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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

Remember that through all of that muddle mess of 'what is really illegal' is the fact that 'ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.' So if the prosecutor won't even comment on 'hypothetical situations' then how is a normal citizen supposed to evaluate these things for themselves? Accidentally cross the line, and then find yourself in jail as an example to others? Is this the 'justice' that we want? Throwing people in jail as part of the process of figuring out where we should 'draw the line?' Just throwing people under the bus?

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The interface between "ignorance is no excuse" and the vagueness and selective enforcement of a great deal of law is always a difficult gray area.

I think that the most important thing about a political system is predictability, not "democracy" or "justice" or some other vague, high minded ideal. The number one job of our elected and appointed officials should be providing this predictability.

This is a particularly stark example of what happens when that duty is shirked. Corruption and incompetence flow into every crevice not solidly plugged with deterministic law.

I have to disagree. Predictability is quite important, but often the most brutal regimes are the most predictable, and that's not something I want. I don't want to know for sure, unquestionably that if I speak out against the government me and my family will be fed into a wood chipper, no matter how predictable that response would be.

> but often the most brutal regimes are the most predictable

I'm not so sure, not saying there not might be some cases of this, but usually brutal regimes exercise force arbitrarily.

Predictability implies a set of constraints on the actions of those in power.

Predictability is quite important, but often the most brutal regimes are the most predictable, and that's not something I want.

I agree that a predictable rule of law isn't enough for a worthwhile society. At the same time, it's worth noting that many repressive regimes are very unpredictable.

Look at Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Stalin's Russia; Unpredictable terror is an important weapon in a dictator's arsenal. It forces people to go beyond the normal call of duty in defense of the state. It produces something like "learned helplessness" in the population. It prevents rivals from acting against the leader.

Intermittent reinforcement is the most effective form of operant conditioning. Unpredictable punishments in a wide gray area will make people stay well clear of even the shallow end of that gray area.

...which is why nobody speeds.

They don't 'disappear' you or send you to the torture chamber for going over the speed limit. They do send you away for speaking out against the leader.

You make a great argument, and I've been thinking about it, because I know intermittent reinforcement/operant conditioning has extremely strong evidence in its favor. A HN comment from today[1] brought the problem to my mind again, but this time with a possible solution.

At their roots, operant conditioning and classical conditioning are both learning mechanisms. Since the time of operant conditioning, spaced repetition[2] has gained a lot of popularity. It's a further refinement that depends on beginning with short intervals, and proceeding to longer ones.

The idea this suggests to me is that speeding tickets happen to many people infrequently enough that the enhanced learning never takes place. Draconian crackdowns, however, happen frequently and with high salience because of media coverage--the only time you know about someone else getting a speeding ticket is when you see them pulled over, and it's hard to feel as personally involved with that as when you hear all the details of someone's arrest and imprisonment on the news.

One piece of evidence for media coverage changing behavior is that people buy lottery tickets; because they've seen lottery winners on the news, the probability of winning has a much higher salience than it deserves.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2030038

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

This is exactly the line of reasoning I wanted to suggest; operant conditioning, as with all forms of learning, has nonlinear results below a certain threshold of involvement. We're not good at expectation values, especially in these cases:

1. Rare events, like receiving a speeding ticket, are relatively underweighted. Every time you drive without receiving a ticket reinforces speeding behavior.

2. Extremely salient events, like winning the lottery, tend to be overweighted--possibly because they're so important to our cognition, and we tell ourselves plausible stories about winning.

There's also a difference between negative and positive reinforcement and punishment. Receiving a speeding ticket is positive punishment; the lottery is positive reinforcement. Couple that with differential media coverage, like you mentioned, and you get significantly different behavior.

"Predictability" is more or less what's meant by "the rule of law". It's generally considered important.

Yes. Though the `more or less' is important. There are numerous discussion about what `rule of law' really means.

"ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law"

Not exactly; it's more complex than that. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

I think this is more related to inadvertent vs. intentional recording. For example, you can inadvertently record someone who is shouting at you if you were on the phone, leaving a voicemail message.

Exactly, its not about justice - it's about power and accountability.

I really wish I could remember who said it, but it always comes to mind when I read a story like this. "He who stands against the law shall die, for the law is god." [That should probably be an upper-case "G".]

Essentially that is this man's crime. From a judge's perspective, he didn't really say that the law in question was invalid or that he was unjustly persecuted, but that the authority of law was invalid. From the judge's seat he might as well have been a murder arguing that murder was OK by killing someone in the courtroom. In the end, that is the single greatest crime that anyone can commit.

Someone with a little more common sense would have gone to a higher court and argued that he wasn't allowed a court reporter, an act that contradicted the entire point of his argument.

Growing up, I always found this odd as well. Now I think when they say "ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law" what they actually mean is "just because you didn't know (perhaps because there was no way to know), we're still going to punish you".

"the prosecutor won't even comment on 'hypothetical situations'"

Which is ironic, since that is the core part of his job, to present a hypothetical scenario (an alleged crime) and argue it actually happened.

By keeping the laws vague you can pretty much arrest whoever you want for whatever you want. And, when you've got enough ridiculous laws on the books that the average citizen can't avoid regularly committing felonies, a police state isn't far behind. That's not to say that the ones who wrote the laws, or the ones who enforce them, are doing so to that end. But when the pieces are put in place, even if unwittingly, it's only a matter of time.

I came here to say this.

Underpinning all police states is a system that a citizen can be arrested for just about anything. This is how you keep citizens in check.

I found it interesting (and also saddening) that all the "law enforcement" people automatically line up to oppose the use of cameras. It's as if they live in a different world than the rest of us, who see cameras as ubiquitous and handy. This separation of society into 2 classes, the "law enforcers" and "average citizens", is another harbinger of a police state.

I'm sure many here will say: so what? I'm not bothering anybody, so why should I worry? The problem is, all of this capricious police action weakens society as a whole. We can't move forward if we're governed by 20th century laws applied at whim.

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