[FRIAM] From Merle--AI News

[Steve Smith]

> glen wrote:
>> IDK. The implication that we already have laws that cover (80%?) of 
>> the use cases for new tech we, as a society, want to discourage, is a 
>> good default. It resists the "there ought to be a law" sensibility 
>> held by old people and curmudgeons everywhere. And it keeps our legal 
>> system a little more adaptive than it would be were we to burden it 
>> with even more persnickety case-by-case rulings.

>> sas> I try to hear "there oughtta be a law" as pining for a new and 
>> relevant heuristic where the old one(s) don't work (well)?

<episode 1>

    In my early coding years I remember coming to the simultaneous
    understanding that the bulk of most systems/code is "exception
    handling" and that most inexperienced coders tend to ignore the
    edge/corner cases until forced (by iterated releases with real users
    as their test-load) and spaghetti up their solutions one exception
    at a time, and sometimes if they don't abstract their exceptions
    well enough the exception handling expands geometrically (with
    exceptions to the exceptions, recursively).


<episode 2>

    In my Private Investigator years I spent my share of time in /law
    offices/ and /courthouses/ and rubbing shoulders with /law
    enforcement/...  I came to understand that these too were episystems
    on top of episystems with a scissors/paper/stone circularity built
    into the system to attenuate runaway behaviour by each "branch" of
    government (and/or it's agents).

    The law libraries were dominated in volume and complexity by
    case-law which felt to me to be nothing other than edge-corner
    case/exception-handling...   Most of my clients represented
    plaintiffs in civil cases, a few defendants.   Only those with big
    bucks pursued legal-action, lawyers (and court fees and PIs) being
    expensive and only those in desperate circumstance could muster the
    resources to fight back (see DJT's strategy as taught to him by Roy
    Cohn).

    The lawyers (and the rest of us by extension) thrived on this
    "tangled web of mal-complexity" and I had the (mis)fortune of
    listening in to lawyers and paralegals discuss how they would
    exploit these tangles for their clients...  even to the point of
    trying to enlist me in throwing some extra tanglage into the
    equation myself.

<episode 2.2>

    I stayed above that where I recognized it, trying to refactor my
    client intake process, leading me to my own exception handling: e.g.

     1. Divorces with children
     2. Divorces with pets
     3. Divorces

     1. Insurance claim denial
     2. Insurance claims
     3. Insurance companies as claimant or defendant

     1. Distressed Real Estate Foreclosures
     2. Real Estate Foreclosures
     3. Real Estate Transactions

     1. /ad//
        /
     2. /nauseum/
     3. /infinitum/

<episode 2.99>

    by the time I graduated college I was well over-done with this work
    which lead me almost exclusively to seeing (feeling, smelling,
    tasting) the seamy underbelly of my community (and the world by
    extension).  I began with: "I will only take righteous cases"  and
    ended with "there are no righteous cases".

    <episode 3>So I doubled down and went to Los Alamos to help make
    weapons of mass destruction under the premise of MAD! I considered
    investigative journalism for a few minutes instead... but for /seamy
    underbelly/ problem and the allure of /Nuclear
    Weapons-as-fundamental-physics-and-reality-insight/ I might have
    gone there.

<episode N>

    Thankfully I have aged out on a lot of that and am happy to defer
    most of the "hard questions" to Sabine Hossenfelder  and Randall
    Munroe who are much smarter and more clever at expressing it than I
    ever will be or have been!

    I just watched her very convincing episode on why free will is an
    illusion.  I found her very convincing, but realize that she and I
    had absolutely no choice in the matter of being compelling or
    compelled...   I  have the illusion that I'm one step closer to
    Satori now...  until Glen hits me with a stick again!

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