Over time I’ve come to feel forced to conclude that that most people want large areas of life to be relative free of law. That is, they don’t want to allow legal complaints about harms in those areas. They instead want other social institutions to handle such harms, or such harms to just be suffered.
>few are interested in my proposal to radically lower the cost of lawsuits.
I notice that you frequently make inferences about what people want from lack of interest in your proposals, but isn't it possible that people are just uninterested in new ideas generally, or uninterested in Robin Hanson proposals, or something like that? You don't spend a lot of time marketing your proposals; that seems a sufficient explanation for lack of interest.
Your site is called "Overcoming Bias". I hope you are aware of the bias of Western culture, with its focus on the individual. This leads to a pattern of justifying small actions which help the person doing them and harm others, which would be seen as less acceptable in other cultures like China. Any generalizations or explanations you make based on observations in Western culture should consider the context and the limitations of that context.
Considering your first example, about "snitches". What if we just treat law enforcement as another group? Its members have a large interest in protecting its other members; occasionally it sacrifices some members who have acted egregiously bad in order to protect the reputation of the group; and its overall actions respond to the pressure put on it by other groups (government demands, politics, etc.; Seattle's temporarily police-free zone is an example of this). It's well-known that betraying one's group can often result in a large cost to one's group, but benefit to another group, and that other groups will often attempt to incentivize such betrayals. We could explain hatred of "snitches" in terms of the overall cost to the group: better to limit punishment to within the group, than to have the group as a whole suffer from interaction from another group (law enforcement).
I think you're probably right to say "[t]ypically one can’t sue for harms suffered unless one can show a monetary harm", but the statement "fan fiction isn’t a copyright violation if you don’t make cash from it" is categorically untrue. See, e.g., https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2182&context=smulr
Maybe it's because most interactions with the law are high-risk and low reward, when even in the USA, broadly ranked in various indices as being less corrupt than the average country, cops steal as much or more than they recover from robbers and burglars every year, cops can murder you with impunity and generally the worst that happens is they get a paid vacation, and that old standby of "when seconds matter, the police are only a half hour away."
Has anyone here ever tried to report a theft or other crime? The cops won't even bother *pretending* that they'll do anything about it. Given these trends, i.e. them never doing anything positive for you in any specific case, and the inherent risk in involving them with anyone you care about, why would you want to ever involve the law or law enforcement in your life?
99% of cops get paid vacations when murdering people:
There were more than 1,000 "known police killings" every year from 2013 through 2019, according to Mapping Police Violence, most of them shootings, according to the Washington Post. Ninety-nine percent of those cases never resulted in criminal charges.
The prohibition against snitching is not about wanting areas in life that are law free. It is a signaling exercise. Snitching is often highest in communities (can't find the source) where these admonitions are most proffered. It is that information about illegality should not be given freely. See the literature about legal mobilization. Also see https://freakonomics.com/2007/09/help-the-police-help-yourself/ for an extreme example. Ethan Brown's "Snitch" talks about how false witnessing becomes important in the drug trade.
Women make use of child and family services (CFS) as a tool for policing each others behaviors. I have heard anecdotes from working class women that the CFS are sometimes weaponized in disagreements about other matters. Reporting to CFS, threatening to report to CFS or being accused of snitching to CFS are strategies employed when disagreements raise to the level of violence by other means.
Without the police, the threat of incarceration and the exchange of information about other illegal conduct for leniency snitching has no value. In fact in these markets the persons who don't snitch are at a severe disadvantage. The police and family services exist in these areas because ancient styles don't work as well with non elites.
Thus it is the other way around. The laws exists in these domains because the mechanisms that high status elites use to police each others conduct don't work for low status individuals. The whore cannot be slut shamed but the socialite can. The confidence man/fraudster can't be humiliated and shunned but the braggart can be gossiped about in secret and publicly humiliated or shunned if necessary. We like these style because they allow for policing of each other. Competing hierarchy ladders meant the ancient ways could not longer be applied to the new underclasses. The law exists because our societies grew too large to be police with these ancient style.
I expect you've heard of Robert Ellickson's "Order Without Law", as Bryan Caplan has reviewed it. The people discussed there were ignorant of what the law actually was and very averse to it intruding on the status quo. To them things should be settled in a "neighborly" fashion without resorting to the law.
"the US Supreme Court struck down a law that would have punished people from lying about having military medals, saying citizens have a free speech right to make such lies"
This is insanely wrong. Lying cannot be considered a 'free speech' right unless we know the implications of such lies. How about someone lies in a business deal and loots someone's money? They will be and must be punished for 'fraud', instead of being saved in the name of 'free speech'.
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>few are interested in my proposal to radically lower the cost of lawsuits.
I notice that you frequently make inferences about what people want from lack of interest in your proposals, but isn't it possible that people are just uninterested in new ideas generally, or uninterested in Robin Hanson proposals, or something like that? You don't spend a lot of time marketing your proposals; that seems a sufficient explanation for lack of interest.
Your site is called "Overcoming Bias". I hope you are aware of the bias of Western culture, with its focus on the individual. This leads to a pattern of justifying small actions which help the person doing them and harm others, which would be seen as less acceptable in other cultures like China. Any generalizations or explanations you make based on observations in Western culture should consider the context and the limitations of that context.
Considering your first example, about "snitches". What if we just treat law enforcement as another group? Its members have a large interest in protecting its other members; occasionally it sacrifices some members who have acted egregiously bad in order to protect the reputation of the group; and its overall actions respond to the pressure put on it by other groups (government demands, politics, etc.; Seattle's temporarily police-free zone is an example of this). It's well-known that betraying one's group can often result in a large cost to one's group, but benefit to another group, and that other groups will often attempt to incentivize such betrayals. We could explain hatred of "snitches" in terms of the overall cost to the group: better to limit punishment to within the group, than to have the group as a whole suffer from interaction from another group (law enforcement).
https://www.amazon.com/Order-without-Law-Neighbors-Disputes/dp/0674641698/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2TA5HG6CGG8V2&keywords=without+laws&qid=1677785247&s=books&sprefix=without+laws%2Cstripbooks%2C91&sr=1-5
this is a good book on this topic. It is super common for people to adhere to norms that are not really supported by laws.
I think you're probably right to say "[t]ypically one can’t sue for harms suffered unless one can show a monetary harm", but the statement "fan fiction isn’t a copyright violation if you don’t make cash from it" is categorically untrue. See, e.g., https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2182&context=smulr
Maybe it's because most interactions with the law are high-risk and low reward, when even in the USA, broadly ranked in various indices as being less corrupt than the average country, cops steal as much or more than they recover from robbers and burglars every year, cops can murder you with impunity and generally the worst that happens is they get a paid vacation, and that old standby of "when seconds matter, the police are only a half hour away."
Has anyone here ever tried to report a theft or other crime? The cops won't even bother *pretending* that they'll do anything about it. Given these trends, i.e. them never doing anything positive for you in any specific case, and the inherent risk in involving them with anyone you care about, why would you want to ever involve the law or law enforcement in your life?
__________________________________________________
Cops steal more than they recover stolen goods:
$63B civil forfeited 2002-2018 https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/pfp3content/forfeiture-is-lucrative-for-governments-nationwide/
$50B recovered over same period, FBI crime data explorer:
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/property-crime
99% of cops get paid vacations when murdering people:
There were more than 1,000 "known police killings" every year from 2013 through 2019, according to Mapping Police Violence, most of them shootings, according to the Washington Post. Ninety-nine percent of those cases never resulted in criminal charges.
https://www.insider.com/how-police-allowed-to-kill-americans-laws-2020-6
Isn't this partly because of the difficulty in applying law to some domains? The "transaction costs" involved in using law is quite high.
Could you put up a link to wherever you outlined your low cost legal dispute settlement process please
The prohibition against snitching is not about wanting areas in life that are law free. It is a signaling exercise. Snitching is often highest in communities (can't find the source) where these admonitions are most proffered. It is that information about illegality should not be given freely. See the literature about legal mobilization. Also see https://freakonomics.com/2007/09/help-the-police-help-yourself/ for an extreme example. Ethan Brown's "Snitch" talks about how false witnessing becomes important in the drug trade.
Women make use of child and family services (CFS) as a tool for policing each others behaviors. I have heard anecdotes from working class women that the CFS are sometimes weaponized in disagreements about other matters. Reporting to CFS, threatening to report to CFS or being accused of snitching to CFS are strategies employed when disagreements raise to the level of violence by other means.
Without the police, the threat of incarceration and the exchange of information about other illegal conduct for leniency snitching has no value. In fact in these markets the persons who don't snitch are at a severe disadvantage. The police and family services exist in these areas because ancient styles don't work as well with non elites.
Thus it is the other way around. The laws exists in these domains because the mechanisms that high status elites use to police each others conduct don't work for low status individuals. The whore cannot be slut shamed but the socialite can. The confidence man/fraudster can't be humiliated and shunned but the braggart can be gossiped about in secret and publicly humiliated or shunned if necessary. We like these style because they allow for policing of each other. Competing hierarchy ladders meant the ancient ways could not longer be applied to the new underclasses. The law exists because our societies grew too large to be police with these ancient style.
I expect you've heard of Robert Ellickson's "Order Without Law", as Bryan Caplan has reviewed it. The people discussed there were ignorant of what the law actually was and very averse to it intruding on the status quo. To them things should be settled in a "neighborly" fashion without resorting to the law.
"the US Supreme Court struck down a law that would have punished people from lying about having military medals, saying citizens have a free speech right to make such lies"
This is insanely wrong. Lying cannot be considered a 'free speech' right unless we know the implications of such lies. How about someone lies in a business deal and loots someone's money? They will be and must be punished for 'fraud', instead of being saved in the name of 'free speech'.
In 7th paragraph... They like about.. Shouldn't it be lie about?