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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine everyone was raised to ignore authority figures and only execute commands that are provably in compliance with the law,

Ok I can at least see you've thought about this, but this part is not happening. Definitely not this century, probably not ever. Despite our best delusions, we're still just apes who follow other apes, mostly based on social relationships or the appearance of confidence. We can't even train our society to vote.

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So thats my point:

we don't need to attain this hypothetical perfectly effective education that prevents us from blindly following authority figures: even if we fail at such an education we can simply guard against the corruption of logic by formal verification, we can design the system to be ape-proof.

You can't make it ape-proof because, at minimum, the last mile of enforcement is performed by apes, who are going to continue following their ape instincts. Unless you plan to have government and law enforcement run entirely by robots.

Technically you are correct that human agents of the state who's pay and freedom depend on compliance with a formal verification governed law doesn't prevent say one of these armed human agents of the state from abusing their arms. But it could guarantee that such human agents can't repeat there crimes systematically: they lose their arms, face fines or are incarcerated. Contrast that with: currently not even formally verified due process is guaranteed. The system is currently allowed to delude itself ad nauseam.

Your argument now seems to be that systematic disobedience or rebellion is infeasible. History offers many counter examples. No one is confused about whether cops planting drugs on people is legal, but it still happens. The only way to prevent this is to build a totalitarian regime of literally unprecedented power. This is bad, whether it succeeds or more likely fails.

Again: the problem in OP wasn't one of interpreting the law. Everyone understood what the law was. They just didn't care, due to ape reasons. And if you can solve those, a formal logical law is mostly an incremental improvement.

What I meant is this: suppose we follow the ape working for the state [which runs on formal verification] that refuses to apply logic, so this ape logs into the decentralized network to see its open task list, somebody asks for a point cloud, the ape doesn't want to send it for ape reasons, the citizen supplies proof that he is entitled to a copy of the file, the ape still refuses, pay is a function of tasks completed, the task never completes and because of it is raised in priority, at some point no new tasks are assigned unless he completes the task, if the ape refuses they lose their position and source of income because ape is not fullfilling duty.

We can make it ape proof, and there is a natural path via arbitrage.

I don't think you actually want to live in that world. Certainly to me it sounds dystopic, far along the road to that unprecedented totalitarian regime I was talking about. Maybe if people are getting "upset" with you, it's because they sense that kind of proposal coming and agree with me that it's extremely dangerous.

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