glen wrote:
IDK. The implication that we already have laws that cover (80%?) of
the use cases for new tech we, as a society, want to discourage, is a
good default. It resists the "there ought to be a law" sensibility
held by old people and curmudgeons everywhere. And it keeps our legal
system a little more adaptive than it would be were we to burden it
with even more persnickety case-by-case rulings.
sas> I try to hear "there oughtta be a law" as pining for a new and
relevant heuristic where the old one(s) don't work (well)?
<episode 1>
In my early coding years I remember coming to the simultaneous
understanding that the bulk of most systems/code is "exception
handling" and that most inexperienced coders tend to ignore the
edge/corner cases until forced (by iterated releases with real users
as their test-load) and spaghetti up their solutions one exception
at a time, and sometimes if they don't abstract their exceptions
well enough the exception handling expands geometrically (with
exceptions to the exceptions, recursively).
<episode 2>
In my Private Investigator years I spent my share of time in /law
offices/ and /courthouses/ and rubbing shoulders with /law
enforcement/... I came to understand that these too were episystems
on top of episystems with a scissors/paper/stone circularity built
into the system to attenuate runaway behaviour by each "branch" of
government (and/or it's agents).
The law libraries were dominated in volume and complexity by
case-law which felt to me to be nothing other than edge-corner
case/exception-handling... Most of my clients represented
plaintiffs in civil cases, a few defendants. Only those with big
bucks pursued legal-action, lawyers (and court fees and PIs) being
expensive and only those in desperate circumstance could muster the
resources to fight back (see DJT's strategy as taught to him by Roy
Cohn).
The lawyers (and the rest of us by extension) thrived on this
"tangled web of mal-complexity" and I had the (mis)fortune of
listening in to lawyers and paralegals discuss how they would
exploit these tangles for their clients... even to the point of
trying to enlist me in throwing some extra tanglage into the
equation myself.
<episode 2.2>
I stayed above that where I recognized it, trying to refactor my
client intake process, leading me to my own exception handling: e.g.
1. Divorces with children
2. Divorces with pets
3. Divorces
1. Insurance claim denial
2. Insurance claims
3. Insurance companies as claimant or defendant
1. Distressed Real Estate Foreclosures
2. Real Estate Foreclosures
3. Real Estate Transactions
1. /ad//
/
2. /nauseum/
3. /infinitum/
<episode 2.99>
by the time I graduated college I was well over-done with this work
which lead me almost exclusively to seeing (feeling, smelling,
tasting) the seamy underbelly of my community (and the world by
extension). I began with: "I will only take righteous cases" and
ended with "there are no righteous cases".
<episode 3>So I doubled down and went to Los Alamos to help make
weapons of mass destruction under the premise of MAD! I considered
investigative journalism for a few minutes instead... but for /seamy
underbelly/ problem and the allure of /Nuclear
Weapons-as-fundamental-physics-and-reality-insight/ I might have
gone there.
<episode N>
Thankfully I have aged out on a lot of that and am happy to defer
most of the "hard questions" to Sabine Hossenfelder and Randall
Munroe who are much smarter and more clever at expressing it than I
ever will be or have been!
I just watched her very convincing episode on why free will is an
illusion. I found her very convincing, but realize that she and I
had absolutely no choice in the matter of being compelling or
compelled... I have the illusion that I'm one step closer to
Satori now... until Glen hits me with a stick again!
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