Why is it a useful description to call the legal system a criminal organization, to define physicians as a social class, to describe X as a fraudulent enterprise, or other things in that class?
The only reason I can see is to make an attack against the thing you are describing, because if you do not intend the attack then the description is not useful- if describing an institution as a criminal organization doesn’t mean that it should be dismantled (or better), then describing an institution as a criminal organization means nothing.
If saying that a title is nothing more than a social class doesn’t also say that the title is without significant meaning, then saying that a title is nothing more than a social class is an exercise in definitional naval-gazing (by which I mean both a somewhat hyperbolic sense of the literal meaning and also as a dismissal of the practice of using tautological descriptions that parse as attacks without meaning them as attacks).
And so forth.
If you want to describe the problems, you have to describe, or at least cogently assert the problems. The problem that you are asserting about the American legal system seems to be related to the idea that it accepts some kinds of implicit coercion in plea bargains, but forbids other forms of coercion, and makes people claim that they haven’t been coerced at all when accepting plea bargains? You never actually said why that’s bad, and I honestly don’t believe that it is bad- Sure, it’s a little bit hypocritical; it might even be a violation of law. And the practice of plea bargaining is problematic from the start- but it would be even more problematic if there was no attempt to ensure that suspects were free from untoward coercion.
When you suggest that physicians are “actually nothing but” a social class with certain characteristics, you aren’t communicating anything about the core point that being good at healing people is insufficient to become a physician. Those two words are the attacking part of the statement: “Physicians are a social class with specific privileges, social roles, and barriers to entry.” is not an attack, it’s an uncontroversial background statement that could easily lead into a point.
I can see why fudging times in healthcare might be bad, since recording inaccurate information about treatment could possibly result in making decisions based on inaccurate information, and developing bad norms about “insignificant” falsifications risks people falsifying more significant details. But I have to draw from my own knowledge to reach that conclusion; you seem to stop at “the system would grind to a halt if people simply refused to [follow the normal behavior in the system]”, without reference to the bad things that the normal behavior in the system might cause.
“X relies on asserting Y, when we know Y to be false” is not intrinsically a problem. In most cases where “Asserting Y when it is common knowledge that Y is false” is a problem, it is a problem because it can lead to asserting Z when it is not common knowledge that Z is false and where belief in Z might be a problem.
The latter is a strict subset of the former, but it is the big one if “everybody knows that Y is false”.
In the cases where asserting Y when Y is false, but it is not common knowledge that Y is false, the path to a problem likely passes through “People actually believe Y, because they have been told Y by someone who knows if Y is true.”
Why is it a useful description to call the legal system a criminal organization, to define physicians as a social class, to describe X as a fraudulent enterprise, or other things in that class?
The only reason I can see is to make an attack against the thing you are describing, because if you do not intend the attack then the description is not useful- if describing an institution as a criminal organization doesn’t mean that it should be dismantled (or better), then describing an institution as a criminal organization means nothing.
If saying that a title is nothing more than a social class doesn’t also say that the title is without significant meaning, then saying that a title is nothing more than a social class is an exercise in definitional naval-gazing (by which I mean both a somewhat hyperbolic sense of the literal meaning and also as a dismissal of the practice of using tautological descriptions that parse as attacks without meaning them as attacks).
And so forth.
If you want to describe the problems, you have to describe, or at least cogently assert the problems. The problem that you are asserting about the American legal system seems to be related to the idea that it accepts some kinds of implicit coercion in plea bargains, but forbids other forms of coercion, and makes people claim that they haven’t been coerced at all when accepting plea bargains? You never actually said why that’s bad, and I honestly don’t believe that it is bad- Sure, it’s a little bit hypocritical; it might even be a violation of law. And the practice of plea bargaining is problematic from the start- but it would be even more problematic if there was no attempt to ensure that suspects were free from untoward coercion.
When you suggest that physicians are “actually nothing but” a social class with certain characteristics, you aren’t communicating anything about the core point that being good at healing people is insufficient to become a physician. Those two words are the attacking part of the statement: “Physicians are a social class with specific privileges, social roles, and barriers to entry.” is not an attack, it’s an uncontroversial background statement that could easily lead into a point.
I can see why fudging times in healthcare might be bad, since recording inaccurate information about treatment could possibly result in making decisions based on inaccurate information, and developing bad norms about “insignificant” falsifications risks people falsifying more significant details. But I have to draw from my own knowledge to reach that conclusion; you seem to stop at “the system would grind to a halt if people simply refused to [follow the normal behavior in the system]”, without reference to the bad things that the normal behavior in the system might cause.
“X relies on asserting Y, when we know Y to be false” is not intrinsically a problem. In most cases where “Asserting Y when it is common knowledge that Y is false” is a problem, it is a problem because it can lead to asserting Z when it is not common knowledge that Z is false and where belief in Z might be a problem.
You made a jump from:
to
The difference between the two may be relevant to the contents of the OP.
The latter is a strict subset of the former, but it is the big one if “everybody knows that Y is false”.
In the cases where asserting Y when Y is false, but it is not common knowledge that Y is false, the path to a problem likely passes through “People actually believe Y, because they have been told Y by someone who knows if Y is true.”