.
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