Comment by rossdavidh
3 years ago
Well, every rule and law in existence, that I can think of, has an assumed intent. That's probably a necessary condition for rules, whether it's a sign in the park or a government regulation or anything else.
If people do not have, to some degree at least, a shared intent (e.g. let's have a conversation here about topic X, let's have a park to have fun or relax in, etc.) there is probably no set of rules that can specify sufficiently what can and must not be done. If you did manage to craft such a sufficiently detailed set of rules, it would be too large for people to read and understand.
You should really look into how judges interpret laws (rules, basically). There are two schools I know of: purposivism and textualism (I agree with the latter and it doesn't take into account intentions. That's the basis of how the recent case Van Buren v US was decided, I would recommend reading it: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf). But in both, you have things like canons of interpretation and background principles and so on. It's always awesome to see how people who have to deal with the problem have thought about it, because they have usually invested a lot of time into it and come up with insights. See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation
The justification for textualism is that it's better to be wrong in a precise way, than to try to be right in a fuzzy way. But both models are wrong. Bit rot is real and applies to laws. It's not possible to keep laws up to date with what they would be if lawmakers had infinite resources to dedicate to lawmaking and maintenance, even ignoring the huge issue of democratic consensus and parliamentary procedure issues.
(All models are wrong! Some useful!)
The law is a tool which imperfectly models the goals of the lawmakers.
For lawyers judges, the beauty of law is that the law has plenty of room to support contradictory interpretations.
That's not the argument for textualism. You can read law review articles and papers on SSRI to find more.
1 reply →
And now I’d say you’ve rediscovered part of the authors intent.
Shared intent, across cross border platforms, is awfully hard if not impossible to achieve with anything approaching consistency.