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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the few proposals that I know of to literally use programming languages in laws, I have wondered if actually lowering the language expressiveness would help (e.g. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia )

The thinking being that the less nuanced the vocabulary, the less ways it could be interpreted and thus one may not have to write so many laywerly guard phrases to artificially constrain "normal" vocabulary. It may very well run the risk of having to use a bazillion more cross-references as one builds up a "library" of word-subroutines, but still could be a net win

But I guess I can navel-gaze all I like because for this specific domain, any change might as well be all the changes since there's no prayer

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The US government has the Plain Language movement which is rewriting policy and legal documents in clear, plain language.

The plainlanguage.gov site is an excellent all-around writing resource. I direct junior developers here when they are trying too hard to sound fancy when communicating technical concepts in documentation and design documents.

Here are some great examples:

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/ambi...

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/mont...

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/use-...

> The Plain Writing Act of 2010 was signed on October 13, 2010. The law requires that federal agencies use clear government communication that the public can understand and use.

well, no shit! that's amazing

Thanks so much for bringing that to my attention, I'll try to see how I can incorporate those into my own process

[X] Good.

This is a great resource for UX design as well.

Wow TIL. Those before and afters are awesome and I have definitely seen this showing up in government documents. Thanks for sharing.

That's a great initiative, but even with these, I feel there's further opportunity to make these clearer.

As a particular example, is there any reason to keep the vague "second month" in the second example [2], rather than "subsequent month" or "next month"?

[2] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/mont...

Yeah it's not that clear to me. My interpretation would be that if I'm reporting (whatever that means) April, then May would be the first month following, and hence June would be the second month following. Hence the last day I could submit would be June 15th (paper) or June 25th (electronic).

Oh, wow, I think you're absolutely right and I entirely misread that (supposedly "plain") explanation. Having an example, like the one you gave, in the text would be really useful!

Lots of ambiguity with “next”. It’s always so hard to describe “next Wednesday” if it’s Monday or “next week” if it’s Saturday.

My friends from non English countries get very confused that somehow “next Wednesday” when it’s Monday might not mean two days from now but 8 days from now. And how two days in that instance would be referred as “this Wednesday” or “this coming Wednesday”

Which is different way of talking. If you were sitting by the road counting cars and you are at car “n”, Saying “the next car” would refer to car n+1. If your counting wednesdays you experienced “next Wednesday” technically refers to n+2

I stopped saying “this <day>” or “next <day>” and now just say “Wednesday the 25th” for instance.

> It’s always so hard to describe “next Wednesday” if it’s Monday

'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week on the calendar— even if that day is in the past.

Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely. But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it actually does mean.

> I stopped saying “this <day>” or “next <day>” and now just say “Wednesday the 25th” for instance.

I love this. Indexicals in general can be tricky, and I love expressions that rely less or very little at all on context. Sometimes when a friend is telling a complicated story I'll ask them to repeat something tbey just said but with no use of pronouns, for instance, and it always makes interpretation much easier.

As much as I think the actual idioms are perfectly describable, they are somewhat prominently misused. One of my pet peeves is how YouTube's search filters uses its time restriction phrases incorrectly: it says 'today' to mean 'within the past 24 hours', 'this week' to mean 'within the past week', 'this year' to mean 'within the past year', etc. It's Tuesday, and when I search for videos with an upload date from 'this week', I get results including videos uploaded 4 days ago, but this week is not yet 4 days old under any standard convention (e.g., starting the week on Mondays rather than Sundays)... -_-

Your pattern of:

'<term>' is always <my definition>; doesn't matter <other factor>.

Is never going to be true in spoken language. Otherwise we wouldn't be having conversations about confusion and ambiguity in the first place.

At any given time, the lexicon is evolving and some idioms are expanding or on the verge of extinction. Still, there are uses of words and phrases that can reasonably be described as simply wrong at a given time, based on a failure to understand the idiom whose invocation is being attempted. Errors that are sufficiently popular and persistent will eventually just reshape the language, but for a time even an error that is pretty popular or fairly long-lived is still recognizable as an error.

By my intuition, I'd say the uses of 'this week' and friends I described as improper qualify handily, not being all that widespread yet. A couple more marginal examples that stand out to me because erroneous uses are much more common: 'let alone' (which is binary and often used with subject and object reversed), the distinction between envy and jealousy.

You can take up a radical descriptivist position, e.g., that anything spoken by adult native speakers of normal faculties is never erroneous, or re-scope my assertions by saying that I'm gatekeeping speakers who see such usage as correct from my perceived language community or tradition, whatever, but imo the first is trivial and the second boring.

Sometimes specialists misappropriate methodological constraints from their discipline as general ontological or social principles, often discounting an inherent normativity in the way people actually relate to the things those specialists study. I think that's essentially at the heart of the most inflated and controversial uses of concepts like cultural relativism and linguistic descriptivism, and probably applies to nonspecific objections like the one you make above (as opposed to pointing at some specific dialectal variation in the use of such phrases or something like that).

> 'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week on the calendar— even if that day is in the past.

Nope. This is highly contingent on "which day of the week starts a week" conventions.

If it is Sunday, then "next Wednesday" does not clearly mean the day 10 days from now ... and which one you lean toward will depend (in part) on "week starts on Monday" or "week starts on Sunday".

Yes, the boundaries of the calendar week is a convention that varies and impacts the description I gave in a straightforward and obvious way, so you can expect complications with different conventions on the boundaries of each week. :)

Things are also a bit complicated where I live by the fact that 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' follow the same pattern as I described before, but in a way consistent with calendar weeks beginning on Monday rather than Sunday— even though calendars here conventionally start the week on Sunday and usage of 'this <day of week>' and 'next <day of week>' align with that.

Anyhow, the variation you are getting at is already captured in the description I gave: as the calendar (week boundaries) varies, so does the description's meaning. The description is already indexed to a particular calendar (as is the expression, unfortunately implicitly). :p

My claim was that the meaning is easy enough to describe, not that the phrase is unambiguous. That a phrase can be used ambiguously doesn't mean that descriptions/definitions/characterizations of its general meaning actually have to be ambiguous or vague themselves.

Still yeah, this is a real problem for conversations between people who aren't looking at the same calendar/don't understand a shared convention for week boundaries.

> Things are also a bit complicated where I live by the fact that 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' follow the same pattern as I described before, but in a way consistent with calendar weeks beginning on Monday rather than Sunday— even though calendars here conventionally start the week on Sunday and usage of 'this <day of week>' and 'next <day of week>' align with that.

My sense is that weekend nomenclature is even more confusing.

If it is Monday, and I say "next weekend", I'd wager there's a greater proportion of English speakers (at least) who would understand that to mean the two day period that starts in roughly another 4 days. That is: "next weekend" referred to at any time before (possibly) Friday means "the next one to occur", not "the one that is a part of the next calendar week". By contrast, on Friday "next weekend" pretty clearly means the two days that will occur in about 7 days, rather than "this weekend" meaning the two days that start in less than 24 hours.

Yeah, I think the weekend nomenclature is definitely trickier.

> If it is Monday, and I say "next weekend", I'd wager there's a greater proportion of English speakers (at least) who would understand that to mean the two day period that starts in roughly another 4 days.

To my ear, this is wrong, but I think you're right that it's more common. I think 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' are fuzzier than 'this Tuesday' and 'next Tuesday' because of that misalignment I pointed to before, where 'the weekend' is thought of as a thing that comes at the end of a week, but how we write it most calendars where I live is as a thing that bookends the week on each side.

But I couldn't take up the usage you describe even if I moved to a region where it was predominant, I think. How could I abide a situation where 'this Saturday' occurs during 'next weekend'? That's simply madness. :D

(It's amazing how much we humans manage to communicate with something as messy as natural language-- perhaps especially amazing to programmer-brained people like me, who take some comfort and ease from the simplicity and neatness of the artificial formalisms we work with every day.)

i think the difference is the frequency with which it is necessary to differentiate "this" and "next".

for weekends, most of the time most people are talking in ways that make "this weekend" "the next weekend to occur". so here, "this" and "next" are effectively synonymous.

for days of the week, however, it is more often important to differentiate "this Thursday" (occuring in a couple of days from now, during this week) and "next thursday" (occuring in more than 7 days from now, as part of next week).

If my hunch is correct, it would make conventions highly dependent on social scheduling frequency in a culture.

'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week on the calendar— even if that day is in the past.

Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely. But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it actually does mean.

That's the way it's supposed to be, at least as spoken in the part of Scotland from where my family hails.

But the Americans I know seem to get it wrong about half the time.

What I haven't figured out is if it's a regional (dialectical) thing, or just certain people being "dense", or simply never having been taught the rule.

I’ve lived in the US my whole life and I don’t recall anyone ever getting it wrong. Except this scene in Seinfeld which is obviously Jerry being pedantic for comedic effect.

> Sid: Well I'm going down to visit my sister in Virginia next Wednesday, for a week, so I can't park it.

> Jerry: This Wednesday?

> Sid: No, next Wednesday, week after this Wednesday.

> Jerry: But the Wednesday two days from now is the next Wednesday.

> Sid: If I meant this Wednesday, I would have said this Wednesday. It's the week after this Wednesday.

Yeah, I've given up on expecting to know what people will understand "next Wednesday" to mean. I either say "this coming Wednesday" or "next week on Wednesday". Problems solved.

Well, usually. I've still had conversations like this:

Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."

Them: "Whoa, slow down there. Do you mean this coming Wednesday, or next week on Wednesday?"

Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."

Them: "Ohhhh! Thank you so much, it wasn't clear before."

If they name a rule after me, I want it to be, "If someone can reasonably interpret a phrase to mean two contradictory things, you have to stop using that phrase if you want clear communication, even if it means being more verbose."

I've taken to saying "Wednesday" or "this Wednesday" to refer to whichever Wednesday is coming up, and then "the Wednesday after this Wednesday" to refer to the following Wednesday. It is a bit wordy but at least it's unambiguous.

And in reading your comment, I just realized there's a difference between casual conversation and writing something down.

I can easily say "Hey, let's meet next Wednesday!" and you may reply with "Oh, great, I'll put it in the calendar, the 8th it is!" and you reply with "No, I meant the 15th" -- and this reduces the ambiguity. This kind of thing would be happening in "real time", so being perfectly clear isn't as important.

However, if you write "next Wednesday" in a contract, and then complete it on the 15th instead of the 8th, and it's taken to Court ... it's a lot harder to figure out what the the original conversation was like, that led to the writing of the contract!

Hence, it makes sense to use as unambiguous language as possible when writing a contract.

Am I crazy or does the guidelines page not contain the guidelines? https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/

Maybe because I’m on mobile?

The guidelines are hidden in the menu in the top-right on mobile.

> the less nuanced the vocabulary, the less ways it could be interpreted

I genuinely don't mean this in a dickish way -- isn't this, like, tautologically untrue?

By definition, more nuanced, more descriptive language describes a narrower, more precise view of reality than broader language otherwise would.

When would plainer language allow less room for interpretation?

I do generally think writing laws and other documents in plainer language would be beneficial for society, but not for this reason. Sometimes you do have to describe a really, really precise concept. "Kill" is different than "murder" is different than "manslaughter" in ways that are meaningful and important to preserve.

Although even as I write that, I guess you could say "kill", "kill a person with intention", "kill a person without intention". That's kind of what you mean by word subroutines?

At a certain point this just seems like a similarly-complex vocabulary, just with more words, though.

Yes, sorry, it's the latter idea that you arrived at: if a law cannot be understood by a 9th grader, then one might argue it is mal-specified. I grew up hearing stories of folks that dropped out in the 9th grade so it seemed like a reasonable cut-off

I am 100% open to the fact that it may not be possible to do this, since nat-lang is its own special little thing, and trying to apply fixes to it may be nonsensical themselves

The word subroutines would be cross-references to potentially more complex concepts akin to "one cannot end life (§3.14.159) unless working (§8.6.753) in a job (§127.0.1) that allows State violence" where the boundaries of what this legislation cares about 'ending life,' the boundaries around 'working,' the boundaries of a 'job' would then be composed into 'citizen cannot kill other citizen'.

I always got the impression that the nuance between murder and manslaughter wasn't in their degree of unlawfulness but rather in their sentencing, but I am deeply thankful that I haven't needed to know

> I always got the impression that the nuance between murder and manslaughter wasn't in their degree of unlawfulness but rather in their sentencing, but I am deeply thankful that I haven't needed to know

As an aside the difference between murder and manslaughter is in the intent of the perpetrator. Murder is typically when you intended for the outcome to be death (and is additionally divided into whether or not it was premeditated/planned).

Manslaughter is reserved for when there was not intent to kill, but your actions caused a death.

Right, but that's why I said the sentencing part because to the best of my knowledge one doesn't become "more unlawful" in either case, rather if found guilty of the "lesser" of the two evils(?) you are unlikely to get capital punishment. The nuance is in the severity, not the crime

Err, having written that out I now guess there is also some social component to it: you may still be received at a party if convicted of manslaughter but maybe not murder so we need different words to describe the act for purposes outside of the legal system

I mean… they represent two very different acts, albeit with the same outcome. It makes sense that we use different words for it.

We even draw the distinction between degrees of murder since sitting down and planning a murder in cold blood (murder in the first degree) is far different than a road rage incident with a gun (murder 2) which is different still than a shove in a bar where someone falls down and hits their head and dies (manslaughter). Hell, some places even distinguish between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.

The point is that all these words have meaning, and we deeply care about the nuance.

Apologies, I wasn't trying to say "English can get bent for having nuance" I was speaking about them from a legal point of view, and (again) I emphasize that based on your examples the difference matters solely in sentencing not "how illegal" they are

To circle back to the "if law were programming" idea, I think of all the nuances you cited as belonging in any "then" clauses, not the "if" clauses of legalese

  if made_dead:
    # determine punishment
    if premeditated:
       ...
    elif road_rage and crime_scene.contains({"gun"}):
       # a kind of very, very slightly premeditation
       ...
    else:
       # and here one can get into [in]voluntary made dead

because (as I ham-fistedly tried to get at) there are very, very few cases in the law where one human can legally end the life of another human so it's silly to try and split hairs about "why" except for how much revenge(?) society wants to extract from them for the wrongdoing

Law does have subroutines like this... but they're implicit via "as used in this section, X is defined as" clauses that may be pages away or defined decades prior, as well as de facto definitions scattered through centuries of case law. New legislation can't simplify things unless the entire graph of implicit definitions is considered.

All this was inscrutable before LLMs, but LLMs bring their own challenges: to summarize something in plain text, is it using a deep graph of definitions that are sourced and verifiable, or hallucinating their existence? IMO architectures as in https://arxiv.org/html/2410.04949v1 and https://arxiv.org/html/2409.13252v1 are useful; one uses LLMs to create local knowledge graphs and integrate them, then translates natural language queries into (successive) graph queries or graph-based RAG approaches. Things are still evolving in real time here, and IMO we've only scratched the surface of what's possible.

Yes, but that needs to be cleaned up!

> if a law cannot be understood by a 9th grader, then one might argue it is mal-specified

You want to administer nuclear weapons, the U.S. military and toxic-waste rules based on a high-school freshman’s knowledge of the world?

What should be done for the high-school freshman dropout who goes on to get a commercial driver's license, and then goes on to get an endorsement for transporting hazardous materials?

I would like to see general law subject to a restriction like that. But law that applies to specialized domains can be written such that anyone reasonably proficient in that domain can understand it.

I'd take out the reference to "job" -- because the only State violence where it's legal to commit violence against another person without provocation is in the Military (and even then, it's subject to Rules of Engagement and other protocols); whereas even though police have powers not normally exercised by other citizens to arrest people, both police and citizens have the right to respond to lethal force with lethal force, which can often (but not always -- "lethal" can mean severe maiming, for example, or an attempt to incapacitate) lead to the death of the person being responded to.

But murder and manslaughter aren't simply "kill a person with intention", "kill a person without intention", that's why we have different degrees of each. Because you have to define what intention means. Savagely beating somebody to death, while believing they'll probably survive - is that with intention or without? There's also other forms of homicide than just manslaughter and murder!

I think that's why these terms exist, because they become shorthand for longwinded definitions that may need to be very precise.

FWIW, judges in England (or maybe UK) have flip-flopped on this question as recently as in 2003. (See "R v G") That said maybe the problem is that the UK doesn't have different degrees of murder. But still.

Real life can be complicated and moral/legal questions can be hard to determine.

What you're describing sounds like Toki Pona, which ends up very ambiguous because of 120 word vocabulary. Still, here's a contract written in it:

https://jonathangabel.com/2012/lipu-lawa-pi-esun-kama/

I actually initially did load the Toki Pona wikipedia page because I (erroneously) thought TP was just a constrained version of English and not its own language. So, once I saw it was not one of the established natural languages that are used in law/contracts/treaties I closed the page

If we were going to get 80 year old Senators to learn a new language, I'd lobby for Lojban which is at least plausibly designed for representing unambiguous semantics

I've mentioned before that any laws that are written in formal languages seems great from the metric of keeping "interpretation" cases out of the judicial system but would put society back into the "priests read Latin and tell the plebs what God really meant, trustmebro" and that's for sure no bueno

I think you'd just end up going through the motions of this again: https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0

Care to elaborate on the proposals to do laws via formal languages?

Seems like there's a lot of pitfalls there, but that comes with the territory of writing laws in general.

Seems like a concept worth exploring.

https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala#readme is the most famous one I know of, and https://github.com/CatalaLang/catleg is an integration with the French legal code. https://catleg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli_reference.html#c... gives an example URL that has unfortunately link rotted but wayback has it https://web.archive.org/web/20240721045507/https://www.legif...

I am pretty sure there are several more but that's the one I can recall. It has been discussed here periodically https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/catalalang (and https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=catala-lang.org ) with the 2023 thread being the beefiest https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37546874

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