User:MaxEnt

I'm also MaxEnt at en.Wikipedia, and more likely to receive notifications there. MaxEnt 20:25, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Against unmaintained complexity

In addition to some practical views, I have a meta view on software patents that this is one of many examples where the legal system gets away with sloppy refactoring (in the Lessig sense of law as code) promulgating an unnecessary social burden. I'd like to see the software engineering community infuse the legal profession with some hard-won lessons about deleting code that causes too many problems before building further on an uncertain foundation.

Imagine in software if you had to read every revision in the version history to gain certainty about what the software actually does. Unbearable. Imagine if a program only produced meaningful results in the presence of a certified software professional. The legal profession has managed to outsource much of the complexity burden (to their paying clients) in a way that doesn't strike me as prudent or socially sustainable in a society contending with exponential technology growth. This is not a good omen for some of our near term global challenges.

What I would give to see the day when a legislator has to run the text of the proposed legislation through a legislation compiler, which spits out:

error: invalid legislation: clarity violation on line 337
error: invalid legislation: complexity explosion on line 1219
error: unterminated chain: the legislative intent of William of Orange is unknown 
...
Too many errors.  Compilation halted. 

Many of the people who complain about the burden of big government are the same people who welcome the climbing vines of big litigation. Do we really want the software profession tangled up with a code base (intellectual property law) with no established tradition of refactoring against intrinsic complexity constraints? Absolutely not. There's no possible way this unholy marriage expedites innovation.

This is fundamentally a systems theory perspective. How long can we continue to ignore the systems theory perspective considering the trajectory of modern society? Is it the case that as the semantic web comes to fruition over the next 25 years that the next generation will become accustomed to instantaneous clarity on any subject posed? Except law?

Query

Is is legal to do X?

Semantic web response

No one really knows. Here are 500 confounding factors weighted by case history and recent judicial trends. IANAL. Only your lawyer is qualified to help you throw your personal dart at the moving dart board.

Then the average person might finally get it in a visceral way, that the community of law needs to conscientiously limit the sway of speculative archaeology.