I think what you're describing is fundamentally against the incentives of lawmakers. Complex laws make it possible to decouple legislative goals from public-image goals: when was the last time you saw something that actually had to be explained come up in a televised debate?
I agree, lawmakers benefit because lay people cannot understand the laws being passed.
That said, this is the secret. We market this to the law writers!
Getting to a point where we have 10x productivity gain will be hard but after that any tool with a 10x productivity win will be adopted. That is a no brainier.
Now we are in a future where all laws are written in this new syntax, but shared as long compiled documents full of redundant legalese English.
In such a future, lawyers can write law and contracts easily but cannot read them efficiently. Imagine writing JavaScript but debugging the assembly...
Lawyers would naturally start asking their peers to share the "source" rather than the compiled "binary", for evaluation. It is just a no brainier.
Now you have a future with a flurishing new syntax dominating the entire ecosystem. Hopefully better languages are created, etc. You even have an entire generation of lawyers who only know these higher level languages.
This isn't an overnight solution but by the time lawmakers realize the trend of higher level syntax is going to hurt their ability to hide truth, the game will already have been changed.
Just in case it isn't; we'd all benefit from laws that ordinary people can read, understand and follow.
When the quantity of law grows so great and complicated that nobody can feasibly read it becomes hard to be a law abiding citizen. Lawyers, despite rumors otherwise, are ordinary people too and benefit from clearly written law, in English for English speaking countries.
It wasn't satire, but I enjoy that you thought it was :)
I agree that society benefits when we have succinct, easily understandable laws for lay people.
That said we are currently moving father away from that target, rather than nearer.
I would argue software is doing the opposite. It started extremely obscure and has slowly but surely moved in a direction where a majority of people can learn to understand it in months.
Example, a 3 month "bootcamp" can now teach a lay person to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript and accurately predict the output of the interconnections of millions (billions?) of lines on code.
You might argue the bootcampers don't truly understand what the kernel is doing. This is the point though, thanks to abstraction, they can grok it without needing to dive deep.
I don't think there will ever exist a world where lay people will understand legalese. However, I do believe we can build a world where people can be trivially self taught and then grok new laws, and even write new laws of their own.
HTML, CSS and Javascript are not comparably complex.
In software engineering we can set scope and conceptual boundaries.
Law cannot. It is complex because the world is complex. Unless you have a mechanism for simplifying human nature, the law will continue to require specialists.
unfortunately while cynical i do believe this comment
captures the reality of the situation. whatshisface, what do you think can be done to take back US society and make it a little closer to what our seemingly more critically-thinking predecessors had lived through?
Just like the cynical reality that C/C++ programers don't want to encourage package managers. The higher the barriers to entry the more you're talents are worth.
The reality is, regardless of any one groups desire, the productivity wins of package managers are too great and the momentum of the larger software development community is moving towards package managers for every language and will one day include C/C++.
Similarly, lawmakers are a select few of a larger community of domestic but more importantly international lawyers. You give the larger community a 10x productivity win, and just sit back and watch the domino effect work.
Lawyers already study the laws of other countries. It is common for precedents established in one country to be imported into another country by "persuasion". It is also common to more or less copy and paste legislation or other legal wording.
Draftsmanship is not the hard part of law. The hard part is everything else.
_Evidence_:
> when was the last time you saw something that actually had to be explained come up in a televised debate?
_Question_:
> what do you think can be done to take back US society and make it a little closer to what our seemingly more critically-thinking predecessors had lived through?
_Logic_:
An individual can only critically think about or evaluate things that are presented to them.
_Issue_:
If something is glossed over, for whatever reason (be it too difficult to understand), it has not been [and likely will never be] presented for evaluation unless ____(Reason #1).
The issue doesn't end with the lack of presentation -- instead it ends with the consensus that it's OK or necessary to gloss over things because ______(Reason #2).
I was asking a completely friendly question out of genuine curiosity as to his opinion. your insinuation that I am not capable of logical thinking based on my honest question, as well as the cutesy symbolics is a little bit rude, and I hope you got a kick out of getting all the formatting to line up. A+ work
Please remain civil, even if you feel someone has insinuated something. Which, incidentally, they often haven't. This kind of thing is notoriously difficult to read, which is an additional reason to remain civil.
Edit: unfortunately you've broken the HN guidelines with incivility quite a bit in the past too. We ban accounts that do that. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and clean up your act if you want to keep commenting here.
> I was asking a completely friendly question out of genuine curiosity as to his opinion.
Why do you feel the need to tell me this? I wouldn't have commented if I thought otherwise. P.S. There was no intention to be demeaning. Just intention to present the issue clearly.
As for the cutesy symbols, they're there to make clear that this isn't a problem because it's DIFFICULT to solve, as the solution is perfectly clear. Give individuals a voice by informing them and allow them to offer an evaluation.
The reason it's still a problem is because of a lack of leverage on the uninformed individuals' behalf.
