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Comment by manofmanysmiles | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing to me that people think they need other people to resolve disputes, or that "law" is some kind of magic...

And yet people keep thinking so, both selling it as magic, and buying it as magic, and not once taking the time to consider what the words on the paper might mean.

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> that "law" is some kind of magic...

Law is some kind of magic, though. Consider the case where I want to cast the "Lawyer" protection spell.

If I chant "I am invoking my right to remain silent. I want to contact my attorney" then the police must stop questioning me and provide me one [1]. The spell worked.

If I chant "This is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up" then my spell is not strong enough and the police can interrogate me as they see fit [2].

And then there's the time where a wizard had to interpret a comma [3].

[1] https://www.nedbarnett.com/do-i-have-a-right-to-an-attorney-...

[2] https://uproxx.com/culture/louisiana-supreme-court-suspect-l...

[3] https://www.loweringthebar.net/2017/03/the-oxford-comma-use-...

This is precisely the madness that I'm astounded by. Most people think this is sane, normal and moral.

And, I imagine most people reading this think I'm either insane, ignorant or uneducated, or will attach some other adjectives to further alienate me. It's okay, I already feel like an alien.

I'm not looking for an argument. I don't need to convince anyone.

I was hoping for a more receptive audience. Oh well.

You mentioned that you don’t understand the magical thinking, but then someone shows that the proper incantation matters more than the sentiment or intent. That’s why you see magical thinking. We all want a world where the earnest desire for rescue matters more than words in the request, because while sometimes we know the right words, sometimes we don’t. If you think you always know the right words and everyone else should too, that’s not reasonable and this should be obvious for many reasons along the lines of differences in intelligence, jurisdiction, language difficulties, etc

It's a risk/reward issue. By analogy, I am perfectly capable of filling out an IRS 1040 form, so why pay a CPA? Because the CPA knows what things can be classified as business expenses. They have first-hand knowledge of which items have passed audits and which the IRS dismissed as farfetched. You're paying for someone who has the insider knowledge to navigate a minefield of non-obvious questions.

Or for a technical analogy, I'm capable of learning any programming language you can throw at me. However, a business who wants to hire someone is going to prefer someone with experience in that language's entire ecosystem. It's not enough to know the syntax. That's the easy part. The harder part is knowing which parts to reference at a given time, which modules experienced devs would choose to solve a specific problem, etc.

Well, same here. I'm wholly capable of reading and understanding the words of a contract or a summons or a lawsuit. What I don't know is the significance of specific phrases in those things, or what I'm allowed to use as evidence on my own behalf, or which issues I might raise that a judge would dismiss as something learned in the first semester of law school. And that's why I'd pay a lawyer to address legal issues for me.

It's the same with plumbing, wiring, programing, writing, cooking, gardening, and most of the other verbs.

For the most part, everyone can do these things, but it's nice to pay someome else to do it; especially in fields where experience gives expertise and hopefully wisdom. Also, it's handy to hire a licensed practicioner in fields where government requires licensure to sell services.

Some people are really woried about making big mistakes that are expensive to clean when plumbing or wiring or lawyering. It's a legitimate thing to consider.

It's a matter of opportunity costs as well. If you want to be able to do plumbing, wiring, framing... you likely don't also have the time to learn the potentially vast amount of knowledge required to adeptly navigate the legal system.

> Some people are really woried about making big mistakes that are expensive to clean when plumbing or wiring or lawyering.

Even worse, if you lawyer wrong (or wire wrong), you might not be able to clean it up - you just do your time or perhaps die.

There's a difference, though. Law and medicine are fields with very strong gatekeeping. You also need a licence for many construction engineering roles, and in fact both stakes and accountability there are much higher than in the former two (in fact, it is a bit appalling, how little lawyers and doctors are hold accountable for stupid shit they do, if they follow the playbook), and realistically you need to learn as much if not more to be a good construction engineer (but most construction engineers are not especially good, just as most lawyers and doctors aren't very good), but you don't see so much reverence towards construction engineers, and there are much fewer artificial borders for one to learn construction engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

You can get very far in life by just reading the contract, even farther by googling some context, and even farther by hiring an expert in the field.

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