I remember at one point a religious camp counselor caught me using a glowstick on the Sabbath, and advised me to throw the glowstick away, on the theory that kindling a new light on the Sabbath violated the applicable religious laws.
It sounds to me like your camp counselor was ignorant of the actual halachah, but had some vague of how the relevant halachot worked and tried to construct his own rational for them. A glow stick does not produce significant quantities of heat, so a glowstick is probably at most Rabbinically prohibited. This means that arguably the consequences of what one does after having such an object activated may be less severe than if it were say a candle. In particular, one is in general prohibited on the Sabbath from benefiting from actions which one knew were violations of the Sabbath, but that might not apply since a glowstick is at most Rabbinically prohibited, and likely not even then. However, a candle is classified as “muktzah”, a complicated status that roughly means that even if it had been lit before Sabbath, it cannot be moved, and arguably that would apply to a glowstick. However, once one has picked up a muktzah object (whether on purpose or by accident), one may generally move it around until one puts it down.
I don’t think I can even begin to comprehend the kind of bizarre law-fetishism that could lead to this runaway ridiculous situation—where the answer to “can I move this candle” is “it’s complicated”.
There are a lot of comments already in this subthread addressing these issues already but I’m going to just comment on one other issue that’s worth bringing up. There’s a common belief among Orthodox Jews that the rule system reflects reality at some level. This is most common among certain chassidic groups, especially the Lubavitch, who believe that doing mitzvot (commandments from God) actively make the world a better place (less disease, fewer natural disasters etc.) and that doing bad things has the opposite effect. In the context of that belief, understanding the exact boundaries of the laws is similar to understanding the exact boundaries of the laws of physics. Whether a given mass of enriched uranium will go critical is complicated, a function of the exact shape, the U-235/-238 ratio, the presence and types of trace impurities and other factors. We don’t mind that because we all see the results. To some believers, whether religious Jews, or other highly legalistic religions such as some branches of Catholicism, this feels very similar. Caring about the minutia is an example of really acting like there’s a dragon in the garage.
This was very much not the case within the Orthodox tradition I was raised in.
Something similar was true for mishpatim (1), I guess—in the same way that secular communities frequently assume that their preferred policies make the world a better place—but chukim (1) were presented entirely deontologically.
Sure, one could make an argument to the effect that God was omniscient and benevolent, and wanted these rules followed, and therefore it was likely that the effect of following the rules would be beneficial… but mostly nobody did; the more common stance was that obedience to God was the proper terminal value, and God wanted these rules followed, and therefore compliance with the rules was a proper instrumental value. Likely consequences didn’t enter into it at all.
(1) Jewish tradition divides the commandments derived from the Old Testament, which are by tradition understood as coming directly from God (as distinct from the ones that are understood as coming from later rabbinical bodies), into two classes, chukim and mishpatim. Roughly speaking, mishpatim have a reason given and chukim don’t.
(shrug) I think what I said here applies. Try explaining the social rules governing successfully navigating your own community to a complete outsider—or even better, someone with Asperger’s—and you may find it easier to comprehend how one gets into such a ridiculous situation.
I’m a gentile atheist and I find that Halachich debate and reasoning totally appeals to the detail-oriented fanboy in me. Ultimately, it was a barren intellectual exercise with respect to the real world, but a hugely challenging intellectual exercise—a game—nonetheless. Maybe one of the great games of history. Who can tell how many brilliant minds wasted their lives building this enormously refined system of law, based on the myths of one of many, many barbaric tribes? But with that said, in the modern day, many of the best jurists and legal scholars today are Jews who owe some debt to this cultural inheritance.
I think this must apply to every legal system which has governed humans so far. If laws are to be made known to everyone, and generally comprehensible, then they can’t be too complicated. As it is, they tend to be plenty complicated. Even so, great numbers of people in aggregate are still far, far more complicated than any human system of laws. They will do things unanticipated by the lawmakers, and not exactly covered by the words of the lawmakers. Then, a court of law may be required to decide whether or how an inherently ambiguous law applies to an unanticipated fact pattern.
I think this must apply to every legal system which has governed humans so far.
I agree, and it’s factually true; my concern was that if training on Halachic law was good practice for common law, then our legal systems suffer too much from complications. I think the Halachic system is bad, and to the extent that our legal system resembles it enough to measurably advantage Halachic scholars, our legal system is bad too.
There was a move at one point to write laws in Python or some other programming code; I would then argue that if thinking like a programmer made you a better jurist or legal scholar, it says good things about both systems.
I am seriously interested in more information about this approach. I think that right now, there are two modern systems of law: Roman-derived law and English-derived, or “common” law. Sharia law might count as a close runner-up. I think Halacha is well-developed, but not widely-enforced, so I would not count it as a major modern legal system. With that said, and admitting I don’t know much about civil law or the religious laws, my impression is that all the above are similarly complicated, and have been for centuries. I am in doubt that human behavior and its ambiguities could be simplified by being encoded in Python. I think it’s a really, really hard problem, at least as long as humans remain as unpredictable as they do.
I am seriously interested in more information about this approach. I think that right now, there are two modern systems of law: Roman-derived law and English-derived, or “common” law. Sharia law might count as a close runner-up. I think Halacha is well-developed, but not widely-enforced, so I would not count it as a major modern legal system.
David Friedman has taught a course in “Legal Systems Very Different From Ours” in both 2008 and 2010. See these course pages: [1][2]
It would probably have to be coupled, though, with a state where laws are actually enforced consistently, and can be changed quickly if they end up screwing things up massively.
Who can tell how many brilliant minds wasted their lives building this enormously refined system of law, based on the myths of one of many, many barbaric tribes?
They may have wasted their minds on it, but the better they where at wasting their minds the higher their status was, the likelier it was they would marry a girl from another respected or wealthy family and consequently the more they got to reproduce.
Where their minds truly wasted? Or did it by happy accident, a hack of our out of date reward systems, managed to produce more brilliant, if deluded and blinded minds? History has also since shown that the minds aren’t irreversibly deluded.
I can’t help but wonder if we would have had quite as many wonderful minds like Bohr, Einstein, Hertz or Nobele prize winners like Richard Phillips Fenyman or Isidor Isaac Rabi (!) if those minds in the late middle ages or early modern period weren’t wasted.
Possibly, but at the same time, a lot of those people in the Middle Ages were still wasting time and are still doing so today. There’s no question for example that Maimonides was brilliant. He was impressive for his accomplishments in philosophy, medicine, and even in other areas that he only dabbled in (such as math). That he spent most of his time on halachah certainly held back society. And he’s not the only example. Similar remarks would apply to many of the great Rabbis in history and even some of the modern ones.
I’d be interested in seeing how you draw the line between Maimonides’ work in halachah and in philosophy. I can certainly identify outputs that I would classify as one or the other, but I would have a very hard time drawing a sharp line between the processes.
I agree that there isn’t a sharp line. But if we just look at the material that falls unambiguously into halachah as opposed to all the material that falls into philosophy or the borderline, there’s a lot more halachich material.
Sure. Again, classifying the outputs isn’t too hard. Philosophical and halachic writing are different genres, and it’s relatively easy to class writing by genre. Sure, there’s a fuzzy middle ground, but I agree that that’s a minor concern.
But your argument seems to depend on the idea that if he spent a year thinking about stuff and at the end of that year wrote five thousand words we would class as halachah and five hundred words we would class as philosophy, that means he wasted that year, whereas if it had been the other way around, that would advance society.
Before endorsing such an argument, I’d want to know more about what was actually going on in that year. I could easily see it going either way, simply because there isn’t a clear correlation in this context between how useful his thinking was vs. what genre he published the results in.
Regarding fanboyism, that’s certainly an aspect that it has similarity to among the more self-conscious Orthodox Jews there’s a feeling that they understand it as an intellectual game. And for what it is worth, when I’ve wrote on my blog entries about things likes the halachot of making a horcrux, or the kashrut status of a Star Trek replicator, most Orthodox readers are interested and generally not offended.
What you call law fetishism I call ensuring high fidelity in meme transmission while at the same time trying to make irrational memes that are adaptive easier to rationalise.
The whole collection of memes that lead to this “ridiculous situation” was fitness enhancing, even from a genetic perspective, but people who transmitted it didn’t know why it worked (note: We probably still don’t appreciate how culture modifies behaviours and expectations in unknown ways).
It was improved mostly via groups that where unfortunate enough to stumble on a variation that didn’t work dying off or being out-shined. The Shakers are a example of a Christian group stumbling upon a variation (or mutation) of Christianity that unfortunately doesn’t work, However over time people found it harder and harder to execute all these seemingly random instructions (junk memes build up over time), that is where scholarship comes in.
Sometimes you can streamline the rules, at the price of adding a few more junk memes, other times you can create convoluted rationalizations that most never study but helps those in positions of authority being more or less sincere in promoting the rules.
Abrahamic faiths are basically elaborate collections of scripts that when executed in the “ancestral” environment helped the entire list of memes come down to the present. They like I previously stated often even helped general genetic fitness (just look at the increase in numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe from the 16th century onwards, or the increase in Amish numbers since the early 20th century) They could employ a much longer list of behaviours than the limited lists of taboos and rituals of older traditions because of writing and boon that is the idea of a omnipotent omniscient agent which basically acts as universal solvent for the feeling of cognitive dissonance.
Religious scholars and leaders where in times when they where greatly respected basically social engineers who tried to tweak the DNA of their society to keep it competitive or to enhance their own benefit from the super-organism.
the answer to “can I move this candle” is “it’s complicated”.
I think there’s a principle at work here. I suspect that this has been expressed more formally. But...
… laws proposed to govern human behavior—which is complicated—can only anticipate a portion of that behavior. Lawmakers may enact the most rigid, black-and-white, unambiguous law you could imagine, but it must be expressed in words more ambiguous than the words used in mathematics. There will be a grey area, and human action will find that grey area. It will be complicated on the fringes.
This applies to any system of law by which humans are to govern themselves, Halacha just as much as the United States Code of Federal Regulations.
I see Wikipedia says Goodhart’s Law may mean: “that once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.”
I tentatively think prescriptive laws do not correspond to measures, whether surrogtate or direct. Right now, I think surrogate measures are like maps, which may or may not match the territory. On the other hand, I think laws are not like maps. Rather, they are like plans, especially like plans made for exploring territory that has not yet been mapped. Every so often, explorers must revisit their plans in the face of reality. My metaphor may be breaking down a bit here, but imagine law as a single set of instructions issued by the King to innumerable groups of hopeful colonists, setting out to explore a new world. The instructions may suffice for many or most, but some will have to make some creative interpretation.
Out of curiosity, do people who grow up under this sort of regime end up thinking it’s normal, similarly to the way people raised in Christianity end up desensitized to the absurd-sounding nature of the beliefs about virgin birth and so on? Does it cause them to e.g. be more accepting of government regulation than average? Or is there some kind of compartmentalization going on where they continue expecting rules in general to make some sort of sense (and not interfere with practical functioning), just not those labeled “religious”?
My suspicion, of course, is the latter (just as people compartmentalize their epistemic beliefs, and allow their absurdity heuristic to function more-or-less normally outside of the religious domain), but I’d be curious to hear reflections from those who were raised in strict legalistic religions about the extent to which such practices actually struck them as absurd inside their own minds (even allowing for belief in the empirical claims of the religion about the nature of the universe).
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was raised an Orthodox Jew and I basically took to treating it as “normal” in the same sense that any set of arbitrary social rules is “normal.” It was no weirder than the rules governing, say, when it was OK to wear a T-shirt and sneakers vs. when it wasn’t, or when it was OK to eat the last piece of cake, or whatever.
And I still basically think that. It’s not that there’s some default state where there aren’t any arbitrary rules to follow, against which I can compare the rules of Orthodox Judaism. There are just different cultures, each with its own set of rules.
I suspect that, again as with any set of social norms, the key distinction is between people who are raised with only one such set of norms, compared to people who are raised having to navigate among several. The former group can treat their culture’s rules as invisible and default and “common sensical”; the latter group can’t get away with that so easily.
Off-topic halachic minutia:
It sounds to me like your camp counselor was ignorant of the actual halachah, but had some vague of how the relevant halachot worked and tried to construct his own rational for them. A glow stick does not produce significant quantities of heat, so a glowstick is probably at most Rabbinically prohibited. This means that arguably the consequences of what one does after having such an object activated may be less severe than if it were say a candle. In particular, one is in general prohibited on the Sabbath from benefiting from actions which one knew were violations of the Sabbath, but that might not apply since a glowstick is at most Rabbinically prohibited, and likely not even then. However, a candle is classified as “muktzah”, a complicated status that roughly means that even if it had been lit before Sabbath, it cannot be moved, and arguably that would apply to a glowstick. However, once one has picked up a muktzah object (whether on purpose or by accident), one may generally move it around until one puts it down.
I don’t think I can even begin to comprehend the kind of bizarre law-fetishism that could lead to this runaway ridiculous situation—where the answer to “can I move this candle” is “it’s complicated”.
There are a lot of comments already in this subthread addressing these issues already but I’m going to just comment on one other issue that’s worth bringing up. There’s a common belief among Orthodox Jews that the rule system reflects reality at some level. This is most common among certain chassidic groups, especially the Lubavitch, who believe that doing mitzvot (commandments from God) actively make the world a better place (less disease, fewer natural disasters etc.) and that doing bad things has the opposite effect. In the context of that belief, understanding the exact boundaries of the laws is similar to understanding the exact boundaries of the laws of physics. Whether a given mass of enriched uranium will go critical is complicated, a function of the exact shape, the U-235/-238 ratio, the presence and types of trace impurities and other factors. We don’t mind that because we all see the results. To some believers, whether religious Jews, or other highly legalistic religions such as some branches of Catholicism, this feels very similar. Caring about the minutia is an example of really acting like there’s a dragon in the garage.
This was very much not the case within the Orthodox tradition I was raised in.
Something similar was true for mishpatim (1), I guess—in the same way that secular communities frequently assume that their preferred policies make the world a better place—but chukim (1) were presented entirely deontologically.
Sure, one could make an argument to the effect that God was omniscient and benevolent, and wanted these rules followed, and therefore it was likely that the effect of following the rules would be beneficial… but mostly nobody did; the more common stance was that obedience to God was the proper terminal value, and God wanted these rules followed, and therefore compliance with the rules was a proper instrumental value. Likely consequences didn’t enter into it at all.
(1) Jewish tradition divides the commandments derived from the Old Testament, which are by tradition understood as coming directly from God (as distinct from the ones that are understood as coming from later rabbinical bodies), into two classes, chukim and mishpatim. Roughly speaking, mishpatim have a reason given and chukim don’t.
(shrug) I think what I said here applies. Try explaining the social rules governing successfully navigating your own community to a complete outsider—or even better, someone with Asperger’s—and you may find it easier to comprehend how one gets into such a ridiculous situation.
I’m a gentile atheist and I find that Halachich debate and reasoning totally appeals to the detail-oriented fanboy in me. Ultimately, it was a barren intellectual exercise with respect to the real world, but a hugely challenging intellectual exercise—a game—nonetheless. Maybe one of the great games of history. Who can tell how many brilliant minds wasted their lives building this enormously refined system of law, based on the myths of one of many, many barbaric tribes? But with that said, in the modern day, many of the best jurists and legal scholars today are Jews who owe some debt to this cultural inheritance.
This says some good things about the cultural laws, but it also says some bad things about our legal systems.
I think this must apply to every legal system which has governed humans so far. If laws are to be made known to everyone, and generally comprehensible, then they can’t be too complicated. As it is, they tend to be plenty complicated. Even so, great numbers of people in aggregate are still far, far more complicated than any human system of laws. They will do things unanticipated by the lawmakers, and not exactly covered by the words of the lawmakers. Then, a court of law may be required to decide whether or how an inherently ambiguous law applies to an unanticipated fact pattern.
I agree, and it’s factually true; my concern was that if training on Halachic law was good practice for common law, then our legal systems suffer too much from complications. I think the Halachic system is bad, and to the extent that our legal system resembles it enough to measurably advantage Halachic scholars, our legal system is bad too.
There was a move at one point to write laws in Python or some other programming code; I would then argue that if thinking like a programmer made you a better jurist or legal scholar, it says good things about both systems.
I am seriously interested in more information about this approach. I think that right now, there are two modern systems of law: Roman-derived law and English-derived, or “common” law. Sharia law might count as a close runner-up. I think Halacha is well-developed, but not widely-enforced, so I would not count it as a major modern legal system. With that said, and admitting I don’t know much about civil law or the religious laws, my impression is that all the above are similarly complicated, and have been for centuries. I am in doubt that human behavior and its ambiguities could be simplified by being encoded in Python. I think it’s a really, really hard problem, at least as long as humans remain as unpredictable as they do.
Off-topic: Why does everyone on lesswrong say Python when they need to mention a programming language?
Rule 46b:: I will not turn my programming language into a snake. It never helps.
It has a very high ease of learning to usefulness ratio?
edit: It seems to come highly recommended as a first programming language (certainly it was such to me).
Do you mean a high usefulness to difficulty of learning ratio?
Atari BASIC had a nearly infinite ease of learning to usefulness ratio. :)
Right.
Python is my first (and currently only) programming language. It’s easy to read, easy to learn, and useful.
Python code is also reasonably easy to read. It’s sometimes called executable pseudocode.
I did a Google duel—and it appears that “Java” beats “Python” for mentions around here.
I don’t get it either I’m more of a C guy.
David Friedman has taught a course in “Legal Systems Very Different From Ours” in both 2008 and 2010. See these course pages: [1] [2]
I think the Python thing was just for the payoff functions of securities, not for laws as such.
That is disappointing. Lawmakers who think like programmers seems like it would be a huge improvement on the current system.
Lawmakers who think like programmers might be an improvement. But I’m not sure.
On Less Wrong, this almost reads as “if only lawmakers were more like me, things would be okay.” I’m skeptical.
It would probably have to be coupled, though, with a state where laws are actually enforced consistently, and can be changed quickly if they end up screwing things up massively.
They may have wasted their minds on it, but the better they where at wasting their minds the higher their status was, the likelier it was they would marry a girl from another respected or wealthy family and consequently the more they got to reproduce.
Where their minds truly wasted? Or did it by happy accident, a hack of our out of date reward systems, managed to produce more brilliant, if deluded and blinded minds? History has also since shown that the minds aren’t irreversibly deluded.
I can’t help but wonder if we would have had quite as many wonderful minds like Bohr, Einstein, Hertz or Nobele prize winners like Richard Phillips Fenyman or Isidor Isaac Rabi (!) if those minds in the late middle ages or early modern period weren’t wasted.
Possibly, but at the same time, a lot of those people in the Middle Ages were still wasting time and are still doing so today. There’s no question for example that Maimonides was brilliant. He was impressive for his accomplishments in philosophy, medicine, and even in other areas that he only dabbled in (such as math). That he spent most of his time on halachah certainly held back society. And he’s not the only example. Similar remarks would apply to many of the great Rabbis in history and even some of the modern ones.
I’d be interested in seeing how you draw the line between Maimonides’ work in halachah and in philosophy. I can certainly identify outputs that I would classify as one or the other, but I would have a very hard time drawing a sharp line between the processes.
I agree that there isn’t a sharp line. But if we just look at the material that falls unambiguously into halachah as opposed to all the material that falls into philosophy or the borderline, there’s a lot more halachich material.
Sure. Again, classifying the outputs isn’t too hard. Philosophical and halachic writing are different genres, and it’s relatively easy to class writing by genre. Sure, there’s a fuzzy middle ground, but I agree that that’s a minor concern.
But your argument seems to depend on the idea that if he spent a year thinking about stuff and at the end of that year wrote five thousand words we would class as halachah and five hundred words we would class as philosophy, that means he wasted that year, whereas if it had been the other way around, that would advance society.
Before endorsing such an argument, I’d want to know more about what was actually going on in that year. I could easily see it going either way, simply because there isn’t a clear correlation in this context between how useful his thinking was vs. what genre he published the results in.
Regarding fanboyism, that’s certainly an aspect that it has similarity to among the more self-conscious Orthodox Jews there’s a feeling that they understand it as an intellectual game. And for what it is worth, when I’ve wrote on my blog entries about things likes the halachot of making a horcrux, or the kashrut status of a Star Trek replicator, most Orthodox readers are interested and generally not offended.
I want a link to that.
Discussed in this entry.
I think Lawyers are like Warriors in this regard.
What you call law fetishism I call ensuring high fidelity in meme transmission while at the same time trying to make irrational memes that are adaptive easier to rationalise.
The whole collection of memes that lead to this “ridiculous situation” was fitness enhancing, even from a genetic perspective, but people who transmitted it didn’t know why it worked (note: We probably still don’t appreciate how culture modifies behaviours and expectations in unknown ways).
It was improved mostly via groups that where unfortunate enough to stumble on a variation that didn’t work dying off or being out-shined. The Shakers are a example of a Christian group stumbling upon a variation (or mutation) of Christianity that unfortunately doesn’t work, However over time people found it harder and harder to execute all these seemingly random instructions (junk memes build up over time), that is where scholarship comes in.
Sometimes you can streamline the rules, at the price of adding a few more junk memes, other times you can create convoluted rationalizations that most never study but helps those in positions of authority being more or less sincere in promoting the rules.
Abrahamic faiths are basically elaborate collections of scripts that when executed in the “ancestral” environment helped the entire list of memes come down to the present. They like I previously stated often even helped general genetic fitness (just look at the increase in numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe from the 16th century onwards, or the increase in Amish numbers since the early 20th century) They could employ a much longer list of behaviours than the limited lists of taboos and rituals of older traditions because of writing and boon that is the idea of a omnipotent omniscient agent which basically acts as universal solvent for the feeling of cognitive dissonance.
Religious scholars and leaders where in times when they where greatly respected basically social engineers who tried to tweak the DNA of their society to keep it competitive or to enhance their own benefit from the super-organism.
I think there’s a principle at work here. I suspect that this has been expressed more formally. But...
… laws proposed to govern human behavior—which is complicated—can only anticipate a portion of that behavior. Lawmakers may enact the most rigid, black-and-white, unambiguous law you could imagine, but it must be expressed in words more ambiguous than the words used in mathematics. There will be a grey area, and human action will find that grey area. It will be complicated on the fringes.
This applies to any system of law by which humans are to govern themselves, Halacha just as much as the United States Code of Federal Regulations.
That sounds related to Goodhart’s Law.
Could reasonably be called “Costanza’s Corollary to Goodhart’s Law” .
I see Wikipedia says Goodhart’s Law may mean: “that once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.”
I tentatively think prescriptive laws do not correspond to measures, whether surrogtate or direct. Right now, I think surrogate measures are like maps, which may or may not match the territory. On the other hand, I think laws are not like maps. Rather, they are like plans, especially like plans made for exploring territory that has not yet been mapped. Every so often, explorers must revisit their plans in the face of reality. My metaphor may be breaking down a bit here, but imagine law as a single set of instructions issued by the King to innumerable groups of hopeful colonists, setting out to explore a new world. The instructions may suffice for many or most, but some will have to make some creative interpretation.
Out of curiosity, do people who grow up under this sort of regime end up thinking it’s normal, similarly to the way people raised in Christianity end up desensitized to the absurd-sounding nature of the beliefs about virgin birth and so on? Does it cause them to e.g. be more accepting of government regulation than average? Or is there some kind of compartmentalization going on where they continue expecting rules in general to make some sort of sense (and not interfere with practical functioning), just not those labeled “religious”?
My suspicion, of course, is the latter (just as people compartmentalize their epistemic beliefs, and allow their absurdity heuristic to function more-or-less normally outside of the religious domain), but I’d be curious to hear reflections from those who were raised in strict legalistic religions about the extent to which such practices actually struck them as absurd inside their own minds (even allowing for belief in the empirical claims of the religion about the nature of the universe).
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was raised an Orthodox Jew and I basically took to treating it as “normal” in the same sense that any set of arbitrary social rules is “normal.” It was no weirder than the rules governing, say, when it was OK to wear a T-shirt and sneakers vs. when it wasn’t, or when it was OK to eat the last piece of cake, or whatever.
And I still basically think that. It’s not that there’s some default state where there aren’t any arbitrary rules to follow, against which I can compare the rules of Orthodox Judaism. There are just different cultures, each with its own set of rules.
I suspect that, again as with any set of social norms, the key distinction is between people who are raised with only one such set of norms, compared to people who are raised having to navigate among several. The former group can treat their culture’s rules as invisible and default and “common sensical”; the latter group can’t get away with that so easily.