[grarpamp]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 3:38 PM, Sean Lynch <seanl at literati.org> wrote:
>
> 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.

Programming 2.0... Load Firmware:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRKH_BSsk0