I don't disagree, but I want to share a comic irony:
"For example, our concepts of mass, time and space, and many concepts built on these, are pretty stiff."
One of the original triggers of cultural floppiness, on a par with Marx, Nietzsche, and quantum mechanics, was the change in our concepts of mass, time and space.
There's another irony here, in that what Einstein's relativity actually did was /eliminate/ relativity from physics (which is why he hated it when people started calling it "relativity theory"). It didn't show that the laws of physics are subjective. Very recent observations had /seemed/ to prove that they were; and Einstein restored objectivity to physics by proving that Newton's conceptions of mass, time, and space were /objectively/ wrong. Yes, he showed "time" and "space" aren't real in the Platonic sense. /And provided better alternatives./
The more-important thing Einstein did, with far greater consequences, was to prove that the nominalist view of the meaning of words is superior to all logocentric views such as realism, essentialism, and Platonism. AFAIK, not a single person in the humanities* has understood either of these points in the 119 years since.
Originalism as a philosophy of legal interpretation that itself is bolstered by 'stiff' commitment has the effect of stiffening law over time as it tries to anchor and lock in to what was thought at a particular time, place, and context, usually long enough in the past such that those involved in the drafting are deceased and some track record of case law near to that time and context helps to establish that original meaning with minimal wiggle room for latter day jurists who want to interpret that particular law in a floppy way.
I think there's a really good central point here, but a better metaphor than stiff vs floppy might be elastic vs plastic deformation at the boundaries. Every concept has some elastic limit, and can recover from small deviations. But, larger deviations can permanently reshape and distort it.
"Thou shalt not kill" has a very high elastic limit. All the murders and executions and wars in history haven't changed the underlying idea that killing humans is bad and people shouldn't do it. We keep snapping back to it.
"This is the word we use to refer to people whose ancestors lived in Africa until a few hundred years ago" has a low elastic limit. It takes a much smaller push to change irreversibly.
Note: I suspect you can also find natural analogies for the variables that affect elastic limit (temperature, purity) as well as tensile/compressive/shear strength for the different forces that induce conceptual strain.
Except... "Thou shalt not kill" was a maltranslation, deliberate or accidental. The original meaning of that phrase is more along the lines of "Thou shalt not murder", with the implication being that some killing was A-OK.
Any time someone starts slinging biblical ideas at you, it's always wise to first examine the translation they're using, and the biases of the translation. King James has an awful lot about the "Divine Right of Kings" in it, and very little about what duties the king owes the commoner, something that's pretty damn convenient when you consider the where/when of that translation. The reading I've done of earlier translations and more modern ones would tend to indicate that the commission working for King James had certain goals in mind...
The main risk would be using an incomplete framework that neglects pertinent factors that can't be easily quantified, and aren't economic in nature.
For example, on the basis of economics one could make compelling arguments to create financial markets for human organs, or for babies up for adoption. How many matters of legal importance are *only* economic in nature?
When the Supreme Court makes a ruling, they write a long explanation of the original purpose and justification of the law, the issues to consider in its application, and how they conclude the law should be used. This explanation is not technically law, but is used to interpret the law from then on.
Would it be better to require the legislators who write any new law, to also write just such an exegesis /before it can be passed/?
I think that most law in our system doesn't work because the idjits writing those laws have no idea at all how "things really work" out in the real world.
The very arrogance embedded in the idea "Imma gonna fix this problem by passing a law/writing a memo/making a rule" is the inherent problem with all of this idiocy.
Most of the people subscribing to this pattern of dealing with the world are abstractionists that live inside their heads, and who never go outside and actually observe the real world, or the actual impact of their attempts at modifying things.
If you really want to "fix" a problem, you first need to understand it. No understandee, no fixee...
And, most problems involving "law" are generally behavioral; people are doing things you don't want them doing, for whatever reason. You want to "fix" those problems, then you need to go out and look at the things in their environment that are influencing their behavior.
Think of the way some canny civil engineers lay out sidewalks in new construction: They don't. At first.
They allow the users to demonstrate what paths they use in the new facilities, and then the canny civil engineer goes out and paves those paths. This is a technique they call "following the desire path". And, the desire path is that which the user is doing, in the course of daily life getting around the facility. You don't want them walking a certain path? You need to figure out why, and then modify whatever is cuing them to walk that path; simply putting up a sign or a fence ain't going to do the job. They'll ignore it, walk around it, or otherwise subvert your intent of blocking them from taking that path.
Way too many people who are "in charge" really have no idea what they are doing, or how to get things done within the institutions they run. That goes double for the idjit class we elect to our legislatures, most of whom are truly sub-par creatures only capable of winning the popularity contests we call elections.
When you're "in charge" of things, you really have to model the world around you as a succession of Skinner Boxes, and every Skinner Box as being a part of the conversation that each individual has with their environment. You want the individual to do things differently? Then, you have to understand that conversation and work within it; if the individual gets what they want from that individual Skinner Box, then they're going to keep right on doing it, regardless of what you want or what you wrote in your precious little law or memo. Likewise, if the environmental cue that they're getting says "Don't do what the boss is saying...", then they're not going to do it. Ever.
The majority of our "leadership" simply does not get this concept, because we never teach it or bring it out. They're all selected, trained, and conditioned such that they think that whatever they imagine within the confines of their very limited minds is what is real; they believe, truly believe, that they bring reality into being by thinking about it, and that they can simply change reality by expressing their thoughts.
You have to go out into the world and look at things, exactly the way a good civil engineer lays out sidewalks. It's not what you think about where those sidewalks need to go, it's what the environment is telling the people using your facility about where they need to go, and how to get there most efficiently. For their needs, not your loony imaginings...
This is why every law ought to come with a statement of intended purpose, a set of criteria it is supposed to meet, and a time limit whereupon it will be looked at for effectiveness. If it ain't meeting the stated intent? Buh-bye...
Example: "This bill is meant to reduce homelessness; currently, the homeless population in our jurisdiction is X. If that isn't reduced to Y by year Z, then the law established by this bill is null and void."
We don't do that, so the cruft keeps building up until it chokes out the system. This is possibly by intent of the idjit class we elect, because with no actual objective performance goals stated, they can keep the grift going until we run out of money...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to a first approximation I am rounding this question to "Is a common law or civil law system better?" AKA whose job is it to say what the law is and means, between the legislature and judiciary?
In a civil law system it's easier to know in advance what is and isn't allowed. In a common law system there is more freedom for courts to handle unanticipated problems with laws and their implementation. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
Overall, I think it would be better to have more well-thought-out laws written in simpler, harder to re-interpret language; combined with a legislature that is much more willing to repeal, amend, and pass new laws; under a common-law system judiciary still willing and able to interpret edge cases when they're ones the legislators genuinely hadn't considered.
I have no idea how to achieve that. Based on how these systems exist in the world today, I tend to prefer common law systems to civil law systems. Ambiguity lets people take risks and try new things and operate in a gray area, hopefully long enough for law to catch up, or with enough ambiguity to persuade a judge when cases do arise where things should be legal but might not be.
It'd be wise to revisit the entire purpose behind a legal system.
What is it?
I'd submit that anyone with the idea that the purpose is to provide some abstract ideal of "perfect justice" is delusional, at best. Ain't nobody short of God himself going to manage that feat, and the idea that a mere human would make the attempt? The height of self-deluded arrogance.
I would submit to you that any legal system conceived of and managed by human beings is going to be imperfect, regardless of intent. Because of that, we have to look at what social function this system performs for us, and it ain't the provision of some high-concept absolute whose meaning none of us can agree on in the first place.
The fundamental social function fulfilled by the "legal/justice system" is effectively this: Behavioral control and the modification of improper behavior by those demonstrating it. There's nothing else there to explain it; it's a tool we use to make living together in groups tolerable and possible. As such, you have to evaluate what the effect of your "legal system" is, within the general population: Does it encourage people to behave with propriety and avoid transgressing on their neighbors? Does it operate to ensure that people peacefully allow the mechanisms of the system to usurp their own very personal desire for vengeance and blood-debt upon those who transgress upon them? Do people feel satisfied, knowing that the courts have done their job, had their say? Are they willing to grant those courts primacy in these questions?
If your answers to that are negatives, then you've got problems and are a long way down the road towards vigilance committees and open violence in the streets. People are what people are, and if the justice system you've set up isn't answering their needs for modifying and checking the behavior of the people encroaching on them, well... Don't be real surprised when individual "justice" does what the internet does, and routes around failure. If enough people come to believe that calling 911 is useless, and that the crooks they catch in the act won't be punished and indeed, will likely be released? Do not, I pray you, be very surprised when said criminals wind up subject to informal street "justice" of a very lethal and highly creative sort.
Justice as an ideal is nice, but it's a luxury belief system that isn't really real, and has nothing to do with daily life. You are not God; do not think you can play him in real life. The best that you can accomplish is an attempt to curb some behaviors and encourage others; if you don't do either of those two well enough, you need to be prepared for people to step in and do your job for you.
There's a reason that the old truism about cops existing not to protect the public, but to protect the criminal from the public. Street justice is ugly, unfair, and generally excessive; you cease to provide the behavioral checks and curbs, be ready for someone else to do that, with emphasis. Also, be prepared for those people that you catch doing that to be rather hard to convict, what with jury nullification and the ineffectuality of your own courts with the truly criminal.
There ain't nothing out there saying that our current system is the way we have to do it. It's entirely possible that something new will come along, and that it won't look a bit like today's dysfunctional shambolic state of affairs.
Our basic values are fairly firmly rooted in our biology. Food, warmth and orgasms are rewarding, while pain and suffering are disvalued. Culture can affect values sometimes. For example, if someone becomes addicted to opiods, then that could be modeled as a change in their values. Religious conversion is another example. However, it can be challenging to distinguish between value changes and belief changes. Valuing opiods is similar to learning that they are valuable. Valuing god is like learning about god's importance.
Isn't it a bit simpler than people think. The basic or core concepts of a society's culture are elastic with things that don't matter, ie fashion or music, but more rigid with those that do. Try and move the stiff concepts past a certain point and the society breaks down to be replaced by anarchy and eventually a new culture. I think history is replete with examples of this. Arguing semantics about definitions can further understanding but doesn't alter the core culture points, and it's a given that not every culture shares all the same values, though many do overlap.
This seems actually very valuable in terms of civilisation building. A couple thoughts maybe:
Empires often rise and fall in part due to culture drift in a negative direction (i.e. waste of resources) and cultural drift is often because our culture re: the concepts such as our values imbedded in floppy concepts re: humanities/arts/etc. Our systems of humanities/art makes less direct progress if not regression due to (obviously inherent implications (such as defining what progress even is)), or at least in part due to how floppy they are.
On the whole humans are incetivised for themselves and not even in the long term but to justify immediate pleasure. This means motions in larger societies that are wealthy will seem to naturally tend towards the justification of desire (even if such desire is "higher order" like God or Altruism). However if we implemented philosophy of science style grounding for the humanties/art (and anything to do with culture/values) for the sake of our culture, perhaps we can make culture more stiff and less prone to cultural drift?
This is not to limit progress or debate (as shown extensively by the success of other stiff concepts like STEM and econ, where meta discussions can and should be had), but instead limit *backward* movement. Now of course comes the question of what is backwards movement vs. forward. There seem to be very obviously some wasteful (harmful in terms of resources) activity/unfulfilling (harmful in terms of happiness) activity to a population practicing any culture.
At the very least memetics derived from a stiff conception seem to outcompete other memetics that are floppy in terms of progress (in terms of real benefit (defined almost however one likes) to those who practice it). Aditionally, I value human prosperity (or so I think) so I quite like a civilisation that promotes free speech, etc. So working in a foundational stiffness into such things would seem to be quite beneficial.
This makes me think: leveraging on this idea, could one build a discipline (such as philosophy of science) to help keep desirable civilisational traits intact and less likely to deform?
Thought strikes me... Just how "floppy" are these constants of human behavior?
From my perspective as someone who's been extremely curious about these things, and who has read widely on the issue, just what is it that makes you think that "the fall of empires" happens not due to rigid and predictable rules, but "floppyness"?
Honestly, watching the world around me devolve into the Late Roman Empire, I have to wonder if things are not more rigidly bound in this arena than some physical laws, which always seem to be full of loopholes when you look closely enough.
Yet... The "Progress of Empire"? Did not Rome go the way of all things flesh in almost the exact manner that multiple imperial attempts across history fall into decay? Can you not trace out trends and like events in nearly all of them?
I mean, we don't really know precisely how the ancient empires of Cambodia that built Angkor Wat collapsed, but you can about guarantee yourself that there were similar corruptions and malfeasances in all the little details of the bureaucracies that ran their hydraulics, much the same as we're watching our own government turn against us and the original purpose of the institutions. Otherwise, those entities would still likely be with us, in some form or another, yes?
I think the perception of "floppy" is just that: A perception. The actual reality is that social decay and all that has rules that are possibly more rigid than mere physical law. Were that not the case, would the "collapse of civilization" not have demonstrable differences, everywhere and when it occurs?
If you think there is anything new, under our sun, you're likely not looking hard enough. Or, with enough clarity of vision.
I think we agree in a lot but I don't think you understood what I was talking about. I agree that history rhymes, and specifically the decay of civilisations due to corruptions, a society that becomes built on little cowardicies and indulgence. That is exactly the basis for what I was saying. I was never trying to claim that human nature was floppy - indeed I would be silly to make a claim against a word which is trivially tautologically correct. Instead, the ways in which our society, technology and culture is structured makes us express the same aspects of human nature in different ways. Here, my arguement is stressing the society and culture aspect of that observation. Better culture and society is a real thing, and it does create real prosperity / or as you observe, a worse culture or society leads to malfeasances and cowardicies which may run a civilisation into the ground.
So what was I saying?
We can (perhaps arbitrarily due to challenging meta-ethics, but for example running on trying to benefit people and not hurt them is generally uncontroversial, albiet poorly reflected on sometimes) posit that certain cultural and societal norms are better (say, less corruption). I was pointing out that part of the reason our culture is in a decline is because cultures can drift to worse and worse cultures due to reasons such as wealth enough to act wastefully etc. Floppiness as discussed here is simply a way to measure the elasticity of drift in concepts, noting that our culture seems to be disproportinately floppy compared to our scientific subjects. What I was trying to point out is - we agree that cultural drift in a declining direction is bad - there may be ways to remove some of that cultural elasticity (floppiness) inthe negative direction.
One possible way to do this for example is establish an effective and objective metric and then as we can generally track the rise and fall of desirable cultures in all possible culture-space made up of n dimensions - we then possibly apply some method of a loss function to it and then optimise for some local minima in the cost function (using backpropagation calculus). Rather, as the author of this proposes, add some more math to our culture.
"Adding math to the culture..." isn't going to solve the problem. It's not the math that's the issue, it's the people using it. You can carefully and accurately calculate your way into disaster with anything; math isn't a truth, it's a tool.
GIGO is a thing, one that most "I'll solve this with math..." types forget. Or, never learned...
The real problem here isn't technique; it's a failure to understand and work within the actual parameters of the problem: People.
Why do civilizations become sclerotic and then collapse? What's the actual reason for all the corruption, when nearly all can see it right in front of them?
The reason is people. The wrong sorts of people getting into power; the usual run of average person who lets those people run things, without doing anything about them screwing it up, when they know that's precisely what they're doing.
Longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the real reason civilizations go through this process is because we invest far too much power in the institutional reef structures that we think these things we call "civilization" consists of. That power attracts the venal and corrupt, who eventually take over and run everything into the ground through sheer short-sided selfishness. The Roman Boni probably had some idea that they were hollowing out Rome itself by driving all the rural yeoman types into bankruptcy and buying up their small farms to turn into slave-operated latifundia, but they failed to recognize what that was doing to the very basis of Rome itself. All those rural types pushed off the farms...? No longer all that much use, so off to the cities, where their kids became urban sophisticates who weren't really all that good at being Roman legionaries, which cut into the business of conquest... It was a spiral of corruption because nobody saw those Boni as a problem. They also didn't see themselves as such, but they were what killed the Roman Republic more than anything else.
You want to "fix" the idea of civilization, you have to first fix the idea that "civilization" is something external, something imposed from without. The institutions of civilization don't create that civilization; the people who're participating in it do that. If you're inherently uncivilized, then the very first moment those external controls go away, you're going to behave barbarically. Likewise, if your institutions vanish, and you're on your own as a civilized man, you'll recreate it. If you don't, then you were never civilized in the first damn place.
Look up that real-world Lord of the Flies situation that happened back in the 1960s. Nothing "floppy" there, about how those young Polynesian men conducted themselves; lost at see, marooned? They effectively recreated civilization around them, and behaved as civilized men. That's how that stuff actually works, and civilizations fall when we forget that. Are positions of power taken over by the venal and corrupt...? Well, whether it is Cambodia or Rome, civilization falls.
And, the signal thing to note in all cases is that the bit that failed? Wasn't the average working stiff Roman or Cambodian; they kept right on keeping on, all through the "Fall of Civilization". It was the so-called "elites" that failed, and failed miserably. Rome was still fielding decent soldiers towards the end; what they weren't fielding were decent officers, drawn from the elite classes. Who suddenly felt like it was better to lop off a thumb or two, to avoid military service, despite their elevated status and wealth. You start seeing that, you know the end is near for a civilization.
Sorry, it really seems like you're talking past me with this one here. Great, I agree with most of this apart from the idea that I'm failing to interact within the parameters of "people."
Culture isn't an abstract ideal, culture is the men and women that inhabit our society and their actions. What makes that up is a complex interplay of values, social norms and material conditions. When I advocate for using math I'm not talking about some sort of abstract oh let's just throw math at this - I mean we can use it to tell us what is more helpful *practically*. It may well be some of those things might look like limiting the investment of power into "institutional reef structures." If the Romans or Cambodians had let their civilisational action be guided by more than a thousand thousand little cowardices and sweet ideals with lip service paid to them, but instead objective metrics that told them of the evils of good men doing nothing perhaps they would've never fell.
What about the role of the CIA in defining and driving those floppy vs stiff concepts? One would think the whole process is organic, indeed we are lead to believe that it is; until you see evidence that it's not.
I don't disagree, but I want to share a comic irony:
"For example, our concepts of mass, time and space, and many concepts built on these, are pretty stiff."
One of the original triggers of cultural floppiness, on a par with Marx, Nietzsche, and quantum mechanics, was the change in our concepts of mass, time and space.
There's another irony here, in that what Einstein's relativity actually did was /eliminate/ relativity from physics (which is why he hated it when people started calling it "relativity theory"). It didn't show that the laws of physics are subjective. Very recent observations had /seemed/ to prove that they were; and Einstein restored objectivity to physics by proving that Newton's conceptions of mass, time, and space were /objectively/ wrong. Yes, he showed "time" and "space" aren't real in the Platonic sense. /And provided better alternatives./
The more-important thing Einstein did, with far greater consequences, was to prove that the nominalist view of the meaning of words is superior to all logocentric views such as realism, essentialism, and Platonism. AFAIK, not a single person in the humanities* has understood either of these points in the 119 years since.
* I count economics as a science.
Originalism as a philosophy of legal interpretation that itself is bolstered by 'stiff' commitment has the effect of stiffening law over time as it tries to anchor and lock in to what was thought at a particular time, place, and context, usually long enough in the past such that those involved in the drafting are deceased and some track record of case law near to that time and context helps to establish that original meaning with minimal wiggle room for latter day jurists who want to interpret that particular law in a floppy way.
I think there's a really good central point here, but a better metaphor than stiff vs floppy might be elastic vs plastic deformation at the boundaries. Every concept has some elastic limit, and can recover from small deviations. But, larger deviations can permanently reshape and distort it.
"Thou shalt not kill" has a very high elastic limit. All the murders and executions and wars in history haven't changed the underlying idea that killing humans is bad and people shouldn't do it. We keep snapping back to it.
"This is the word we use to refer to people whose ancestors lived in Africa until a few hundred years ago" has a low elastic limit. It takes a much smaller push to change irreversibly.
Note: I suspect you can also find natural analogies for the variables that affect elastic limit (temperature, purity) as well as tensile/compressive/shear strength for the different forces that induce conceptual strain.
Except... "Thou shalt not kill" was a maltranslation, deliberate or accidental. The original meaning of that phrase is more along the lines of "Thou shalt not murder", with the implication being that some killing was A-OK.
Any time someone starts slinging biblical ideas at you, it's always wise to first examine the translation they're using, and the biases of the translation. King James has an awful lot about the "Divine Right of Kings" in it, and very little about what duties the king owes the commoner, something that's pretty damn convenient when you consider the where/when of that translation. The reading I've done of earlier translations and more modern ones would tend to indicate that the commission working for King James had certain goals in mind...
What are the risks/downsides for non-lawyers of stiffing up things like law?
Law & econ scholars know law just as well as other legal scholars.
The main risk would be using an incomplete framework that neglects pertinent factors that can't be easily quantified, and aren't economic in nature.
For example, on the basis of economics one could make compelling arguments to create financial markets for human organs, or for babies up for adoption. How many matters of legal importance are *only* economic in nature?
There are no non-economic factors.
Wanting to stiff things up signals low confidence in your ability to use floppiness to your advantage.
Everyone has to know what it actually says.
It has to say what it actually means in language that's comprehensible.
It has to mean what legislators intend for it to mean.
Legislators have to both understand and admit what they intend for it to mean.
When the Supreme Court makes a ruling, they write a long explanation of the original purpose and justification of the law, the issues to consider in its application, and how they conclude the law should be used. This explanation is not technically law, but is used to interpret the law from then on.
Would it be better to require the legislators who write any new law, to also write just such an exegesis /before it can be passed/?
I think that most law in our system doesn't work because the idjits writing those laws have no idea at all how "things really work" out in the real world.
The very arrogance embedded in the idea "Imma gonna fix this problem by passing a law/writing a memo/making a rule" is the inherent problem with all of this idiocy.
Most of the people subscribing to this pattern of dealing with the world are abstractionists that live inside their heads, and who never go outside and actually observe the real world, or the actual impact of their attempts at modifying things.
If you really want to "fix" a problem, you first need to understand it. No understandee, no fixee...
And, most problems involving "law" are generally behavioral; people are doing things you don't want them doing, for whatever reason. You want to "fix" those problems, then you need to go out and look at the things in their environment that are influencing their behavior.
Think of the way some canny civil engineers lay out sidewalks in new construction: They don't. At first.
They allow the users to demonstrate what paths they use in the new facilities, and then the canny civil engineer goes out and paves those paths. This is a technique they call "following the desire path". And, the desire path is that which the user is doing, in the course of daily life getting around the facility. You don't want them walking a certain path? You need to figure out why, and then modify whatever is cuing them to walk that path; simply putting up a sign or a fence ain't going to do the job. They'll ignore it, walk around it, or otherwise subvert your intent of blocking them from taking that path.
Way too many people who are "in charge" really have no idea what they are doing, or how to get things done within the institutions they run. That goes double for the idjit class we elect to our legislatures, most of whom are truly sub-par creatures only capable of winning the popularity contests we call elections.
When you're "in charge" of things, you really have to model the world around you as a succession of Skinner Boxes, and every Skinner Box as being a part of the conversation that each individual has with their environment. You want the individual to do things differently? Then, you have to understand that conversation and work within it; if the individual gets what they want from that individual Skinner Box, then they're going to keep right on doing it, regardless of what you want or what you wrote in your precious little law or memo. Likewise, if the environmental cue that they're getting says "Don't do what the boss is saying...", then they're not going to do it. Ever.
The majority of our "leadership" simply does not get this concept, because we never teach it or bring it out. They're all selected, trained, and conditioned such that they think that whatever they imagine within the confines of their very limited minds is what is real; they believe, truly believe, that they bring reality into being by thinking about it, and that they can simply change reality by expressing their thoughts.
You have to go out into the world and look at things, exactly the way a good civil engineer lays out sidewalks. It's not what you think about where those sidewalks need to go, it's what the environment is telling the people using your facility about where they need to go, and how to get there most efficiently. For their needs, not your loony imaginings...
This is why every law ought to come with a statement of intended purpose, a set of criteria it is supposed to meet, and a time limit whereupon it will be looked at for effectiveness. If it ain't meeting the stated intent? Buh-bye...
Example: "This bill is meant to reduce homelessness; currently, the homeless population in our jurisdiction is X. If that isn't reduced to Y by year Z, then the law established by this bill is null and void."
We don't do that, so the cruft keeps building up until it chokes out the system. This is possibly by intent of the idjit class we elect, because with no actual objective performance goals stated, they can keep the grift going until we run out of money...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to a first approximation I am rounding this question to "Is a common law or civil law system better?" AKA whose job is it to say what the law is and means, between the legislature and judiciary?
In a civil law system it's easier to know in advance what is and isn't allowed. In a common law system there is more freedom for courts to handle unanticipated problems with laws and their implementation. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
Overall, I think it would be better to have more well-thought-out laws written in simpler, harder to re-interpret language; combined with a legislature that is much more willing to repeal, amend, and pass new laws; under a common-law system judiciary still willing and able to interpret edge cases when they're ones the legislators genuinely hadn't considered.
I have no idea how to achieve that. Based on how these systems exist in the world today, I tend to prefer common law systems to civil law systems. Ambiguity lets people take risks and try new things and operate in a gray area, hopefully long enough for law to catch up, or with enough ambiguity to persuade a judge when cases do arise where things should be legal but might not be.
It'd be wise to revisit the entire purpose behind a legal system.
What is it?
I'd submit that anyone with the idea that the purpose is to provide some abstract ideal of "perfect justice" is delusional, at best. Ain't nobody short of God himself going to manage that feat, and the idea that a mere human would make the attempt? The height of self-deluded arrogance.
I would submit to you that any legal system conceived of and managed by human beings is going to be imperfect, regardless of intent. Because of that, we have to look at what social function this system performs for us, and it ain't the provision of some high-concept absolute whose meaning none of us can agree on in the first place.
The fundamental social function fulfilled by the "legal/justice system" is effectively this: Behavioral control and the modification of improper behavior by those demonstrating it. There's nothing else there to explain it; it's a tool we use to make living together in groups tolerable and possible. As such, you have to evaluate what the effect of your "legal system" is, within the general population: Does it encourage people to behave with propriety and avoid transgressing on their neighbors? Does it operate to ensure that people peacefully allow the mechanisms of the system to usurp their own very personal desire for vengeance and blood-debt upon those who transgress upon them? Do people feel satisfied, knowing that the courts have done their job, had their say? Are they willing to grant those courts primacy in these questions?
If your answers to that are negatives, then you've got problems and are a long way down the road towards vigilance committees and open violence in the streets. People are what people are, and if the justice system you've set up isn't answering their needs for modifying and checking the behavior of the people encroaching on them, well... Don't be real surprised when individual "justice" does what the internet does, and routes around failure. If enough people come to believe that calling 911 is useless, and that the crooks they catch in the act won't be punished and indeed, will likely be released? Do not, I pray you, be very surprised when said criminals wind up subject to informal street "justice" of a very lethal and highly creative sort.
Justice as an ideal is nice, but it's a luxury belief system that isn't really real, and has nothing to do with daily life. You are not God; do not think you can play him in real life. The best that you can accomplish is an attempt to curb some behaviors and encourage others; if you don't do either of those two well enough, you need to be prepared for people to step in and do your job for you.
There's a reason that the old truism about cops existing not to protect the public, but to protect the criminal from the public. Street justice is ugly, unfair, and generally excessive; you cease to provide the behavioral checks and curbs, be ready for someone else to do that, with emphasis. Also, be prepared for those people that you catch doing that to be rather hard to convict, what with jury nullification and the ineffectuality of your own courts with the truly criminal.
There ain't nothing out there saying that our current system is the way we have to do it. It's entirely possible that something new will come along, and that it won't look a bit like today's dysfunctional shambolic state of affairs.
"Floppy concepts" are membionts that use r-reproductive strategies, "stiff concepts" are membionts that use K-strategies.
What are deep values? Are they just values that don't change much, is there something else to the depth you are thinking of?
There are legal concepts that go back centuries and even millennia. It doesn't seem all that floppy to me.
Shallower values are strategies for achieving deeper values.
Our basic values are fairly firmly rooted in our biology. Food, warmth and orgasms are rewarding, while pain and suffering are disvalued. Culture can affect values sometimes. For example, if someone becomes addicted to opiods, then that could be modeled as a change in their values. Religious conversion is another example. However, it can be challenging to distinguish between value changes and belief changes. Valuing opiods is similar to learning that they are valuable. Valuing god is like learning about god's importance.
Isn't it a bit simpler than people think. The basic or core concepts of a society's culture are elastic with things that don't matter, ie fashion or music, but more rigid with those that do. Try and move the stiff concepts past a certain point and the society breaks down to be replaced by anarchy and eventually a new culture. I think history is replete with examples of this. Arguing semantics about definitions can further understanding but doesn't alter the core culture points, and it's a given that not every culture shares all the same values, though many do overlap.
Brings to mind the Pace Layers model from Stuart Brand and Brian Eno. See https://www.workfutures.io/p/layers-of-time-pace-layers-of-work.
This seems actually very valuable in terms of civilisation building. A couple thoughts maybe:
Empires often rise and fall in part due to culture drift in a negative direction (i.e. waste of resources) and cultural drift is often because our culture re: the concepts such as our values imbedded in floppy concepts re: humanities/arts/etc. Our systems of humanities/art makes less direct progress if not regression due to (obviously inherent implications (such as defining what progress even is)), or at least in part due to how floppy they are.
On the whole humans are incetivised for themselves and not even in the long term but to justify immediate pleasure. This means motions in larger societies that are wealthy will seem to naturally tend towards the justification of desire (even if such desire is "higher order" like God or Altruism). However if we implemented philosophy of science style grounding for the humanties/art (and anything to do with culture/values) for the sake of our culture, perhaps we can make culture more stiff and less prone to cultural drift?
This is not to limit progress or debate (as shown extensively by the success of other stiff concepts like STEM and econ, where meta discussions can and should be had), but instead limit *backward* movement. Now of course comes the question of what is backwards movement vs. forward. There seem to be very obviously some wasteful (harmful in terms of resources) activity/unfulfilling (harmful in terms of happiness) activity to a population practicing any culture.
At the very least memetics derived from a stiff conception seem to outcompete other memetics that are floppy in terms of progress (in terms of real benefit (defined almost however one likes) to those who practice it). Aditionally, I value human prosperity (or so I think) so I quite like a civilisation that promotes free speech, etc. So working in a foundational stiffness into such things would seem to be quite beneficial.
This makes me think: leveraging on this idea, could one build a discipline (such as philosophy of science) to help keep desirable civilisational traits intact and less likely to deform?
Thought strikes me... Just how "floppy" are these constants of human behavior?
From my perspective as someone who's been extremely curious about these things, and who has read widely on the issue, just what is it that makes you think that "the fall of empires" happens not due to rigid and predictable rules, but "floppyness"?
Honestly, watching the world around me devolve into the Late Roman Empire, I have to wonder if things are not more rigidly bound in this arena than some physical laws, which always seem to be full of loopholes when you look closely enough.
Yet... The "Progress of Empire"? Did not Rome go the way of all things flesh in almost the exact manner that multiple imperial attempts across history fall into decay? Can you not trace out trends and like events in nearly all of them?
I mean, we don't really know precisely how the ancient empires of Cambodia that built Angkor Wat collapsed, but you can about guarantee yourself that there were similar corruptions and malfeasances in all the little details of the bureaucracies that ran their hydraulics, much the same as we're watching our own government turn against us and the original purpose of the institutions. Otherwise, those entities would still likely be with us, in some form or another, yes?
I think the perception of "floppy" is just that: A perception. The actual reality is that social decay and all that has rules that are possibly more rigid than mere physical law. Were that not the case, would the "collapse of civilization" not have demonstrable differences, everywhere and when it occurs?
If you think there is anything new, under our sun, you're likely not looking hard enough. Or, with enough clarity of vision.
Hey man,
I think we agree in a lot but I don't think you understood what I was talking about. I agree that history rhymes, and specifically the decay of civilisations due to corruptions, a society that becomes built on little cowardicies and indulgence. That is exactly the basis for what I was saying. I was never trying to claim that human nature was floppy - indeed I would be silly to make a claim against a word which is trivially tautologically correct. Instead, the ways in which our society, technology and culture is structured makes us express the same aspects of human nature in different ways. Here, my arguement is stressing the society and culture aspect of that observation. Better culture and society is a real thing, and it does create real prosperity / or as you observe, a worse culture or society leads to malfeasances and cowardicies which may run a civilisation into the ground.
So what was I saying?
We can (perhaps arbitrarily due to challenging meta-ethics, but for example running on trying to benefit people and not hurt them is generally uncontroversial, albiet poorly reflected on sometimes) posit that certain cultural and societal norms are better (say, less corruption). I was pointing out that part of the reason our culture is in a decline is because cultures can drift to worse and worse cultures due to reasons such as wealth enough to act wastefully etc. Floppiness as discussed here is simply a way to measure the elasticity of drift in concepts, noting that our culture seems to be disproportinately floppy compared to our scientific subjects. What I was trying to point out is - we agree that cultural drift in a declining direction is bad - there may be ways to remove some of that cultural elasticity (floppiness) inthe negative direction.
One possible way to do this for example is establish an effective and objective metric and then as we can generally track the rise and fall of desirable cultures in all possible culture-space made up of n dimensions - we then possibly apply some method of a loss function to it and then optimise for some local minima in the cost function (using backpropagation calculus). Rather, as the author of this proposes, add some more math to our culture.
Hope that helps.
"Adding math to the culture..." isn't going to solve the problem. It's not the math that's the issue, it's the people using it. You can carefully and accurately calculate your way into disaster with anything; math isn't a truth, it's a tool.
GIGO is a thing, one that most "I'll solve this with math..." types forget. Or, never learned...
The real problem here isn't technique; it's a failure to understand and work within the actual parameters of the problem: People.
Why do civilizations become sclerotic and then collapse? What's the actual reason for all the corruption, when nearly all can see it right in front of them?
The reason is people. The wrong sorts of people getting into power; the usual run of average person who lets those people run things, without doing anything about them screwing it up, when they know that's precisely what they're doing.
Longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the real reason civilizations go through this process is because we invest far too much power in the institutional reef structures that we think these things we call "civilization" consists of. That power attracts the venal and corrupt, who eventually take over and run everything into the ground through sheer short-sided selfishness. The Roman Boni probably had some idea that they were hollowing out Rome itself by driving all the rural yeoman types into bankruptcy and buying up their small farms to turn into slave-operated latifundia, but they failed to recognize what that was doing to the very basis of Rome itself. All those rural types pushed off the farms...? No longer all that much use, so off to the cities, where their kids became urban sophisticates who weren't really all that good at being Roman legionaries, which cut into the business of conquest... It was a spiral of corruption because nobody saw those Boni as a problem. They also didn't see themselves as such, but they were what killed the Roman Republic more than anything else.
You want to "fix" the idea of civilization, you have to first fix the idea that "civilization" is something external, something imposed from without. The institutions of civilization don't create that civilization; the people who're participating in it do that. If you're inherently uncivilized, then the very first moment those external controls go away, you're going to behave barbarically. Likewise, if your institutions vanish, and you're on your own as a civilized man, you'll recreate it. If you don't, then you were never civilized in the first damn place.
Look up that real-world Lord of the Flies situation that happened back in the 1960s. Nothing "floppy" there, about how those young Polynesian men conducted themselves; lost at see, marooned? They effectively recreated civilization around them, and behaved as civilized men. That's how that stuff actually works, and civilizations fall when we forget that. Are positions of power taken over by the venal and corrupt...? Well, whether it is Cambodia or Rome, civilization falls.
And, the signal thing to note in all cases is that the bit that failed? Wasn't the average working stiff Roman or Cambodian; they kept right on keeping on, all through the "Fall of Civilization". It was the so-called "elites" that failed, and failed miserably. Rome was still fielding decent soldiers towards the end; what they weren't fielding were decent officers, drawn from the elite classes. Who suddenly felt like it was better to lop off a thumb or two, to avoid military service, despite their elevated status and wealth. You start seeing that, you know the end is near for a civilization.
Sorry, it really seems like you're talking past me with this one here. Great, I agree with most of this apart from the idea that I'm failing to interact within the parameters of "people."
Culture isn't an abstract ideal, culture is the men and women that inhabit our society and their actions. What makes that up is a complex interplay of values, social norms and material conditions. When I advocate for using math I'm not talking about some sort of abstract oh let's just throw math at this - I mean we can use it to tell us what is more helpful *practically*. It may well be some of those things might look like limiting the investment of power into "institutional reef structures." If the Romans or Cambodians had let their civilisational action be guided by more than a thousand thousand little cowardices and sweet ideals with lip service paid to them, but instead objective metrics that told them of the evils of good men doing nothing perhaps they would've never fell.
What about the role of the CIA in defining and driving those floppy vs stiff concepts? One would think the whole process is organic, indeed we are lead to believe that it is; until you see evidence that it's not.