Comment by nitrogen
13 years ago
The Law is full of legacy cruft, and is based on philosophies that largely predate empiricism. Has there ever been an attempt to design a legal system based on modern engineering principles? Laws are as much about systems as about people. When you want to understand people you might rely on a politician, but to understand systems you should rely on engineers.
The engineers that designed the RBMK reactor used for Chernobyl, the ones that designed the USS Thresher which was crushed with all hands after a combined failure of its emergency ballast tank blow and steam propulsion system, or the ones who designed the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia?
This is not to say that we can't improve the legal system. But if engineering has taught me anything, it's that it will always be prudent to design a relief/safety valve into the system.
Chernobyl, Challenger, and Columbia are examples of systems where engineers were constrained by politicians.
I hadn't heard of the USS Thresher before today, but I did just read a bit of the Wikipedia article.
When a disaster occurs in engineering, the lessons learned are applied to the next design. When a disaster occurs in politics, the other party gets its turn to cause the next disaster.
Engineering isn't engineering without constraints... it's just spending an unbounded amount of time and money on a thing ( or science, in some terms). Engineers are obligated to not work on a project which cannot be safely completed within guidelines. You can't push off that obligation elsewhere: if you design a building, and that building falls over, you need to justify why. You can't say they asked you to make it cheaper; you either find a way to make it safe and cheaper, or you don't do it.
This isn't to say that nobody makes mistakes, but it's worth remembering that engineering is applied science. It's not practiced in a vacuum, it takes into account economic and political influences and balances them against public well being. The buck stops with engineers.
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>When a disaster occurs in engineering, the lessons learned are applied to the next design.
And how does that work for software engineering thus far?
What we know of it, is that errors tend to repeat themselves, and little is learned from design to design, especially across projects and teams.
Software engineering is much more like law than civic engineering.
So, it's quite invalid to compare law (which deals with people, perceptions, norms, ever shifting societies and situations, intentions and other delicate situations) with some well known ways to build things with very tangible, hard physical constrains and behavior.
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This. I've been thinking a lot about this (not particularly hard, admittedly) lately. I suppose the main problem would be that those in power, i.e. politicians, will mostly be out of a job once such a task were to be undertaken.