Blog

Follow along. When your cable company keeps you on hold you get angry. When you get angry you go blow off steam. When you blow off steam accidents happen. When accidents happen you get an eye patch. When you have an eye patch you are tough. When you look tough they want to see how tough. When people want to see how tough, you wind up in a roadside ditch. By this logic, congress should be able to regulate wait times to prevent people from winding up in roadside ditches. It’s rational! Call it the Roadside Ditch Protection Act!

Oh boy can I attest to this, after spending two years in freakin’ Johnstown.

Louisville is a big upgrade.

Following up on Orin’s previous post about how people perceive a video of an Occupier getting tased, we have this follow-up.

I posted a reader poll yesterday on the video of the U.S. Park Police officer tasing an OccupyDC protester, and the responses are fascinating. With about 2,000 votes, opinion is almost exactly evenly divided. 43% say the officer acted appropriately; 41% say the officer did not act appropriately; and 16% say that they need more information before deciding. The comment thread is equally divided, with over 300 comments so far.

Why is opinion so divided? My pet hypothesis is that most people recognize two competing narratives when it comes to police-citizen interaction. The first narrative is what you might call the equality narrative. The equality narrative posits that the police are just citizens who happen to wear uniforms, and they have no more right to get their way than anyone else. If an officer asks a person questions, for example, he doesn’t have to respond. Unless the officer orders him to stay put, he can walk away.

The second narrative is what I’ll call the inequality narrative. The inequality narrative posits that the police have special authority by virtue of being police officers, and that people interacting with the police have to recognize that special authority and should expect trouble if they don’t. If an officer decides to make an arrest, for example, the subject of the arrest can’t just decide he would rather not be arrested and try to resist the officer’s efforts.

The key to these two narratives is that they’re both true — at times. The equality narrative is often true. In some circumstances, the police have no more power than anyone else. The inequality narrative is also often true. In other circumstances, the police do have the power to use force to overcome the resistance of individuals who may not want to do what the police want.

This more-or-less fits in with my perception of Orin, as I noted in a comment earlier:

Orin tries so hard to offer a neutral assessment of everything that he is loathe to ever offer his own opinions. When he has addressed it, he essentially says that his lack of a normative opinion is based on his neutral, balanced approach to everything. I think Orin, in fact, after trying so hard for so many years to divorce himself from any ideological perspective, has trained his brain to think objectively. It is quite remarkable, really. Most people think this is a charade, in Orin’s attempt to pretend to be neutral. I don’t. I think this is honestly how he views constitutional law issues.

And I do mean that favorably. He has trained himself to truly see both sides on everything. And he really challenges everyone else to justify their thinking.

Well at this point I’m up to 3521, but I forgot to mark the 3500th post last week.

I hit 2,300 posts on July, 10 2011. 2,433 on August 11, 2011 when my blog went on hiatus. I hit 2,700 posts on September 17, 2011. I hit 3,000 posts on November 14, 2011. And 3,500 posts on about January 27, 2012.

So somewhere between 200 posts a month, on average. That is like 6 or 7 a day.

I’ve been keeping a pretty good clip during my hiatus. I hope someone appreciates it!

Following up on my previous posts about assisted decision making and the unauthorized practice of law, I found this post by Eran Kahana on the Codex blog on just that point.

Let’s begin with addressing why unauthorized practice of law (UPL) even matters here. The bottom line concern here is that if the delivery of legal services by AI is interpreted as UPL, it will likely spell the death knell for any significant development for computational law AI applications (CLAI). Developers who nevertheless dare challenge the UPL rules will need to be well prepared to face the prospect of being dragged into turbulent and expensive legal fist-fights. Will it be worth the bother? Perhaps. But rather than adopt a wait-and-see attitude, a more compelling challenge is to figure out what measures need to be taken, what concerns need to be ameliorated so that we reduce the risk to this valuable area of development. . . .

It is difficult to persuasively argue that it would neither be desirable nor useful to understand what type of warranties are out there. Even so, prospective used-car buyers virtually never hire a lawyer to conduct a warranty compare-and-contrast exercise. It’s too expensive. It’s too time-consuming. CLAI, in contrast, is perfectly suited to deliver this type of service. It can do so very efficiently (i.e., accurately and quickly), especially when it can run a comparison against a large warranty database, one that is well accepted as being representative of other warranties in, for example, the used-car market.

I’m glad to see other people are thinking about these things.

In other news, I will be discussing my work on FantasySCOTUS with the Codex team next week via Skype.