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John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

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Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#151

Post by dpark »

dragonwriter wrote: post #109
dpark wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jurors are not expected to actually learn anything about the law. In fact they are told that they are not deciding or interpreting the law. Juries are finders of facts and the relevant law snippets and their interpretations are given to them by the judge. (Actually if I recall correctly, my jury wasn't even given the actual law text excerpts. Just the plaintext interpretation of them.) It can be interesting going thr…

> Jurors are not expected to actually learn anything about the law Since jury instructions both ask for a determination of whether a particular legal standard was met (phrased in legal terms), and explanation of what facts (in lay terms) the jury must find to say that that standard was met, I think your statement is not completely accurate.

> (phrased in legal terms)

This was not my experience. My jury was given a simplified description of the law with only relevant sections discussed.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#152

Post by ehsankia »

sfifs wrote: post #29

The problem for John Camack was I think he was on both sides of the table writing code - so he wrote the code at Zenimax & re-wrote the code at Oculus. From a layman's perspective, he very well could have been "copying". Normally when you design clean room implementations, you use different people and make sure that the people who write the code never see the prior written code and the person giving the spec doesn't…

Somewhere in the post, he mentions:

"This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo."

So it seems like it's not only code he wrote, but code other people at Occulus wrote too?

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#153

Post by ctdonath »

gravypod wrote: post #35
Filligree wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why is there an assumption that you can explain anything to anyone? There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand.

I'd say there are very few people who are doing things so out there that they cannot explain what they are doing. We aren't that special. We aren't magical unicors who work in all corners of our galaxy. No we are programmers, PhDs, mechanics, engineers. Our jobs share a lot in common with each other and can be easily broken down to their base components. That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things do…

That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely.

To machines and to fellow experts, yes - but not to the general population, and not to people who may be persuaded to jail him, or fine him at tremendous expense, if he doesn't adequately explain it while someone else is being paid big money to obfuscate his explanation.

This isn't advertising or fundraising. This isn't helping people understand who have an ulterior motive for understanding. This is a hostile environment trying to convict him, an environment that leverages ignorance.

And the complex topic at hand isn't sufficiently explained to ordinary people in a matter of hours, he'd have to put them thru a complete "high school thru post-doctoral education" process and bring them up in the vicinity of his level as an "among the greatest of all time in the field". When learning about a particular topic, I was directed to keep notes in a safe-deposit box precisely so if I was ever criminally charged for related reasons, I could literally put the entire jury thru the full education on the subject - and that would take about a month of courtroom time. I can't imagine Carmack's lawyer arranging to put a jury of commoners thru arithmetic-to-post-doctoral-rendering to "explain what he's doing".

I've heard it said that the simple (in rules) game of Go can be so complex that it takes mastery of seventh-level skills just to comprehend what ninth-level skills are doing. You can't just take someone who barely learned the rules and explain, in a short time, what the grandmasters are doing to win.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#154

Post by justinlaster »

xamuel wrote: post #142
ISL wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once espoused a similar opinion, but have since changed my mind. I'm a physicist, and once expressed to a judge I had met on the trail that I wished I could be judged by my academic peers. It was my belief that they would be more receptive to logical argument, understanding in their analysis, and more committed to fundamental principles. The judge was visibly surprised, but said little. What later changed my mind w…

>The judge was visibly surprised I would be too. What you said is rather arrogant. If you had based it on their having specific physics knowledge, that would be one thing. But to say that logic and reasoning is the exclusive realm of academia---that's very insulting to a lot of people.

Insulting. But doesn't make it any less true or false. To presume that your average joe has bothered to play in the realm of academic, diligent logic and reason is a mistake. I am not saying you need to go into a university, I'm not claiming a piece of paper will lend you credibility in this regard. It's about the time and effort that people spend practicing these subjects.

How many people do you know outside of STEM that can comment on the characteristic of falsifiability of scientific theories? How many even bothered to take philosophy 101? How many have bothered to seriously invest themselves in substantive topics that will give them the tools and experience they need to make sound judgements in an array of different subjects?

We are talking about a society where in a large segment of the population does not believe credible scientific theories, and tend to latch onto what can and should be generally discarded viewpoints.

We (as a society) by and large do not hire people without basic math and reasoning skills; why do we suddenly pretend that these same qualifications should not be held in the justice system, or even entertain the idea that these qualifications should be raised to a higher standard. After all, juries sometimes have the power to ruin entire lives and families.

People's egos are not great bedrocks for their credibility and judgement to sit on. Let them be insulted.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#155

Post by gregw2 »

yaur wrote: post #58
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Interesting rant on expert witnesses. Mostly interesting because I've done some expert witness testimony and found it fascinating. I completely resonate with John's issue with the expert's testimony and his understanding of it. John mentioned that their own expert testified differently but he didn't say whether or not their lawyers attempted to impeach their expert with cross examination. In the two cases I participa…

> In a jury trial I can imagine that having the jury understand your testimony is probably the most challenging. What I've seen from the sidelines is that what you want in an expert is someone who make your point, which has more to do with assertiveness than competence, and the credentials to back it up but who can't delve into the topic too deeply because information that the jury doesn't understand is an attack sur…

^this makes a lot of sense

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#156

Post by dpark »

afthonos wrote: post #74
Avenger42 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the idea of a corporation being judged by other corporations, the idea that "peers" should be judged more strictly (i.e., limited to "people in similar situations" monetarily, professionally, etc.), I feel like you would run a very clear risk of creating juries that function similarly to "good-old-boy networks" that are unwilling to judge too harshly.

That's the whole (original) point though. Historically, people would be taken away from people who had known them all their lives, be accused of something fantastical, and be condemned on the strength of he-said, she-said. In the specific case of the USA, a big complaint of colonists is that they would be whisked back to England for trial ("For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: For transpor…

> Peers are supposed to know you, your character, and your history.

I don't think so. It's one thing to say that juries should be made of private citizens drawn from your nation/state/town. It's another thing entirely to say that juries should be made up of your buddies. Peer is not a synonym for neighbor. It means "equal".

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#157

Post by in_cahoots »

ISL wrote: post #60
ue_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very common argument against juries, and I think it's one of the most powerful. Of course if you start to fill a jury with people competent in the area being judged, you run different risks, such as bias within the field. And it's still not clear that it would help with delivering justice. But if we take the idea of a jury to be about judging by one's peers, it should be patently clear (heh) that the jury o…

I once espoused a similar opinion, but have since changed my mind. I'm a physicist, and once expressed to a judge I had met on the trail that I wished I could be judged by my academic peers. It was my belief that they would be more receptive to logical argument, understanding in their analysis, and more committed to fundamental principles. The judge was visibly surprised, but said little. What later changed my mind w…

I'm glad you changed your mind. The corrolary to this is to suggest that uneducated or unprincipled defendants should be tried by an uneducated, unprincipled jury. Everyone deserves access to an informed jury, regardless of the exact definition of 'peer'.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#158

Post by ctdonath »

jjawssd wrote: post #39
Filligree wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why is there an assumption that you can explain anything to anyone? There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand.

Because the verdict boils down to something simple: guilty or not guilty. To get to that conclusion requires the distillation of complex circumstances into a simple binary outcome.

The problem is that making a mistake on that outcome isn't a matter of disinterest or lost sales, it can result in destroying lives.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#159

Post by Digory »

yaur wrote: post #58
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Interesting rant on expert witnesses. Mostly interesting because I've done some expert witness testimony and found it fascinating. I completely resonate with John's issue with the expert's testimony and his understanding of it. John mentioned that their own expert testified differently but he didn't say whether or not their lawyers attempted to impeach their expert with cross examination. In the two cases I participa…

> In a jury trial I can imagine that having the jury understand your testimony is probably the most challenging. What I've seen from the sidelines is that what you want in an expert is someone who make your point, which has more to do with assertiveness than competence, and the credentials to back it up but who can't delve into the topic too deeply because information that the jury doesn't understand is an attack sur…

In civil litigation, my professor used to say you needed three experts: one who actually knows what they're talking about, one that the jury will like, and one to translate between the two.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#160

Post by dagss »

gravypod wrote: post #35
Filligree wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why is there an assumption that you can explain anything to anyone? There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand.

I'd say there are very few people who are doing things so out there that they cannot explain what they are doing. We aren't that special. We aren't magical unicors who work in all corners of our galaxy. No we are programmers, PhDs, mechanics, engineers. Our jobs share a lot in common with each other and can be easily broken down to their base components. That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things do…

The point is not whether it can be understood. The point is that if two sides both make convincing arguments, how do you pick which one is correct? Without knowing the subject matter yourself, as a human one will usually fall back to confidence and charisma. Your brain unnoticeably substitutes "which one is correct" (which is hard / impossible to answer at a dumbed down level) with "who do I trust" which is ruled by charisma and confidence more than anything else.

The wrong projects get funded all the time. In the legal system one should do better.

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