Categories
quotes

Law Development Life Cycle

If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to “developers”) write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the “test case writers”) would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the “testers”, would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there’s too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it’s too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the “users”) could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with.

Bennett Haselton, quoted from Next Year’s Laws, now out in beta! [slashdot.org] Read on Slashdot [slashdot.org].

The whole article is worth a read, don’t let the computer programmer jargon in the quote scare you. Some of the comments are quite insightful too and worth a read. I like the idea of the double blind test for laws that Haselton describes but as one of the comments points out, it is impossible to predict how a law will be read in the future, which is why we have courts and lawyers in the first place. But I think looking at the Software Development Life Cycle [wikipedia.org] is helpful here too; it is impossible to fully predict how the users of your software (or any other product) will use the product or what changes will be desired in the future. The SDLC does not end when the software goes into production, if the software works there will no doubt be updates, if it does not work there will be updates or new software or the software will die. Maybe we should not just use the double blind test when a law is written, maybe when the courts need to step in the law itself should be subjected to possible change and modified so that it meets up-to-date test cases.

Categories
books

The God Delusion

Author
Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion
On Goodreads [goodreads.com]

The God Delusion is a good book. It is a bit too hostile for me at some points but Richard Dawkins [wikipedia.org] spends a chapter of the book on why he is so hostile and his position is well thought out and researched (the opposite of religion, which is what he is arguing against)

Being an Atheist I agree with almost everything Dawkins says in the book, even if some of his conclusions make me uncomfortable. Mostly I feel uncomfortable with is idea that society and we as individuals should not respect others religion and religious customs. His logic as to why we should not respect others religious beliefs and practices and his evidence to support this is convincing to me but I have a lot of good friends who have various religious beliefs and I don’t find it hard or inconvenient to respect those beliefs.

I think there are two reasons I am uncomfortable with this central point made by Dawkins in the book:

One is that I am non-confrontational in nature (people who I disagree with at work might find this a shock but it is true.) I respect other peoples irrational beliefs just as I respect other peoples sexual practices (in so far as they don’t harm other, unwilling people, like children or non-consenting adults.)

My second objection to Dawkins’ lack of respect of peoples religion is that as a vegetarian I want others to respect my choice not to eat meat and not to use leather or other animal products. I am happy to debate this point with others, but I don’t want to force my beliefs on others. I prefer Ghandi’s ideal that ‘you must be the change you wish to see in the world.’

Dawkins does point out that (western, liberal) society has a special ‘respect’ for religion outside of how it deals with other personal choices and that this is wrong because many of the choices people are vocally disrespectful of they disagree with because of their religious choice. We allow these people their ravings not because of our belief in free speech but because of our belief that it is automatically wrong to criticize a religious belief. This point, backed up by examples in the book makes it difficult to disagree with the idea we should challenge and be hostile to religious belief. This all scares me that there is some sort of Secular Inquisition or Anti-religious Revolution (descended from the French Revolution) foreshadowed in Dawkins’s book. If the western, liberal world embraces Dawkins’s ideas there will be no debating a clash of civilizations. It would be a fact of dealing with any group that defined itself by it’s religion.

I learned a good deal from the book and found it well written and engaging. The fact that the conclusions make me uncomfortable does not imply the book has a problem but that I need to consider my own stance more so I can be comfortable either agreeing or disagreeing. A good book that should be read by a great number or people both those inclined to agree and those who reject it’s basic assumptions outright.

Categories
photography

Clean up

IMG_0656

The mess that is Chinatown after the crowds leave the night of Chinese New Year. At midnight everything goes on sale, and at 3 AM the clean up begins as an army of trash trucks, street sweepers and workers push down the streets. By 6 AM all memory of the month of hawkers and stalls is gone and Chinatown is as clean as it will be for another year.

See the whole photoset here [flickr.com].

Categories
photography

恭喜发财

IMG_0464

恭喜发财 — Gong Xi Fa Cai — Kung Hei Fat Choy — The Year of the Rat is upon us!

Categories
ranting

OpenPhotoVR

This [openphotovr.org] is cool. An open source project written by Vladimir Slepnev [livejournal.com] that is similar to Microsoft Photosynth [wikipedia.org]. The photo of Notre Dame linked above is from my Flickr [flickr.com] photostream [flickr.com].

2021.08.01: Photosynth is discontinued, so linking to the Wikipedia page for it. The original link was labs.live.com/photosynth/