If law was code, there would be no need for judges to make decisions. Instead, a "judge" would be someone making a mechanical derivation of the judgement given the situation and the law.
The law is rather a complex set of guidelines which need to leave some space for interpretation, so that additional relevant information for the situation at hand can affect the decision.
Only the legislated part of law is codified. In our American common law system, case law is, by definition, uncodified. So what judges are doing, is taking the codified legislation, and applying case law decisions in layers on top, to reach a final decision.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...
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> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”
When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).
How do you know that it's the words driving the thinking, rather than the stream of words just being an observable trace tacked onto the actual thinking?
> But all inconsistent understanding is incorrect.
Why do you believe that?
Even if we assume that reality itself is self-consistent (what does that even mean?), why would that imply that we humans are able to find a self-consistent representation of it? Maybe reality is self-consistent in some sense but cannot even be represented by the tools we use for theory building.
My point being, the ultimate target of our understanding may be self-consistent, but the way we _necessarily_ have to reduce it to lossy theories means that we can only ever approach it with a non-zero error. And a theory focusing on one aspect, minimizing representational error from one direction of approaching it, necessarily has to make assumptions that will contradict those made by another theory trying to minimize representational error coming from another direction / domain.
> but the way we _necessarily_ have to reduce it to lossy theories means that we can only ever approach it with a non-zero error.
Yes. Fortunately, we also usually don't need the error to be zero. In practice, we usually have narrow scope at any given time, and can get away with a lot of error.
E.g. people in the past found alternatives to modern germ theory, involving evil spirits and other such shenanigans, but to the extend they covered the high-level mechanisms (curse transfers through contact, hygiene and boiling water removes the harmful effects, etc.), it doesn't really matter the theories were wrong. The beliefs were consistent with each other and empirical evidence to some degree, and to that degree were useful.
> And a theory focusing on one aspect, minimizing representational error from one direction of approaching it, necessarily has to make assumptions that will contradict those made by another theory trying to minimize representational error coming from another direction / domain.
That's fair. Our brains and attentions are finite, you always have to limit the scope. If you imagine you'd have practically forever, you could sort it out and make it all consistent to arbitrary degree (subject to fundamental computational limits, which are physical limits). In practice, the heuristic of consistency works like this:
- For things within your domain of interest, inconsistent information flags an error.
- For things at the interface between your domain of interest and another domain(s), inconsistent information flags an abstraction boundary. It's where you can observe simplifications both domains make because they don't add up (and if you adjust them to make them mutually consistent, you just allowed two domains to work together).
> I've observed many (most?) people seemingly being completely oblivious to self-consistency issues of their beliefs and mental models, or even texts they're reading or instructions they're following, and yet... somehow they're generally more successful at life because of it
What do you mean by "successful at life" here? Genuine happiness, fulfillment in life? Or in the sense of doing well by what society holds as it's current interpretion of what one should strive for, and otherwise just kinda drifting through life?
Because if it's the latter, I'd say that is to be expected. It's much simpler to put your energy into fulfilling the expectations of whoever is your superior in your current group, mostly get the expected reward, and then just coast. Reflection and experimentation, which is required to get to self-consistent views, takes effort and and the willingness to question existing beliefs, which will also be uncomfortable times.
In your experience, would you say that your communication has become more precise?
Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.
I don't think my communication became more precise. Language is imprecise and in these cases (ESL), you are also limiting your vocabulary. (Especially when I moved outside the US - while I was around very educated people who studied for the GRE, learning a word is not the same as digesting all connotations.
So in social communication, you aren't getting more precise -- in many cases, you're getting less precise and taking more words to handle that. Consider the idiom "shit or get off the pot." You can say that "Make a decision" is less precise. "Do it or don't" is also an idiom but doesn't express the frustration that the vulgarity does. "I am frustrated and need you to either take action or shut up" is more direct and possibly more offensive because it takes formality.
And then there's the prefix of "Sometimes you need to" that turns it from a command to advice. "Sometimes you need to either take action or stop complaining" sounds like the emphasis is on "you" instead of the predicate as if it's a critique of the person, whereas the idiom gives more of a proverb connotation.
The problem is that language carries many layers and "more precise" is a goal in technical communication but neglects the other layers.
That's a very good question that I also don't have an answer to (yet). But I believe part of the reason for that is that were currently still in the middle of this shift, so there's issues of both knowledge about AI and how people relate to it. And of course there's so many different situations here.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
I am a software engineer. Most of the times, the people asking are from product management or devops. Devops contractors are the most difficult ones. They have access to the code, they have access to Claude. But they don't use it.
The law is rather a complex set of guidelines which need to leave some space for interpretation, so that additional relevant information for the situation at hand can affect the decision.
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