In a message dated 12/20/00 4:34:25 PM Central Standard Time, asa@nada.kth.se
writes:
> Anglic empirism versus continental rationalism?
Very much so. In this regard, I look forward to the upcoming book on the
"Anglosphere" by Foresight director Jim Bennett, excerpts from which I've
been privileged to see. In the meantime, I think it extremely instructive to
compare the workings of the two legal systems and the impact they have on
innovation.
> So the main issue is how to set up the feedback so that it adapts at
> an optimal rate, and also adapt the "strength" of the corrections it
> sets up to avoid too little or too much feedback. Oh, it is just a
> simple optimization problem, as a friend once said about economy :-)
Right. You've pretty much summarized in "systems" terms the central problems
of jurisprudence.
> Actually it sounds a bit like the learning problems we are studying in
> neural networks and the brain - how does a system set its learning
> rate so that it is optimal for a given environment, and adapt it fast
> enough (metalearning) when the environment changes. In this example
> the individual cases and market provides the first level of learning,
> setting the price for various risks. Then there is both some
> adaptation where various cases and political decisions influence the
> strength of the feedback and adaptation to changes in the amount of
> super-mega-risk?
There are finally some people who are beginning to think of jurisprudence
with the precision the passage above suggests. In fact, there's a developing
field of study of the interaction of "AI" and jurisprudence. See, for
instance:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dla0www/centre/web_ai_a.html
and
http://www.flair.law.ubc.ca/jcsmith/logos/noos/machine.html
> The problem seem to be that while there is no shortage of learning
> material on the first level (the everyday cases and transactions),
> making learning relatively efficient, you get far less learning and
> more reliance on the a priori methods on the metalevel.
The analogy in the US court system is between the trial court level and the
succeeding layers of appellate courts above. The US federal court system
(fortunately) publishes the result of many trial court cases (most state
court systems do not, which actually tends to stress the activity of the
"metalevel" over the "first level" in your terminology). In fact, a good
argument can be made that one (although by no means the only) reason that the
federal court system tends to dispense a better quality of justice is the
availability of a rich depository of "first level" case reports.
> Maybe it could be improved if there was a better way of accumulating
> and learning from such decisions on a global scale (a bit like how I
> think politicians might have use for a database showing the results of
> decisions similar to ones they are considering). This is of course the
> job of the historians.
One idea behind having a tiered system of appellate courts is that "global"
issues become refined into fundamental questions and then that their
resolution can be applied across the whole system back at the lower levels.
One idea that Jim Bennett and I have discussed is the need for an
international level of operation for the Anglo common law system. Of course,
divorcing the notion of "law" from that of "sovereignty" would be necessary
to do this - a step most extropians have taken long ago, but which most of
the world seems amazingly ill-prepared to consider.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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