91–100 of 134 posts
I might have heard that in Godel's library there was a book with the note: "I have a truly marvelous proof that the U.S. Constitution is unstable, but the margin of this book is too small to write it out." More seriously, this is actually a bit reminiscent of Fermat's famous comment. I suppose when the lawbots become operational in a few years, we'll get a full logical analysis of the Constitution and find the loopho…
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OP's point is that you can write anything in the constitution - that it can never be changed, or whatever - but that's of no value whatsoever, if a large majority of people agree and decide that it's an invalid document.
That's not how constitutional law works, though. Even if someone seizes power by force, the apparent constitutionality of their reign or lack thereof has many implications in international law and for the recognition of the new government, as well as for retrospective assessments, including the validity of the laws enacted by the regime. Dictators put great efforts in making their reign at least look constitutional.
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The eternity clause implicitly protects itself because anything else would be absurd and judges aren't computers.
If that was how it was meant to be understood, it could have easily been written explicitly by making it a recursive clause. E.g. in the case of my country, article 4 of the constitution says that the first 3 articles cannot be changed; it could have said first 4 articles cannot be changed, thereby making it a legal impasse. More likely, the authors of entrenched clauses understood that, if it came to that, making th…
It could. But why explicitly write down things that are obvious anyway?
> More likely, the authors of entrenched clauses understood that, if it came to that, making that change illegal wouldn't prevent a slip to dictatorship. That impasse would only hinder the honest actors, if in the future there came a time when those entrenched clauses really legitimately need to be changed; and hence that door was deliberately left open.
No, the Basic Law was very much designed to make another slip into dictatorship impossible using legal means. The idea that the eternity clause was deliberately made toothless in case we actually do want to abolish human rights, democracy and rule of law again is frankly absurd.
> Sure, if it came to that, judges may still rule your way to slow down the slide the dictatorship, but then the next constitutional amendment would be "all judges are retired, here's how new judges are selected".
That constitutional amendment would simply be unconstitutional and thus invalid. Law is not code. If you violate its intent, you violate it.
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Not on its own, but by the work of very many societal systems, and on balance it is really these systems that are responsible for the societal effects, the laws merely being the guidelines. So banning something by law does have an effect, but in the discussion of the dissolution of law it's clearly the courts, the bureaucracy, and the media that carry all the important functions of defence against subversion.
I believe the way to think about this is leverage . Courts, media, law enforcement, bureaucracy are all strictly necessary for the shared belief in law to hold, but it's the shared belief that does the lion's share of the work of keeping society coordinated. Taken together, the institutions achieve orders of magnitude greater effect than it would seem from the work they put into it. They do that by creating condition…
> It's the field that does the work, the generator only keeps it up.
No matter how you continue this parable it will become an arms race, invariably.
One very famous such story is the magic oil lamp that kep burning when Massada was under siege. That's as you describe the faith which keeps the flame going.
The problem is in my view rather like Jakob the Liar, Plato's cave parable and the Emperor's new Clothe's. The emperor knows he's naked, but as long as he controls fuel flow, nobody will switch on the light, and if the abstraction is leaky he will be well positioned to throw a huge shadow, waving his arms around.
As they say, biology is all about ... I hope you know what I mean, I just forgot what do they say? Gradients, right?
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The point is that there is a system, with feedback loops. The point is NOT that the system is somehow immaculate and incapable of drifting into instability. Indeed, the concentration of power in the hands of the few we see about us is, arguably, the rejection of representative systems developed in the last several centuries in favor of historical authoritarian approaches. Sweet, sweet panem et circenses => https://en…
> in favor of historical authoritarian approaches. I don't think history is a linear progression from authoritarianism to representative government.
Are you arguing the linearity, or the degree to which any governments in view represent much beyond the whims of the authoritarians?
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> in favor of historical authoritarian approaches. I don't think history is a linear progression from authoritarianism to representative government.
It's more often a progression from authoritarianism to representative government and back to authoritarianism. "Law is what should happen. Politics is what does happen."
Surely if all the legal luminaries of HN banded together we could rewrite the constitution in a statically strong typed language and formal verify it.
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I believe the way to think about this is leverage . Courts, media, law enforcement, bureaucracy are all strictly necessary for the shared belief in law to hold, but it's the shared belief that does the lion's share of the work of keeping society coordinated. Taken together, the institutions achieve orders of magnitude greater effect than it would seem from the work they put into it. They do that by creating condition…
> Or, excuse the bad analogy, think of it as shield generators... > It's the field that does the work, the generator only keeps it up. No matter how you continue this parable it will become an arms race, invariably. One very famous such story is the magic oil lamp that kep burning when Massada was under siege. That's as you describe the faith which keeps the flame going. The problem is in my view rather like Jakob th…
So I guess sure, in the stochastic gradient descent sense biology is about gradients ;)