Conversation with Andrew Critch today, in light of a lot of the nonprofit legal work he’s been involved with lately. I thought it was worth writing up:
“I’ve gained a lot of respect for the law in the last few years. Like, a lot of laws make a lot more sense than you’d think. I actually think looking into the IRS codes would actually be instructive in designing systems to align potentially unfriendly agents.”
I said “Huh. How surprised are you by this? And curious if your brain was doing one particular pattern a few years ago that you can now see as wrong?”
“I think mostly the laws that were promoted to my attention were especially stupid, because that’s what was worth telling outrage stories about. Also, in middle school I developed this general hatred for stupid rules that didn’t make any sense and generalized this to ‘people in power make stupid rules’, or something. But, actually, maybe middle school teachers are just particularly bad at making rules. Most of the IRS tax code has seemed pretty reasonable to me.”
I think there’s a difference between “Most of the IRS tax code is reasonable” and “Most of the instances where the IRS tax code does something are instances where it does reasonable things.” Not all parts of the tax code are used equally often. Furthermore, most unreasonable instances of a lot of things will be rare as a percentage of the whole because there is a large set of uncontroversial background uses. For instance, consider a completely corrupt politician who takes bribes—he’s not going to be taking a bribe for every decision he makes and most of the ones he does make will be uncontroversial things like “approve $X for this thing which everyone thinks should be approved anyway”.
Conversation with Andrew Critch today, in light of a lot of the nonprofit legal work he’s been involved with lately. I thought it was worth writing up:
“I’ve gained a lot of respect for the law in the last few years. Like, a lot of laws make a lot more sense than you’d think. I actually think looking into the IRS codes would actually be instructive in designing systems to align potentially unfriendly agents.”
I said “Huh. How surprised are you by this? And curious if your brain was doing one particular pattern a few years ago that you can now see as wrong?”
“I think mostly the laws that were promoted to my attention were especially stupid, because that’s what was worth telling outrage stories about. Also, in middle school I developed this general hatred for stupid rules that didn’t make any sense and generalized this to ‘people in power make stupid rules’, or something. But, actually, maybe middle school teachers are just particularly bad at making rules. Most of the IRS tax code has seemed pretty reasonable to me.”
I think there’s a difference between “Most of the IRS tax code is reasonable” and “Most of the instances where the IRS tax code does something are instances where it does reasonable things.” Not all parts of the tax code are used equally often. Furthermore, most unreasonable instances of a lot of things will be rare as a percentage of the whole because there is a large set of uncontroversial background uses. For instance, consider a completely corrupt politician who takes bribes—he’s not going to be taking a bribe for every decision he makes and most of the ones he does make will be uncontroversial things like “approve $X for this thing which everyone thinks should be approved anyway”.