Hacker News Reader

Comment by tansey | Hacker News Reader

You want non-lawyers drafting laws? There's a good reason why most congress people are lawyers. The law is very tricky and English is an ambiguous language that needs to be made crystal clear from a legal standpoint (which typically becomes unreadable to laypeople).

That said, I do think there's a place for engineers that happen to be interested in law and passionate about government. I would appreciate it if maybe 10% of congress were former engineers/scientists/developers.

Also, not voting is what corrupt politicians want you to do. Vote for a candidate you do support, even if you know they won't win.

View on HN

> You want non-lawyers drafting laws? There's a good reason why most congress people are lawyers.

Congress people don't draft laws - staff does. Or rather, staff cuts and pastes text provided by lobbyists.

> The law is very tricky and English is an ambiguous language that needs to be made crystal clear from a legal standpoint (which typically becomes unreadable to laypeople).

Laws typically aren't crystal clear from a legal standpoint - that's (part of) why they're "interpreted" by courts and "implemented" by regulation.

And that's not even counting the expansion due to either malicious or stupid drafting. Consider RICO - it was touted as "for use against organized crime". It's now SOP for almost every criminal prosecution. (If an organization may have committed two crimes, it's subject to RICO.)

Actually, yes, I do want to see non-lawyers writing laws. I see this as an issue of competence and self-interest.

On competence - I'd agree that the law is tricky, but I don't think it's impossible for a non-lawyer to learn it. Law isn't like advanced mathematics. Sure, you need to be astute and pay attention, but you and I can read legislation, whereas non-mathematicians really can't access the literature on abstract algebra.

Also, I actually doubt that most members of congress actually write legislation. I doubt they even read most of the legislation they vote on.

As for self-interest... well, how big should dog's teeth be? To me, that depends on whether the dog is defending me from an attacker or, well, attacking me. Honestly, I think that the legal cartel has not had the best interests of the American people at heart. A fifty thousand page tax code is good news for tax lawyers. Software patents seem to do a lot more good for patent lawyers than for software developers. Non-compete clauses? I hate them, so do lawyers. Guess what profession is exempt (by statute) from non-compete clauses in all 50 states? (hint: it's the people who write the law on non-compete clauses).

So overall, I think that developers are smart, literate people who absolutely could learn how to competently create legislation, and that even if they aren't quite as good at it as lawyers, they'd be far more likely to represent my interests as a developer.

hmmm... btw, I may have been wrong about the non-compete thing...

http://www.michbar.org/journal/pdf/pdf4article1451.pdf

looks like they may have become somewhat enforceable for lawyers in more recent years...

Yes, I want non-lawyers drafting laws. Every law I've had occasion to read closely, needing to deal with it, was sloppily written, ambiguous in spots, and basically had uncertainty for me, trying to understand it sufficient to implement it, and loopholes aplenty for lawyers wanting to interpret it their way. I have no doubt a programmer could write better 'legal code'. Whether he could run a better campaign, I doubt.

Depends on what you call "better". I'm sure a programmer could run a better campaign ideologically, making sure to emphasize important things that need to be done and ignore frivolous things based on their actual relevance, and not just the glamor or clamor around the issue. I'm sure a programmer could run a more honest, least-pandering campaign.

If by "better" you mean "more likely to win", then I doubt it. Programmers are addicted to logic and the public is addicted to flattery. They don't go together very well, at least not for one interested in maintaining integrity.

Laws should be written in Python. Seriously. In fact, the SEC is using Python to describe some regulations.

Wow. Source? That would be cool to look at.

http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2010/33-9117.pdf

Warning - huge document, you should save it rather than try to view in the browser. See page 1 and section III.B.1 (page ~200 & surrounding).

What's being proposed is not so much writing regulations in Python (the sort of idea I have been fascinated with for some time), but requiring sellers of complex securities to supply Python code as part of their disclosure requirements. Calculations of potential returns and so forth can then be undertaken by potential buyers using the same methodology used by the sellers.

Currently, information about cash flow related to a security are described verbally in a special financial dialect of legalese, or sometimes in mathematical terms. Calculating the actual profits or obligations in $ is left as an exercise for the reader, and their calculation is only as good as their underlying assumptions about the meaning of specific terms. Should a dispute arise later on, the result is a long technical argument over how these calculations should be performed and whether the accounting methods employed are standard in the industry or not. Of course, if this argument takes place in a court it can become very expensive and last for years, which is why buyers of securities perform all their due diligence before purchasing the security. As this due diligence can easily become expensive and time consuming, a lot of buyers try to reduce the up-front costs by considering the rating assigned to the security by an agency like Moody's or Fitch, who are presumed to be specialists in evaluating these things. Unfortunately, excessive reliance on such ratings has resulted in significant loss for a lot of fund managers and investors in recent years.

So what the SEC is proposing (and which you have until August 2 on which to comment), is that in future some securities offerings should come with the cash flow calculations pre-documented in Python, which would be the equivalent of a mortgage calculator offered by a bank to people who are thinking of buying a house and which is supposed to give an accurate picture of what the monthly numbers will be for a given set of input conditions, eg interest rates or whatever.

Mailing list thread: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2010-April/1241...

Blog post about it: http://jrvarma.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/the-sec-and-the-pyth...

Proposal (pdf): http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2010/33-9117.pdf

Uh...clue check...programmers have to write everything in crystal clear unambiguous form.

So we might need to legislate in code and write a law compiler, but that can be rendered to english pretty easily through a "lawyer-verified" open source transformation. Hell, you could even render a flowchart.

"Corrupt politicians" is a tautology. I don't vote because I don't consent to mob rule, and I refuse to participate in forcing my preferences on other people using the violence of the state.

Mob rule? We have a constitution designed for majority say with minority rights. We have checks and balances. There is a reason we need a social contract in society, and it's been well articulated by people like Locke and Hobbes for hundreds of years.

I don't want to get into a flame war on HN, so I'll just end my replies here. :)

That's why we don't have 'mob rule', i.e. Democracy in the USA. Instead we have a constitutional republic.

I find it interesting that people leap to correct/redefine the usage of a word so that they can ignore the meaning of a statement.

No, that is the crux of his statement. Complaining about a situation as it doesn't exist, is akin to a straw man.

I didn't know that the term was considered a synonym 'democracy', and was using it in a more general sense. The main link between the two seems to be usage along the lines of the Jefferson quote. Saying that a democracy is a type of mob rule doesn't make it the only type of mob rule.

Whether the mob is every citizen or just the citizens that wear majority-approved costumes doesn't change the meaning I was trying to convey.

> Vote for a candidate you do support, even if you know they won't win.

I respect people who do this tremendously.

However, my position is different. I say - the system is not legitimate, and I do not acquiesce to it. It would be hypocritical of me to try to take a share of power that I think is immoral, wrong, and shouldn't exist. In the meantime, I obey mandates that I don't believe in from a mix of fear and cowardice. I'm not proud of that, though, and it makes me sad to think about and acknowledge.

But I do respect the people trying to change the system from the inside.

Do you also tremendously respect people who work for the mafia in order to change it into a charity from the inside? Do you think that is a productive endeavor?

Politicians really want people to believe it is. Then they can bring all those people who want change into the gov't and neuter them by convincing them to wield the power they detest, suffocate them in bureaucracy and the inertia of (for example) a $3.5 trillion "large company" (as PG put it), quagmiring them so that the people in gov't can keep their power and violence.

And it's been quite successful at doing that. The light to this is that gov't is stuck with its own inertia, and eventually drains its host society of so many resources that the society cannot sustain the gov't anymore. An informed society could then start operating on a voluntary basis instead of organizing systems of violence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com