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Gödel's Loophole

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Re: Gödel's Loophole

#21

Post by eurasiantiger »

rtpg wrote: post #7

This is the prototypical "wow the nerd tried to solve law and lawyering". Yes, the constitution can be ammended to be less democratic. It can also be entirely ignored by everyone, and things can also happen in ways that go against its text, with judges looking the other way! People are not magically bound by words on a piece of paper, so if you end up being able to go through the (extremely arduous! Moreso than many…

It’s baffling that some people believe banning something by law prevents it from happening.

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#22

Post by foobar02 »

It's without a doubt amending Article V with Article V; I don't really understand why it's thought of as some mysterious loophole lost to time. Not everything a smart man figures out has to be particularly complex.

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#23

Post by alimw »

jimmyed wrote: post #12

> Gödel responded "Oh, yes, I can prove it," but the judge declined to pursue the matter. Such a mundane judge. It's as if someone says to a physicist "I have the General Unified Theory" and they decide to not listen to it.

If a truly ingenious method exists, probably best that nobody knows about it! Thankfully the current crop of would-be American dictators doesn't look smart enough to figure one out for themselves. (Brute force remains an option.)

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#24

Post by guerrilla »

jimmyed wrote: post #12

> Gödel responded "Oh, yes, I can prove it," but the judge declined to pursue the matter. Such a mundane judge. It's as if someone says to a physicist "I have the General Unified Theory" and they decide to not listen to it.

> It's as if someone says to a physicist "I have the General Unified Theory" and they decide to not listen to it.

That happens all the time. The probably judge ignored Gödel for the same reason physcists ignore cranks.

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#25

Post by elihu »

rtpg wrote: post #7

This is the prototypical "wow the nerd tried to solve law and lawyering". Yes, the constitution can be ammended to be less democratic. It can also be entirely ignored by everyone, and things can also happen in ways that go against its text, with judges looking the other way! People are not magically bound by words on a piece of paper, so if you end up being able to go through the (extremely arduous! Moreso than many…

That the loophole involved the amendment process is just speculation. It may have been something else.

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#26

Post by yungmodulus »

rtpg wrote: post #7

This is the prototypical "wow the nerd tried to solve law and lawyering". Yes, the constitution can be ammended to be less democratic. It can also be entirely ignored by everyone, and things can also happen in ways that go against its text, with judges looking the other way! People are not magically bound by words on a piece of paper, so if you end up being able to go through the (extremely arduous! Moreso than many…

I personally think there's a more interesting point about the United States contained within the Wikipedia article. The concept of various rules, procedures, and laws dependent on celebrity, status, or wealth seems to show up everywhere.

At the courthouse, witnesses would normally remain outside of the room during a citizenship examination, but because Einstein, a celebrity, was involved, and because the judge, Phillip Forman, had administered the oath of citizenship to Einstein, all three men were invited in [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_Loophole

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#27

Post by seanhunter »

jimmyed wrote: post #12

> Gödel responded "Oh, yes, I can prove it," but the judge declined to pursue the matter. Such a mundane judge. It's as if someone says to a physicist "I have the General Unified Theory" and they decide to not listen to it.

Realistically this is more akin to a physicist hearing from a non-physicist they have a design for a perpetual motion machine and declining to pursue it.

Gödel was clearly a giant in his field but here he is completely outside of the rubric of things he was familiar with. Specifically the constitution describes a political system not a logical one and while logic is important for the law, it does not describe anything like a formal system of logic (in the mathematical sense).

Judges are also incredibly busy and they probably had a huge caseload to deal with and little time right then for a detailed constitutional debate.

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#28

Post by karlicoss »

lmm wrote: post #4

The law is not a formal system, it's a tool for humans to decide how to act. If those humans decide they want a tyranny, no amount of words on paper could ever stop them.

Yet we use it to reason about things, so formalizing and finding inconsistencies leaves less space for exploiting it.

Also even though math is backed by a formal system in theory, in practice no one has time to completely verify mathematicians' work bottom-up from axioms (at least until we become better at proof assistants). Ultimately it comes down to intuition and trust, i.e. these people understand the proof, and I trust them, so I think the proposition holds. And similarly in principle a large group of people can decide that they don't trust the axioms (they are arbitrary in a sense, just like laws), yet it formal methods in math are still useful.

Re: Gödel's Loophole

#30

Post by ccortes »

rtpg wrote: post #7

This is the prototypical "wow the nerd tried to solve law and lawyering". Yes, the constitution can be ammended to be less democratic. It can also be entirely ignored by everyone, and things can also happen in ways that go against its text, with judges looking the other way! People are not magically bound by words on a piece of paper, so if you end up being able to go through the (extremely arduous! Moreso than many…

> It's embarassing that this anecdote is given almost any weight. It's absolutely the most navel-gazing useless analysis. It does help to serve as an excellent counter-argument to "philosopher kings", though....

Damn dude, it's just a funny anecdote, no one is claiming it's a national security threat or anything like that.

There was no analysis involved, Gödel found it while studying for something else.

It's a super small wikipedia article for an amusing story, who said anything about solving law? If there is a contradiction on the Constitution I don't know why would it be a wrong thing to, at the very least, address it.

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