I’ve said that the current law is good evidence for what law should be, just as current medical practice is good evidence for what a doctor should do in a given case.
It does not seem to me that the process through which laws are made in my country is an optimizing process for finding “what law should be”. It appears to me more like an optimizing process for finding “what laws would benefit politicians, their families, and their friends.” The feedback loop through which it’s supposed to be the case that politicians get benefited by passing good laws is currently not working very well, at least in part thanks to ideology and anti-epistemologies.
Copyright extension is actually a really great example of this. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that the optimal copyright term would be monotonically increasing, now to effectively two human lifetimes. This doesn’t look like the result of a “quality of law” optimization; it looks like the result of a “money extraction for my buddies” optimization.
It does not seem to me that the process through which laws are made in my country is an optimizing process for finding “what law should be”. It appears to me more like an optimizing process for finding “what laws would benefit politicians, their families, and their friends.” The feedback loop through which it’s supposed to be the case that politicians get benefited by passing good laws is currently not working very well, at least in part thanks to ideology and anti-epistemologies.
Copyright extension is actually a really great example of this. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that the optimal copyright term would be monotonically increasing, now to effectively two human lifetimes. This doesn’t look like the result of a “quality of law” optimization; it looks like the result of a “money extraction for my buddies” optimization.