Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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