It doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable assumption that a lack of supporting evidence (of both necessity and effectiveness) should in fact be reason to rescind a law. Do you disagree with this, or are you just looking for hidden assumptions in Eliezer’s comment?
If you do disagree I would be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning for it.
The word “clear” is important. The vast majority of laws lack clear evidence for or against them. Perhaps it would be good to rescind all such laws, but the confidence one could reasonably have in such a position isn’t remotely like the confidence one could reasonably have in mild atheism.
My confidence in the claim that it would be good to rescind all laws that do not have clear evidence in favour of them stems from my own personal mental analogy of the legal system (something I have a layman’s knowledge of) with software engineering (something I have a professional knowledge of).
I see both as a complex system of interacting rules that can often produce unintended consequences (bugs in software). It is a general principle of good software engineering that all else being equal, simpler is better. Duplication of functionality is bad and should be removed. Code that exists for no apparent purpose is often best removed. By analogy, laws that duplicate functionality should be removed and laws that do not seem to have benefits should be removed.
This is clearly an imperfect analogy, and analogical reasoning in general is something to be wary of, but I find it instructive to see the ever-growing complexity and inefficiency of the legal system (where laws are far more often added than removed) with the very common phenomenon in software engineering of systems over time becoming unmaintainable and inefficient due to a tendency to add and never remove code.
The flawed nature of analogical reasoning clearly sets the level of confidence I can derive from this way of thinking well below confidence in atheism but there are other supporting arguments for the position to be made from other directions and overall I have a moderately high level of confidence that the legal system would be improved by a rebalancing of the rate of accretion of new laws and the rate of pruning of old laws.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright? I’m not aware of any alternatives being tried (successfully or otherwise) in modern countries, so there’s no actual evidence for its necessity. Shall we abolish governmental protection of intellectual property? That’s a somewhat tenable position (donation-based profit, etc.), but I’m guessing most people here don’t hold it.
I suspect that if your suggestion’s consequences were carefully inspected, it would turn out to be more or less indistinguishable from a very extreme form of libertarianism. I’m aware of no clear evidence that prohibiting civilian possession of assault helicopters and anti-tank missiles is beneficial. Are you? Perhaps they’d be primarily used to resist oppressive governments.
It’s also worth observing that plenty of professed rationalists take the exact opposite approach to you. They follow the precautionary principle: ban anything unless we have evidence it’s not harmful.
I don’t think much of either approach. Suggesting that we should have a hard-and-fast rule of what we have to do in the absence of clear evidence is a bad idea. Humans have capacities for intuition and logic in addition to our capacity to gather empirical evidence. If evidence is lacking, we need to take a best guess, not just say “let’s permit/ban it”.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright?
You seem to be expecting a much higher standard of evidence than I had in mind. Perhaps necessity was too strong of a word. Utility? Benefit? Something like that.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects. Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it’s solving.
The examples you use both have straightforward utility (compensating positive externalities, reducing death rates), and mixed evidence of effectiveness (lots of art created but copyright terms of infinity minus epsilon inhibit building shared culture, misuse of legal firearms suggests more powerful weapons would also get misused for greater potential damage but firearm crime correlates poorly to ownership rates).
Prohibiting by default strikes me as untenable on practical grounds, as well as being morally dubious in the extreme. As an aside, however, I actually would support abolishing intellectual property as weakly superior to the current scheme, but I doubt either is optimal.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects.
How can you gather the evidence after the fact without experimentation? You have to try out alternative copyright schemes, for instance, to test whether it’s actually working well. Otherwise I don’t know what you’d consider empirical evidence for success.
Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it’s solving.
How can you tell? What would the actual effects of decriminalizing it be? What would widespread marijuana use do to traffic accidents, the intelligence of the general public, etc.? You can argue that it’s surely better than alcohol and tobacco, but the obvious counterargument is that those are too entrenched to do away with (especially alcohol) and therefore have to be grandfathered in for pragmatic reasons.
Who’s right? Maybe you’re right, but the only way to tell is to experiment. I’d be all in favor of more experiments in things like criminal law, to be sure, but I don’t think the evidence in favor of a marijuana ban at present is much worse than that in favor of copyright.
It doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable assumption that a lack of supporting evidence (of both necessity and effectiveness) should in fact be reason to rescind a law. Do you disagree with this, or are you just looking for hidden assumptions in Eliezer’s comment?
If you do disagree I would be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning for it.
The word “clear” is important. The vast majority of laws lack clear evidence for or against them. Perhaps it would be good to rescind all such laws, but the confidence one could reasonably have in such a position isn’t remotely like the confidence one could reasonably have in mild atheism.
My confidence in the claim that it would be good to rescind all laws that do not have clear evidence in favour of them stems from my own personal mental analogy of the legal system (something I have a layman’s knowledge of) with software engineering (something I have a professional knowledge of).
I see both as a complex system of interacting rules that can often produce unintended consequences (bugs in software). It is a general principle of good software engineering that all else being equal, simpler is better. Duplication of functionality is bad and should be removed. Code that exists for no apparent purpose is often best removed. By analogy, laws that duplicate functionality should be removed and laws that do not seem to have benefits should be removed.
This is clearly an imperfect analogy, and analogical reasoning in general is something to be wary of, but I find it instructive to see the ever-growing complexity and inefficiency of the legal system (where laws are far more often added than removed) with the very common phenomenon in software engineering of systems over time becoming unmaintainable and inefficient due to a tendency to add and never remove code.
The flawed nature of analogical reasoning clearly sets the level of confidence I can derive from this way of thinking well below confidence in atheism but there are other supporting arguments for the position to be made from other directions and overall I have a moderately high level of confidence that the legal system would be improved by a rebalancing of the rate of accretion of new laws and the rate of pruning of old laws.
That’s an unreasonably high bar—there is very little I am as confident of as atheism.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright? I’m not aware of any alternatives being tried (successfully or otherwise) in modern countries, so there’s no actual evidence for its necessity. Shall we abolish governmental protection of intellectual property? That’s a somewhat tenable position (donation-based profit, etc.), but I’m guessing most people here don’t hold it.
I suspect that if your suggestion’s consequences were carefully inspected, it would turn out to be more or less indistinguishable from a very extreme form of libertarianism. I’m aware of no clear evidence that prohibiting civilian possession of assault helicopters and anti-tank missiles is beneficial. Are you? Perhaps they’d be primarily used to resist oppressive governments.
It’s also worth observing that plenty of professed rationalists take the exact opposite approach to you. They follow the precautionary principle: ban anything unless we have evidence it’s not harmful.
I don’t think much of either approach. Suggesting that we should have a hard-and-fast rule of what we have to do in the absence of clear evidence is a bad idea. Humans have capacities for intuition and logic in addition to our capacity to gather empirical evidence. If evidence is lacking, we need to take a best guess, not just say “let’s permit/ban it”.
You seem to be expecting a much higher standard of evidence than I had in mind. Perhaps necessity was too strong of a word. Utility? Benefit? Something like that.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects. Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it’s solving.
The examples you use both have straightforward utility (compensating positive externalities, reducing death rates), and mixed evidence of effectiveness (lots of art created but copyright terms of infinity minus epsilon inhibit building shared culture, misuse of legal firearms suggests more powerful weapons would also get misused for greater potential damage but firearm crime correlates poorly to ownership rates).
Prohibiting by default strikes me as untenable on practical grounds, as well as being morally dubious in the extreme. As an aside, however, I actually would support abolishing intellectual property as weakly superior to the current scheme, but I doubt either is optimal.
How can you gather the evidence after the fact without experimentation? You have to try out alternative copyright schemes, for instance, to test whether it’s actually working well. Otherwise I don’t know what you’d consider empirical evidence for success.
How can you tell? What would the actual effects of decriminalizing it be? What would widespread marijuana use do to traffic accidents, the intelligence of the general public, etc.? You can argue that it’s surely better than alcohol and tobacco, but the obvious counterargument is that those are too entrenched to do away with (especially alcohol) and therefore have to be grandfathered in for pragmatic reasons.
Who’s right? Maybe you’re right, but the only way to tell is to experiment. I’d be all in favor of more experiments in things like criminal law, to be sure, but I don’t think the evidence in favor of a marijuana ban at present is much worse than that in favor of copyright.
As mentioned previously, decriminalization in Portugal serves as a pretty good experiment, and the outcome was much less harm.