Given the track record which is more likely to be effective? Continuing to wish for common sense and latitude in our public officials or protecting yourself from their normal behavior?
I know its fun to rag on public officials on Internet forums. But most of the ones I know have been fairly decent people who are just doing their jobs. There're a few bad apples, but there're a few bad apples in any population. Even the TSA officials (which gets my vote for "worst government bureaucracy") were very apologetic when they confiscated my toothpaste.
I think that you're more likely to get absurd institutional behavior - like confiscating toothpaste - when you deny latitude in employee judgment. The TSA screeners have this massive rulebook that they have to follow, and they risk losing their job when they deviate from it, even if they personally believe the rules are stupid.
Same with the private sector. Companies that have the best reputations tend to be those that empower their employees to solve the customer's problem, like Virgin or Nordstroms. Companies with the worst reputations tend to be those where the employees can't do anything but follow the playbook, like most telecoms.
So I am claiming that loss of privacy that I perceive inevitable in face of modern and upcoming technology is not necessary bad thing because it may create the demand for fixing some stupid rules that may cause some of us harm.
Problem is that it's much easier to ignore bad rules than it is to fix them. You're assuming that if everyone had to abide by the bad rules, they'd get fixed. I'm not sure that's the case - the examples I gave indicate that when you force employees to abide by bad rules, they just start acting badly.
When I was younger, I used to find it very frustrating that the rules said one thing but the way everyone acted was something else. We even have a word for that: "hypocrisy". But as I've gotten older and occasionally even been responsible for creating some of those rules, I've started realizing that the rules are an abstraction. They're there to set expectations. They aren't followed exactly because they can't be followed exactly, and if you try you end up with absurdities like confiscated toothpaste. I'm not so certain that fixing the laws will work, both because it's difficult and because it's quite possible that the reason the laws are broken is because they can't take every situation into account, not because their authors were stupid.
If there is a strong asymmetry between law makers and people who must respect the law (such as in case of employers and employees) people will obey because they have no choice. But even then they will vote with their legs leaving environment that is governed by stupid laws. In case of state and citizens in democracy there is no such strong asymmetry because government must maintain appearance that it works for the people.
> it's quite possible that the reason the laws are broken is because they can't take every situation into account, not because their authors were stupid.
Same thing with computer programs or any complex system but it should not stop us from striving for improvement and inventing tools that may make such improvement possible.
I think that surveillance is one such tool that allows to monitor how much harm enforcing given law can cause and may lead to fixing the law.
I would, for example, never consider moving to the UK with their surveillance, etc., but they obviously have a large populace that disagrees.
Trying to force people into doing something they just don't want to do never works.
Privacy is nice because it doesn't require large numbers of people to act sanely.
This could be said about a lot of people who did incredibly horrific things. Virtually no one, no matter how evil they appear to everyone else, really thinks of themselves that way. They always justify their actions in some way (e.g. "The world will be better off without this race", "no one else is smart enough to see what I see, so fudging a little bit is completely justified. They are too simple minded to understand anything else", etc.).
In regards to rule following, people fall into one of two categories: "Rule followers", people who follow what the rule says, and people like myself who follow the sense behind the rule, not the words specifically and even then only if it makes sense [1].
People from e.g. your TSA example are clearly "rule followers". Here is an article that outlines some of the issues with following rules to this degree: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6433397/The-Authoritarians
Basically, if you can get people who will blindly follow rules you can accomplish just about anything with them. It's also a very handy justification for highly antisocial behavior. Of course people in my category can also use shaky justifications to engage in poor behavior but I can't claim "I was just doing as I was told".
I have plenty of "rule follower" friends (whom I constantly annoy with my heretical suggestions that rules are just guidelines). But at the end of the day we can only judge people's actions based on what they did (rule follower or not). Not how friendly they are doing it. Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbors thought he was nice enough.
>and they risk losing their job when they deviate from it, even if they personally believe the rules are stupid.
If everyone would avoid rules that are, from a common sense point of view, stupid then their job wouldn't be "at risk". They couldn't be replaced with anyone who wouldn't do the same thing.
>Same with the private sector. Companies that have the best reputations tend to be those that empower their employees to solve the customer's problem, like Virgin or Nordstroms. Companies with the worst reputations tend to be those where the employees can't do anything but follow the playbook, like most telecoms.
Interesting point.
[1] e.g. I don't stop at a stop sign if I can clearly see that I can go without impacting anyone else. For me stop sign means "the other people have the right of way, don't impact them". I find following the letter of the law "all four wheels to a full and complete stop" irritating, insulting and of little or no value.
I _always_ stop and look every way.
Implicitly you assume that your senses are infallible and that you will _always_ detect any other vehicles entering the intersection; you may someday be wrong. Several times: I have stopped at an apparently empty intersection only to, a split second later, observ a vehicle enter and leave at high speed without slowing or stopping. Had I merely driven through the intersection I would have been "T-boned" and would likely not be here today.
Of all laws that one could choose to _not_ obey, the traffic laws are among the poorest choices.
The increase in perceptive capacity between slowing to 2-3 ft/sec. vs coming to a complete stop is negligible (and allows one to stop completely if the situation warrants it).
I respectfully disagree. While I try to drive legally, as a pragmatic measure because I value my driving licence, I have less respect for traffic laws than just about any other kind.
Let me be very clear: I am all in favour of promoting safe and considerate driving, and I have nothing against punishing those who do drive dangerously or inconsiderately, including punishing them severely if this is proportionate to the likely consequences of their actions. I just don't feel that the kind of arbitrary, black-and-white laws that we have today are really helping that goal.
In my country, the speed limit on our fastest roads is 70mph. If you do 71mph, even on clear roads with a well maintained vehicle on Christmas morning, then technically you are a criminal. On the other hand, if you drive past a school at 29mph, in the wet, just as the kids are coming out at the end of the day, with parked cars obscuring your view everywhere, then you are unlikely to be prosecuted unless you actually hit someone, because you're under the 30mph limit. The idea that your driving might be considered dangerous (and this might reasonably be argued in court) if you're not breaking some arbitrary technical limit doesn't seem to occur to prosecutors, and the penalties for generic dangerous driving type offences are often laughable; you can get less penalty for killing someone through absurdly dangerous driving than you can for many much less serious crimes not involving the use of a car.
Similar problems apply with:
- banning hand-held mobile phones (yes, they're dangerous, but so are hands-free kits to almost the same degree),
- drunk driving (more than a certain blood alcohol threshold and you're dangerous enough to throw to the wolves, but just under and you're fine, even though people's tolerance varies greatly and someone slightly under might in practice be driving much worse than someone slightly over),
- mandatory bus/cycle lanes (so entering them even when you can see they are completely clear for a long distance is illegal, even if it's just to pass a vehicle in front waiting to turn the other way, and traffic is required by law to queue up behind the waiting vehicle instead),
- red lights for turns that don't cut across any other traffic (so you have to wait even in the middle of the night, on a completely clear junction),
- and, yes, complete-stop-no-really-we-mean-it-lines, for similar reasons.
The problem with such laws is partly that they are designed more for ease of automatic enforcement than in the interests of justice, and partly because as a consequence of the repeated black-and-white approach, many drivers increasingly take the view that if something is not explicitly proscribed by law then they can do it, and even if it is proscribed they can still do it if they think they can get away with it.
Wouldn't it be better if we had traffic laws that were actually in sync with what most experienced drivers would consider reasonable behaviour, and then used actual police officers for enforcement, giving them actual powers to stop and challenge people who are actually driving dangerously or inconsiderately? But of course that's too expensive and requires difficult things like making a real case in court using real evidence that somene's behaviour was actually harmful, so cameras it is.
And in my experience most traffic enforcement seems to be against the latter kind of behavior. (Well, except the cops who sit at the bottom of a hill where the speed limit drops from 35 to 25, because their town needs revenue.) I've never known someone to get pulled over for speeding when they're driving traffic speed on a highway, even if there's a cop right behind them. I think people should and do get pulled over if they're weaving or blindly zooming through red lights.
Isn't it interesting that something as clear cut as traffic laws could spawn such a debate? Pretty good evidence, IMHO, that laws are not clear-cut and there's room for judgment calls in a lot of them.
> Pretty good evidence, IMHO, that laws are not clear-cut and there's room for judgment calls in a lot of them.
The unfortunate thing, IMHO, is that so many of these laws are clear-cut. It would be much better, again IMHO, if there were fewer prosecutions, but those that took place went to a real court where a proper judgement could be made, taking into account all the facts of the specific case.
I can digest your "rules as guidelines" approach, but blowing stop signs because you feel like it is just stupid.
Why?
Because none of us have perfect perception. Because we get distracted, sometimes at the wrong moment. Because sometimes we just don't perceive an oncoming car. Motorcycle riders are painfully aware of this fact.
We're supposed to stop at stop signs in order to make absolutely sure there's no oncoming traffic. Slowing down and glancing to each side doesn't cut it, and if you think it does, you've got some growing up to do.
Sort of buying more time for the hero to make his appearance and fix everything.
On the one hand, I agree with the sentiment that the US Government (at the very least on a Federal level) has deteriorated to a point that it actively prevents itself from being repaired -- it doesn't want fixing. The addition of a two-party system, big media, and citizenry at large careless or clueless about how to protect and expand their liberties, and there's not really anything anybody can do about that.
I don't think, though, that simply accepting bad law as irreparable damage and trying to mitigate its area of influence is a viable long-term course of action. Letting government get progressively worse little by little can result in either a) prolonged suffering for many, until conditions get so bad that the government is disassembled (by civil unrest, economic collapse, population decline, or war), or b) another North Korea, a state frozen in time in total control with little chance of popular revolution, subsisting by the "grace" of other nations that haven't collapsed into political black holes.
One way or another, I expect that the current state of the State will only get worse before getting better. How much worse depending on how long Americans put off the task of figuring out how to start fresh on a new government. One with better antivirus capabilities.