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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state, at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.

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Someone has to be in the news first, and then you learn about it. To that someone, the change you see in tomorrow's legal news is today, was yesterday. It's more a gamble than you think, you just don't feel it until it bites you.

FWIW, we're in complete agreement. I stand by mt original statement that these things are nearly impossible for a layperson to be competent in. It's hard enough for people who do it every day for a living. An equivalent would be non-techies saying "I'm not going to pay a software engineer. Just tell the computer what you want it to do!" And that might sound reasonable to other non-techies, while you and I roll our eyes and laugh. I'm sure CPAs and tax attorneys and the like think the same when they hear engineers talk about filing their own non-trivial taxes.

Well, to put it precisely, an omniscient being would theoretically be capable of knowing today's state of the law with probabilities assigned to the results.

I'm serious. Pick any non-trivial issues of law, ask a world leading expert, and you'd very quickly hear the word "probably" somewhere. Less often than "it depends", but you'll hear those words often nonetheless.

If that's "knowable" to you, I guess it's knowable.

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