Comment by unethical_ban
3 years ago
Agreed. Although I don't think this is a bad idea, I think of the idea of perfectly defined laws and perfectly enforceable laws are terrifying. If every law on the books today were able to be perfectly enforced and perfectly monitored, our lives would be utterly miserable.
I'm not going to argue that's a problem with laws vs. enforcement, but either way, our society is built around ambiguity and unequal enforcement of law.
I'm not speaking about perfect enforcement.
But about that law, in difference to what movies love to pretend, is not about clever word tricks and nit-picking formulations.
(In court it still can be about clever arguing, including nit picking arguments if necessary.)
But code _is_ about nit picking formulations at least if we ignore documentation, naming conventions etc. but lock solely at what the code does.
Code is meant to be precise.
Law is meant to be only as precise as necessary but no more then that. Or you could say it's meant to be as imprecise as viable.
Code is about the specific case (in general).
Law is about the generic case (in general), avoiding specific cases where possible.
Code is made for machines to consume.
Law is meant to be consumed with ambiguous defined context of the situations in (human) .
This is so deeply rooted in law that I would argue it's (in general, with exceptions) not possible to translate any current laws to code without accidentally changing their meaning in a lot of subtle but meaningful cases.
Enforcement and clarity are different concepts. We don't have a big problem with courts or police declining to enforce laws because they aren't precise enough.
Do you have any examples where ambiguity is truly beneficial?
For all the examples I can think of, the most beneficial outcome is removing the law altogether.
Two easy examples:
- Fair use law (there are thinks which clearly are and are not fair use but in between there is huge gray area where you can not really formulate generic precise rules which work reliable).
- Parent law (which has a lot of issues especially given how it's applied, but design wise you fundamentally have ambiguity about questions like when something is "enough added innovation" to be patentable as fundamentaly "the degree of inovativeness" is purely subjective.)
- Insult, is also very subjective. Define it as "only when insult was intented" would be bad, but similar would be "always when the person felt insulted" and even "if intended and felt insulted" has issues.
- Self defense it's in many jurisdiction based on the person feeling threatened, but in jurisdictions with sane law it also involves stuff like "a generic person would also have felt threatened", but then you still have to consider person specific circumstances.
- or lot of stuff around what counts as insider information, e.g. for insider trading
Speed limits is one example.
in many countries speed limits are quite clear cut
through "clear cut" here sometimes still involve an assessment of danger which fundamentally isn't 100% objective
and e.g. in germany you are only allowed to "drive as fast as it's save" even if the speed limit is higher (and that is a common occurrence, e.g. resident areas tend to be 30km/h zones but you have to slow down at nearly every crossing because anything else wouldn't be save and if you do an accident at a crossing driving 30km/h in such a zone you are very likely very much screwed (depending on damage done).
So I guess, yes speed limits in a certain way, too.
1 reply →
How so?
I would have thought that is a good example of a law placing an upper limit on risk in a very black and white way.
Maybe exemptions for passing on single lane roads might be a net reduction of risk but I can’t think of any other grey areas.