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Comment by Xcelerate

8 years ago

> The reasoning was that he impacted markets by not having to buy wheat and therefore he should be fined for violating farming restrictions

I see the government is familiar with interaction-free measurements of quantum systems.

But seriously, it sounds like people will "interpret" anything in any way that is most convenient to them. I almost wish we had a formal system of language so these sorts of things would not occur. Of course, then we would have bugs in that system that would miss important edge cases...

6 comments

Xcelerate

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evv  8 years ago

> I almost wish we had a formal system of language

You mean "legalese"? The language used in law is very specific and nuanced. I enjoy how similar it is to programming, where a bug in the source language can be exploited, much how imperfections in legal documents can be used as a loophole.

I'd love to see a software system that is able to reliably output high-quality legal documents. If developed in the open, any lawyer could theoretically contribute and help avoid loopholes for everyone. In theory we could build a framework that makes it easy to write loophole-free contracts that are easy for all parties to understand.

  • acobster  8 years ago

    > In theory we could build a framework that makes it easy to write loophole-free contracts

    You mean similar to how, in theory, we could build a framework that makes it easy for us all to write readable, bug-free code?

    Edit: I was mostly being tongue in cheek, but I also recognize that this is about provably correct code à la Coq, etc. That'd be cool for sure. :)

    • epicureanideal  8 years ago

      Maybe more similar to strongly typed languages vs weakly typed languages rather than frameworks. Static types, linters, virus scanners, etc.

  • denkmoon  8 years ago

    Fortunately in software we can patch in a matter of moments.

    Unfortunately bugs written in legalese tend to take years or decades to patch.