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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

"""Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in MN, CO, and WA since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?"""

This, a thousand times this.

I was struck with the same idea in the past. Law should not be 100% enforced, or it will be a dystopia. I wouldn't want to live in a world were the Grateful Dead couldn't do any drugs, teenagers could never drink a beer, nobody could express himself with a graffiti in a drab wall, no child that wants to be a graphic designer could ever pirate Photoshop, being a few months less or more than the legal age to date sends you off as a molester, playing a different region DVD lands you to jail, and a million other things...

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This is why there should be fewer laws, with proper penalties for those laws. Many of our laws are designed to prevent us from doing worse things.

Imagine driving on a residential street at 60 mph. That in and of itself is not a problem (other than noise), but hitting something at that speed most certainly is, especially in a neighborhood. Likewise, drunk driving is not a problem until you hit someone or crash yourself. Not coming to a complete stop at a 4-way stop sign. (all traffic examples, sorry)

Those traffic behaviors are not destructive, until something goes wrong. So if we reduce the law count but increase penalties, we're on the right track. For instance, if we really want to stop the effects of drunk driving, we have 30 days jail time for the first offense.

I think that if we had the proper (minimum) set of laws, then we should have no problem with 100% enforcement.

Now, on the issue of privacy, actually achieving 100% enforcement would be impossible without a complete surveillance state (or zero laws, but this is the trivial case).

We do have the power to change the direction of this country, and the author of the article points to gay marriage and pot use to champion this idea of liberty. But the author also points at the sheer scope of federal law as a huge problem. If the government has a problem with you, they can (probably) put you behind bars -- and this is a problem indeed.

So how should you vote? Vote for candidates who want to reduce the burden of government on the people and enhance personal freedom. I contend that gay marriage wouldn't even be an issue if the government weren't involved in marriage in the first place (and it shouldn't be). The Left loves tearing down the moral codes of previous generations, claiming bigotry, homophobia, etc., but it also loves to build up government in a huge way. The Republicans, unfortunately, have lost the way of small government, but I believe they are a better hope than the Dems, in the long run.

Your idea simply doesn't work, because people are terrible at evaluating risk and consequences. For example, say we abolished all the traffic laws and said that drivers would be responsible for any damage they cause. You'd end up with less experienced drivers doing 80mph through a residential area, since there's no speed limit. The penalty for their poor judgement is a dead kid who happened to chase a ball. But since this "seems" like a less likely event, the driver doesn't worry, until its too late.

We experimented with lax traffic laws, and accidents were far more common per mile driven than they are today.

Actually, the current thinking and observation by some urban designers is that "naked roads" can result in safer driving habits[1][2]. The problem is one of environment, design, and policy.

"There is a clear link between people's surroundings and their behaviour. If people are in an unpleasant environment, they will behave badly." - Ben Hamilton-Baillie

Also, in Montana, for example, adding speed limits to interstates which previously had none resulted in more traffic fatalities[3]

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4213221.stm

2. http://www.salon.com/2004/05/20/traffic_design/

3. http://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safety...

There are also "traffic calming" designs (some of which incorporate naked roads concepts) which can reduce accidents.

David Snowden (I ran across his name searching for items related to another Snowden in the news) mentions in a YouTube video a roundabout in England which, despite its visually frightening appearance and apparently very high traffic densities, is one of the safest intersections in the UK.

Traffic calming can be an issue though, because it reduces traffic speeds, which can actually increase overall risk when it slows down emergency vehicles. Especially in residential areas, you can end up reducing the number of minor traffic accidents at the expense of increasing the number of non-traffic-related fatalities by increasing the emergency response time of fire trucks and ambulances.

This is a non-problem:

1) The other road users are operating at a slower speed so it is considerably easier to get out of the way.

2) emergency access is affected by the issue causing the emergency ( a crash for example )

3) normal congestion will put the effective speed lower anyhow.

4) traffic calming can actually increase the throughput of a street For example, converting a street with 2 lanes each direction to a single lane with a central left turn lane: eliminates the congestion caused by people stopping to make turns from the left lane.

>The other road users are operating at a slower speed so it is considerably easier to get out of the way.

You're assuming the other traffic is the problem. Speed humps etc. will considerably slow down e.g. a fire truck even if there are zero other cars on the road.

>emergency access is affected by the issue causing the emergency ( a crash for example )

Again, you're assuming traffic to be the primary problem. If my house is on fire or there is some intruder then there will be negligible effect on the local traffic but structural impediments to haste will still delay the emergency response.

>normal congestion will put the effective speed lower anyhow.

Traffic again.

>traffic calming can actually increase the throughput of a street For example, converting a street with 2 lanes each direction to a single lane with a central left turn lane: eliminates the congestion caused by people stopping to make turns from the left lane.

That's not really traffic calming, or to the extent that it is, should be distinguished from what I'm complaining about, e.g. speed humps or other measures solely designed to reduce traffic speed or annoy motorists into being diverted onto other roads.

Also, the better solution in such cases is to make the road have 2 lanes in each direction and a central left turn lane.

The number of people driving 80mph through a residential area each year would be about the same as it is today: approximately zero. There are far fewer psychopaths than you think, and psychopaths are largely undissuaded by laws.

You don't have to be a psychopath to be young and inexperienced, nor to want to flaunt your disregard for safety.

My larger point is that smaller laws help curb behavior that leads to larger consequences.

If you're young and inexperienced, or want to flaunt your disregard for safety, a "Speed Limit 25" sign won't dissuade you either. It might even persuade you.

One thing with the 100% enforcement principle is that the majority of the laws being overturned today are those that never should have existed in the first place, because they were legislating morals where behavior never hurt anyone else besides their "beliefs". Any behavior that doesn't cause harm to another human being (which can ethically be argued to include oneself or not, but the former makes things much more complicated) should not be illegal. Behaviors proven to cause harm to other human beings (like the drunk driving you suggest), even if unintentional, have the effect of high likelihood of harm to others, and are also valid. Criminalize and legislate away things that harm others. And you need the ability to scientifically verify direct harm or exceedingly high correlations between behavior and harm to outlaw or regulate some behavior.

That means public nudity is legal, nothing about same sex should exist, you can smoke whatever you want (unless it kills you, or permanently maims you, which is why I think self-harm being legal is acceptable, and you should only criminalize the acts of harming others) but not be mentally compromised in public, you can grow whatever you want, you can bear firearms but not take them in public (unless unloaded), you would set speed limits to the first standard deviation of the average speed of a road (ie, the bounds of safety) rather than some arbitrary unrealistic number that causes everyone to speed, etc.

I mean, hell, you could make this very simple in what is criminal:

* Do not directly endanger others excessively through reckless behavior or use of dangerous tools.

* Do not actively hurt another through physical or excessive emotional violence (the latter would have to be extended mental trauma, not just calling someone a name).

And there you go. The first needs a jury to decide if it is a true endangerment in certain conduct, the latter is pretty straightforward, and it only gets murky if you consider ones ability to self-harm being outlawed, which makes a lot of behavior illegal.

Trying to extend them to animals gets complicated, but I figure the distinction is the act of causing pain and suffering vs killing for function. IE, don't endanger or harm other animals unless for the purposes of harvesting resources from them, and only do so causing as little suffering as possible, and that you can't "harvest" an animal owned by someone else (ie, don't murder your neighbors dog saying you wanted to eat dog steaks).

You can argue "harm" about anything. Especially if you include risk of harm. Under that model it would be valid to prohibit driving at any speed, owning a steak knife, etc., because there is some risk that activity poses to others.

The fundamental problem is proportionality. And the reason it's a problem is that perfect enforcement is impossible. The actual harm posed by driving down a residential street at 60MPH is not proportional to the existing penalties (i.e. reckless driving, jail time, suspension of license). You could do it a hundred times and likely nothing bad would happen. The problem is that a) if you do it 50,000 times then likely someone will be injured, and b) you can do it a hundred times and likely not be caught by law enforcement.

So here comes the trouble. If you set the penalty equal to the risk-adjusted harm (i.e. penalty for 60MPH in a residential zone is a $25 fine) then it serves as no deterrent because you'll only be caught less than 1% of the time which makes the risk-adjusted penalty 100 times less than the risk-adjusted harm. However, if you adjust the penalty to account for the low risk of getting caught, you now have a penalty which when imposed is disproportionate to the offense by a factor of 100 or more. Which is problematic when the effectiveness of enforcement increases without adjusting the penalties. And extremely problematic when the reason for enforcement ineffectiveness is that enforcement is expensive or unpopular, meaning that someone targeted for investigation (e.g. for political reasons) could be found violating many such laws in a way that wouldn't be financially or politically viable to investigate every member of the general public, and then be subject to 100X the proportional penalties for the offense(s) because the penalties were set under a set of assumptions about the effectiveness of investigation and enforcement that are invalidated when the investment of investigative resources is politically motivated.

How would property rights fit into this? Does vandalism cause harm to people?

Well yes, you are destroying their property. You harm others by destroying their things, both physically (it consumes time to replace them, it inconveniences them if the target of vandalism, theft, or other defamation becomes unusable, etc).

It is why I brought up pets as property, to cover animal cruelty. If someone else recognizably owns something in the legal system (via valid transaction recognized as voluntary exchange on the part of both parties) than someone else misusing that possession in any ways is grounds to cause harm to the owning party, given that the violence against property was not agreed upon (ie, the owner didn't say demolish my house in a contract).

Smoking in the presence of other people can harm them

And it's illegal to smoke outside of designated areas.

Where is the scientific evidence that bearing a loaded firearm in public harms other people?

You would need to do a long run study on the subject to verify it is the case, but from my intuition and the number of gun misfire cases I hear about, it would probably mathematically prove to have a recognizable increase in the rate of injury due to the firearm in public if it is loaded.

That´s the worst angle to look at this issue, though. It´s the way a white boy from a 1st world country would look at it.

Having many laws and inneficient law enforcement is the recipe for disaster. You just get corruption and lack of isonomy (poor people get jail, rich people get a bail for stupid crimes). Come to Brazil and marvel at the result of your theory. Police is inefficient, rich people get away from murder, and when they catch a poor criminal they execute for banal crimes (e.g., drug posession) with the understanding the judiciary doesn´t work.

What you want is less bogus laws around individual liberties rather than less law enforcement.

This is exactly the scenario I was trying to describe. In a world where we're all technically violating the law at some point, and where we're all being monitored intensively, then it's essentially up to those in power to "decide" who is punished and who isn't, without any real standard of measure. In that world, it seems pretty clear who ends up in jail and who doesn't. ACAB.

Conversely, if we lived in the same world of intensive surveillance, but where law enforcement was instead 100% efficient, we wouldn't have the often valuable ability to break the law.

It's possible to say that we should have better laws, or different laws, or only the "right" laws. But we don't actually have any agency over that (or to the extent that we do, it's often a result of breaking those laws). What we do have some agency over is the internet, and the technical means to stymie surveillance.

> Conversely, if we lived in the same world of intensive surveillance, but where law enforcement was instead 100% efficient, we wouldn't have the often valuable ability to break the law.

You can break the law. You just can't avoid punishment. Difference is subtle, but important.

My country lived 20 years in a dictatorship but the people breaking the law (including intellectuals/communists from middle class), for good or for worse, were the ones that forced a change back into democracy. Now the president is an "ex-terrorist", and we have superfluous legislation and bad law enforcement because the ones now in power abhor it. The result is corruption and crime.

This is just arguing two sides of the same crap (paternal, surveillance state in one side; granny, lenient state in the other) without changing the rules of the game (e.g., less state).

>You can break the law. You just can't avoid punishment. Difference is subtle, but important.

Yes and no. If you can break the law and the penalty is tolerable then you can get the same result as if enforcement is less than completely effective: People break the law and just take their lumps.

The trouble is that when a movement is only just getting started and doesn't yet have popular support, the first thing the government will try to do in the face of people taking their lumps is to ratchet up the penalties to try to deter them. And then, against perfect enforcement, the number of people willing to break the law falls off a cliff because it isn't worth spending decades in prison for the vast majority of would-be supporters -- or if it is then all the supporters end up imprisoned indefinitely or executed and the movement fails.

It is a terrible way to look at it, even if you're white, because you can always be the wrong kind of white person.

Where I grew up, kids on the hockey team, or whose dad owned the car dealership, would repeatedly get away with drunk driving and beating up their girlfriends, whereas poor kids were regularly taken down to the station for skateboarding, even though there were no laws against it.

I'm not an American, and my country is, especially now, poorer than the parent's (he said Brasil, IIRC).

Nothing about some "white boy perspective" to what I said.

That's based on a misunderstanding about what I meant by saying the police should not be totally efficient.

Less efficient != discrimination.

Less efficient != corruption.

It's not a two way association. One could say that a "corrupt police" is "less efficient" but the inverse is not true.

If anything, with it being less efficient, in the way I describe, FEWER poor, black, "wrong kind of white" etc people will actually get caught.

That's like saying two wrongs make a right.

I agree with cold tea actually, at least to a point.

Robust liberties and clear restraints on law enforcement powers at the expense of law enforcement efficiency are a cornerstone of liberty and have been everywhere and throughout history.

The reason why it is only to a point though is that less efficient police driven to maintain quotas will typically focus on the poor who are less able to defend themselves. Most of the data i have seen suggests that there are not major class differences in drug use in the US, but there are huge class differences in enforcement because buying habits are different and so it takes more police work to bust the middle class than it does the poor.

I think that this is one of those cases where we have a perpetual social problem which cannot be remedied by automating the system.

Which they often do, hence the proverb.

They don't, and it's logical fallacy to boot.

The actual proverb is "two wrongs don't make a right".

Yep, I think you get the idea about "white boy from 1st world" though... Someone from a "higher caste", with more influence in the society or who can afford lawyers.

>Having many laws and inneficient law enforcement is the recipe for disaster. You just get corruption and lack of isonomy (poor people get jail, rich people get a bail for stupid crimes). Come to Brazil and marvel at the result of your theory.

Those are not the results of "my theory". Heck that's not my theory either!

First, who said anything about "many laws"? I'm also against having too many laws.

Second, inefficiency != lack of isonomy. Or rather, it can lead to random lack of isonomy (ie. whether rich or poor, colored or not) -- which is not the same as the situation you describe, which is about inequality of law enforcement between rich and poor.

For example, if the police cannot demand a drug testing, then neither rich nor poor can be found with 100% certainty after having taken some. If the police cannot demand your ISP records, then they have a harder time enforcing 100% crackdown on piracy, whether you are rich or poor etc etc.

I was talking about "less efficiency", in the sense of being against giving those kind of "enablers" (which make 100% enforcement a closer possibility) to the police.

Not in favour of discriminating between rich and poor.

>What you want is less bogus laws around individual liberties rather than less law enforcement.

That's good too, but my point was another. That even for good laws, total enforcement of them would make a nightmarish situation. A couple of examples:

1) I wouldn't want everybody to have free reign to spray paint anything they wish. But I'd like for people determined and willing to express something to be able to do it, even if it means I also have to stand some people that just spray BS tags.

2) I wouldn't want all people to go 150 miles on the highway whenever they like. But if the road is empty, it's straight for miles, and you have a nice car, I wouldn't like people to not be able to step on it for some innocent fun.

In this case, fines and speed cops are OK. But not devices like "compulsory speed control" on all cars, or "total speed radar tracking" on all roads, which would enable something like 100% enforcement of the speed limit.

So, when I talk about less "efficiency", I mean not enabling the police to the point of it being a total control state for every aspect of people's lives.

A lot of the times, some of the improvements to society, art, morals, etc, come by breaking the law. Rosa Parks, IIRC, broke the law that day, too.

Your speeding example is a great example on why being able to get away from infraction isn't the holy grail.

Automatic fines reinforces isonomy (everybody is fined equally), and that's a good thing. If some people can game the system, regulation is useless (traffic turns into survival of the fittest, it's game theory).

If someone feels like speeding for civil disobedience, they still can, the state is not making it impossible to (it would if cars couldn't go over limit, for technical reasons). So one can break the law, but face the consequence as everybody else, and argue on the legal system wether this is fair or not. That's what judges and public opinion are for.

When enough people break the law, either the legislation changes or the people change the legislators. But you need penalties being applied to cause pressure for change, otherwise you only get inertia in the legislative.

I actually think that fewer laws and more limits on law enforcement practices is the way to go. I am not that thrilled about isonomy because I think that history shows that isonomy never really is implemented and in fact merely shifts power towards those deciding how the laws are to be enforced.

Look for example at our experience in the US with mandatory sentencing guidelines. This was done to take away leeway in sentencing from judges and in the name of isonomy.

What happened however was different. The problem is that not all cases of a crime are created equal and so instead of judges having sentencing discretion, that was put in the hands of the prosecutor (who would then decide when to prosecute a lesser included offence).

The result is quite striking when you look at drug prosecutions today. It's not law enforcement that makes the difference but prosecutorial discretion. The problem is that human life does not really admit of a situation where a purely mechanical view of justice actually does justice. Total isonomy would not be a justice system but merely one which distributes injustice equally and blindly.

I don't there is a way around this, and I think further we are better just openly admitting that isonomy is neither attainable nor desirable, but instead work to ensure that we really try to ensure real justice and hold people accountable, from the grass roots, for their decisions.

I feel kind of divided on this... I mostly agree, but we also need to think about the consequences of selective enforcement. Cannabis-related arrests, for example, seem to be disproportionately focused on people of color, which may have softened the perceived damage of cannabis prohibition among whites. In other words: we can get away with it, so it's not really a big deal that it's still illegal.

Again, I'm not saying I want a 100% effective police state, but these are problems we have to grapple with. The salience of an issue will often depend on how much it affects you personally. Selective enforcement may diminish the motivation to protest unfair laws within populations that tend to escape said enforcement. In fact, most of the things you mentioned probably shouldn't be crimes to begin with, but I bet many people don't feel strongly enough to protest them because they assume most people can break those laws without punishment. Some people aren't so lucky though.

>I feel kind of divided on this... I mostly agree, but we also need to think about the consequences of selective enforcement.

Oh, I agree. I wasn't advocating selective enforcement. Just less EFFICIENT enforcement.

That is, that the police/government should not be allowed the means (even if they were available) to suppress crime 100% or even 90%.

Even for crimes we all agree are abhorable, like murder. I wouldn't trade freedom and privacy etc to have some way to prevent murders (from current surveillance to some futuristic chip implant in your head to prevent you from committing it). I'd rather live with some potential danger, than with several leashes.

Of course... I understand that your comment wasn't advocating that we only arrest poor people, etc. I'm just curious about a hypothetical: if we DID live in a dystopia where nobody could get away with anything, would this perhaps lead to more civic engagement in protesting unjust laws?

Laws that are easy to break are easy to ignore. But these laws can still be used by a government entity as a legal weapon against you, and that seems a bit scary.

>if we DID live in a dystopia where nobody could get away with anything, would this perhaps lead to more civic engagement in protesting unjust laws?

Perhaps. But it could also be the other way: that in such a dystopia, protesting and civic engagement would also be more difficult if not impossible.

E.g anything beyond voting between a couple of candidates you are given. A dystopia that would enable the police like that, will in all probability also have laws prohibiting public assembly, rallying, etc.

And on top of that, they could also enforce any BS laws to dissidents -- since, with 100% efficiency, they could always find something to pin on them.

> some futuristic chip implant in your head to prevent you from committing it

Just curious, are you thinking of The Alliance?

In fact I believe laws should be designed to require selective enforcement. It's the only way to make the laws as simple and concise as they need to be.

Snowden is a great example of this. He demonstrably has broken the law, the law itself has a valid purpose.

Without selective enforcement he is in for a heap of shit because how do you design a law ahead-of-time that accounts for every possible nuance of how the greater public good might outweigh the risk to national security of analysts routinely disclosing classified information? We here on HN can't even design websites and programs that are secure and the computers do exactly what we tell them do, the legal code has to deal both with human agents who screw up and smart individuals looking for loopholes.

But with selective enforcement we can keep the law simple: "Don't leak classified information", and then allow for public outcry (or common sense) to prosecutors or the POTUS to ensure that he's either not tried, or even has an eventual sentence reduced or commuted.

Even now we live in a country where the police routinely don't 100% enforce the law even without invasive oversight, so it's obvious that merely having the police know about lawbreaking alone doesn't inevitably lead to trouble; oftentimes they care even less than the public does as it results in more paperwork for them.

Aristotle advised that laws should cover the general case and judges the particular. Hence the saying, "Hard cases make bad law." There is always a need to interpret. So the computerization of guilt or even "fishing" is very scary. Privacy is a buffer that helps build "selective enforcement" into any law that gets made.

We know that in the civil sphere getting sued is so bad it often doesn't matter whether you win or lose: the mere threat is enough to compel or punish. Likewise in the criminal sphere, people often settle rather than fight, which would mean bankruptcy and the risk of worse jail time. Now imagine in the criminal sphere if a computer could look at everything you wrote and raise a flag every time something looked suspicious. It's important to have a buffer, some kind of resistance that must be overcome before subjecting people to that. Hence the Fourth Amendment.

The term "selective enforcement" seems to imply that laws are enforced at the whim of the enforcers, which strikes me as an undesirable property of a legal system. It seems to me that selective enforcement, if present at all, should work the other way around: occasionally choosing to acquit, rather than occasionally choosing to enforce.

"Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature. So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world." (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant#Groundwork_of_th...)

> It seems to me that selective enforcement, if present at all, should work the other way around: occasionally choosing to acquit, rather than occasionally choosing to enforce

Do you mean going through the trial and then occasionally choosing to impose a null sentence, as opposed to skipping the trial altogether?

Otherwise I'm not sure how what you propose is different, given that there are so many levels of enforcement within a legal system.

The military is in fact struggling with that issue right now, with debates on sexual harassment in the military taking up a lot of time in the House and Senate. And in fact it seems that Congress will probably remove the ability of the court-martial convening authority to acquit someone at all, due to abuses of that power. So there is no panacea.

Much as your quote seems to imply, there is really only the consideration of what scheme would work best overall. And right now selective acquittal (as opposed to selective enforcement) is destroying the credibility of the military on sexual harrassment issues.

As soon as you go that route though you have to admit that the purpose of the law is to punish people for the crime of being infamous and nothing else really matters.

Maybe that is a tradeoff we should make. I am not yet convinced. My concern is that as soon as you say "let's make this flexible" you ensure that we can find something to charge people with if we want.

The famous and rich have managed to get out of laws that were clearly and explicitly applicable to them.

The problem is not the law itself in those cases, it is the people enforcing the law. If your cops and judges can be bribed then no law or defense is ironclad, "selective enforcement" or not.

However, being infamous is not sufficient to be criminal.

The Chinese experimented with strict enforcement in the Qin Dynasty, following the philosophy of Han Feizi (Legalism). It sounds like it was a big failure. I'm sure there have been other such experiments. The Law is not a computer program.

The Law is full of legacy cruft, and is based on philosophies that largely predate empiricism. Has there ever been an attempt to design a legal system based on modern engineering principles? Laws are as much about systems as about people. When you want to understand people you might rely on a politician, but to understand systems you should rely on engineers.

The engineers that designed the RBMK reactor used for Chernobyl, the ones that designed the USS Thresher which was crushed with all hands after a combined failure of its emergency ballast tank blow and steam propulsion system, or the ones who designed the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia?

This is not to say that we can't improve the legal system. But if engineering has taught me anything, it's that it will always be prudent to design a relief/safety valve into the system.

Chernobyl, Challenger, and Columbia are examples of systems where engineers were constrained by politicians.

I hadn't heard of the USS Thresher before today, but I did just read a bit of the Wikipedia article.

When a disaster occurs in engineering, the lessons learned are applied to the next design. When a disaster occurs in politics, the other party gets its turn to cause the next disaster.

Engineering isn't engineering without constraints... it's just spending an unbounded amount of time and money on a thing ( or science, in some terms). Engineers are obligated to not work on a project which cannot be safely completed within guidelines. You can't push off that obligation elsewhere: if you design a building, and that building falls over, you need to justify why. You can't say they asked you to make it cheaper; you either find a way to make it safe and cheaper, or you don't do it.

This isn't to say that nobody makes mistakes, but it's worth remembering that engineering is applied science. It's not practiced in a vacuum, it takes into account economic and political influences and balances them against public well being. The buck stops with engineers.

Of course everything has constraints, and a social system will have political constrains.

Yet, those systems had "accidents" only after politicians overrided the engineers and acted against their recommendation. Using them as evidence that engineers create systems that are as flawed as the ones created by politicians is wrong.

Anyway, it seems that we still can't engineer social systems. It may be either because the political interference inherent on it makes it impossible, or because we just don't have the right technology... Or maybe we can, and PRISM is the kind of tool that makes it possible. Engineers create all kinds of systems, for all kinds of reasons, well intented or not.

My point is that engineers have no recourse to complaining about being 'overridden'. Politicians don't act; they don't build space shuttles, they don't design nuclear reactors. They give a high level set of orders which engineers either fulfill safely, or not at all. As an example:

In the case of Chernobyl, the problem was actually inexperienced plant operators running an experiment about disaster recovery on a reactor with a positive void coefficient and poorly designed control rods. The positive void coefficient was a limitation of our nuclear design capabilities at the time, the control rods were just poorly designed by some engineer. Either of those factors could have prevented the disaster, and neither of them can be attributed to any politician.

>When a disaster occurs in engineering, the lessons learned are applied to the next design.

And how does that work for software engineering thus far?

What we know of it, is that errors tend to repeat themselves, and little is learned from design to design, especially across projects and teams.

Software engineering is much more like law than civic engineering.

So, it's quite invalid to compare law (which deals with people, perceptions, norms, ever shifting societies and situations, intentions and other delicate situations) with some well known ways to build things with very tangible, hard physical constrains and behavior.

And how does that work for software engineering thus far?

Quite well, in the long run. Ten years ago we had mountains of buffer overflow-ridden web software written in C++ being replaced by SQL-injection-vulnerable Perl and PHP. Twenty-five years ago the Morris worm easily found its way onto thousands of systems.

Now, tools like Valgrind help detect buffer overflows and other memory access problems, ORMs help prevent SQL injection, stringent standards are used for development of safety-critical systems (e.g. MISRA-C), and automated testing is much more widespread. Naive software developers still make naive mistakes, but as a whole, the industry is much better protected against known mistakes.

This. I've been thinking a lot about this (not particularly hard, admittedly) lately. I suppose the main problem would be that those in power, i.e. politicians, will mostly be out of a job once such a task were to be undertaken.

>no child that wants to be a graphic designer could ever pirate Photoshop

More Gimp users? ;)

But on a serious note, I completely agree with you. Perfect, law-following society will not have any social progress.

Laws are not perfect, and they will never be. But some people often treat them like they are. They prefer following laws instead of using their brain to decide what's wrong and what's right, and it's really dangerous to society.

Laws are based on morals, and what people think is right thing to do, not the other way around.

This sounds extremely common sense, but I've met too many people who do not seem to understand this.

I get the point he is trying to make, but my problem with this argument is that it seems to be based on an idea that the default is that a thing is illegal until a law explicitly allows it, which is contrary to the way I've always understood things to be.

In other words, in some (perhaps distant) past, marijuana was not illegal until a legislator decided to pass a law prohibiting its use.

“I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast.” - Ronald Reagan

Marijuana prohibition was pushed by Reagan because he didn´t liked hippies, not based on anything palpable.

Problem is not law enforcement, it´s the way bogus legislation gets pushed on "democracy" without direct involvement of the people.

it seems to be based on an idea that the default is that a thing is illegal until a law explicitly allows it.

I didn't get that idea at all, and I think you are misreading it. Many examples are given of things that recently were or still are explicitly illegal.

If you want to read up on when Marijuana was made illegal, you can start here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_history_of_cannabis_in_th... but I'm not sure of the relevance.

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EDIT WARNING: as soon as I posted I noticed someone deleted the parent comment... it commented something like some crimes (like murder, rape and "stealing my iPhone") always have no defense.

Some things, exist and are possible for good reasons...

People might condemn me and think I am some sort of crazy satanist for believing that even rape has its use...

For most part, rape is utterly evil and should be harshly punished, yet sometimes it was needed, and it might be needed again (I hope not, of course).

Also, how you get 100% effective in getting rid of murder, without also getting rid of soldiers, security guards, hunters or even construction workers? Well, then you need to separate intentional murder, from unintentional one (like a construction worker dropping a hammer from his toolbox into the head of a random person nearby the construction site), but even then, you end with issues like: if law was 100% effective, how you separate the preemptive killing of a armed rapist from murder?

Being a soldier and engaging a suspect enemy spy on your land is murder if he ends dead?

What if your iPhone has the only password needed to open a door to some secure building on fire, and you for whatever reason refuse to give it, it is wrong to steal your iPhone to save a life?

We cannot have 100% effective law enforcement, because there is no such thing of black and white issues on crime, several criminals do not believe themselves to be some sort of evil creature, yes, evil exists, but sometimes the actions of a criminal are just actions that you do not understand the motivation.

Interesting post... but I am not sure I can think up a situation where rape was, or could be, needed?

People might condemn me and think I am some sort of crazy satanist for believing that even rape has its use...

Please explain its use?

It lets the people know who to boil alive first when anarchy finally descends on the land.

really curious what you mean when you say rape can be "needed"...

Obviously, to reproduce when there is no better alternative.

Thankfully, we are very, very, very long ways from that right now...

But nature developed that behavior for a reason...

Obviously, to reproduce when there is no better alternative.

Thankfully, we are very, very, very long ways from that right now...

I doubt that rape was ever needed for the population to reproduce. Why do you think it was needed?

But nature developed that behavior for a reason...

Reason, yes, but not purpose. It may simply be a side-effect that didn't suffer enough evolutionary pressure to be extinguished. See male nipples, for example.

Pressure? What makes you think the pressure is against it?

Evolution operates on genes, not groups; not even individuals, really. Genes that somehow code for rape[1][2] will spread if and only if its carriers reproduce. The "use" of rape, then, should be fairly obvious: If successful, it lets its carrier reproduce.

Any such adaption is bound to be situational, as a healthy relationship is far more likely to produce surviving offspring, then and now. It'll be an "If you cannot get a girlfriend, then get urges towards rape" kind of thing, though typically enough there'll be a lot of variation in that.

There will not, however, be even the slightest degree of adaption in terms of what is best for the group. Group selection doesn't exist, outside of extreme laboratory conditions.

1: Or anything else.

2: Please don't read that as suggesting there might be a single "rape gene". Anything to do with the brain is really, really complex.

What makes you think the pressure is against it?

I don't.

Population replenishment?

Remind me of Orson Scott Card's story (Ender in Exile), in which human crews building off-world colonies consisted of many more women than men (and temporarily allowed for polygamous relationships) to bootstrap the population faster.

This ties into what Nassim Taleb says about fragility and "antifragility" -- a society that allows certain transgressions (to a degree) can be more robust and healthier. Arguably, we have that now. For example, selective enforcement of the law when celebrities and rich, influential people commit certain offenses.

Insignificant example but very annoying to me nonetheless: my last two times using PayByPhone for parking in San Francisco ended up with two tickets, one timed 1 minute following expiration and the other, 2 minutes. I can only suspect that usage of PayByPhone is placing a big fat bullseye on your car for ticketing.

> [...] teenagers could never drink a beer, [...]

Or you could just have decent laws. Most European states get the alcohol laws mostly right.

Obviously this is a strawman. Even North Korea does not have 100% compliance.

No, it's a thought experiment.

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