What I have been after is a way to improve serious conversations, among, e.g., scientists or administrators. In contrast, unless I am very severely mistaken, Nomic players are mostly out to have fun, particularly, the same kind of fun that a person gets by watching a TV show, like Desperate Housewives or Seinfeld, where every character is always trying to one-up every other character.
Would you advise also legal scholars to learn about Nomic to improve real-world, high-stakes judical systems? I would not. I think Nomic is almost certainly irrelevant to that purpose—unless perhaps your goal is to understand the natural human capacity to get off on status competitions and political and legalistic manipulations and trickery to discourage lawyers or judges from getting off on it.
One potential response to what I just wrote is that if we insist that no lawyer or judge derive pleasure from status competitions or manipulations and trickery then our courts would not have enough lawyers and judges even though we pay them well. My response to that is that all I meant is that it would be counterproductive to introduce more of that natural human motivation into our courts, and the need to do so is the only circumstance I can imagine in which Nomic would actually contribute positively to a real-world, high-stakes judicial system.
Suppose someone has gone through the trouble and expense of getting a degree in law and passing the bar exam, but cannot stay motivated to practice law because he or she does not derive sufficient pleasure from it (and he or she cannot become a professor of law). Well, that is a circumstance in which Nomic might have something quite worthwhile to teach that individual lawyer (namely, how to take pleasure in legal maneuvering and legal competition). But that is different from Nomic’s having something to contribute to the judicial system as a whole; the judicial system as a whole is not experiencing any problems in filling its occupational roles with motivated workers.
Moreover, if you are at all interested in becoming more “epistemically” rational than the average person, it is a bad idea to learn how to take pleasure in status competitions or political or legal maneuverings.
What I have been after is a way to improve serious conversations, among, e.g., scientists or administrators. In contrast, unless I am very severely mistaken, Nomic players are mostly out to have fun, particularly, the same kind of fun that a person gets by watching a TV show, like Desperate Housewives or Seinfeld, where every character is always trying to one-up every other character.
Would you advise also legal scholars to learn about Nomic to improve real-world, high-stakes judical systems? I would not. I think Nomic is almost certainly irrelevant to that purpose—unless perhaps your goal is to understand the natural human capacity to get off on status competitions and political and legalistic manipulations and trickery to discourage lawyers or judges from getting off on it.
One potential response to what I just wrote is that if we insist that no lawyer or judge derive pleasure from status competitions or manipulations and trickery then our courts would not have enough lawyers and judges even though we pay them well. My response to that is that all I meant is that it would be counterproductive to introduce more of that natural human motivation into our courts, and the need to do so is the only circumstance I can imagine in which Nomic would actually contribute positively to a real-world, high-stakes judicial system.
Suppose someone has gone through the trouble and expense of getting a degree in law and passing the bar exam, but cannot stay motivated to practice law because he or she does not derive sufficient pleasure from it (and he or she cannot become a professor of law). Well, that is a circumstance in which Nomic might have something quite worthwhile to teach that individual lawyer (namely, how to take pleasure in legal maneuvering and legal competition). But that is different from Nomic’s having something to contribute to the judicial system as a whole; the judicial system as a whole is not experiencing any problems in filling its occupational roles with motivated workers.
Moreover, if you are at all interested in becoming more “epistemically” rational than the average person, it is a bad idea to learn how to take pleasure in status competitions or political or legal maneuverings.
Peter Suber, the inventor of Nomic, is a legal scholar.
...and Nomic itself was published as an appendix to his book on legal philosophy, The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Law, Logic, Omnipotence, and Change, although a preview of its rules appeared in one of Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas columns.
That is not a refutation of anything I wrote. Lots of things invented by legal scholars turn out to have no positive effect on judicial systems.