Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM!dm From: dm@BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: East meets West, la Choi makes Chinese food, swing - American! Message-ID: <8710271607.AA12096@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: Tue, 27-Oct-87 11:19:03 EST Article-I.D.: bu-cs.8710271607.AA12096 Posted: Tue Oct 27 11:19:03 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 29-Oct-87 23:04:49 EST References: <8710261134.aa26049@note.nsf.gov> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 72 >reply I got, `The amount of trouble we have leaving Yugoslavia is miniscule >compared to the amou>nt of trouble we have entering your country.' [They were >refusedniked Visas last year thanks to our wonderful INS and its `No >Cultural Value' ruleset mind]. Touche' ... Canadian musicians have been barred from the US, too. I have heard that the regulation involved was made at the instigation of the musicians' union, to keep foreign (read: non-union) musicians from coming here to steal jobs from the natives. Intended as it is to keep people from ``touring'' piano-bars, it's no different from the green-card business that prevents ``tourists'' from being employed at any other job. Unfortunately, it frequently gets misapplied to people who tour concert-halls and coffee houses. [Now, to make this remotely relevant to this list:] Laws and regulations are like programs. Unfortunately, lawyers and legislatures aren't familiar with the notion of fence-post errors. Congressional hearings are like structured walk-throughs (unfortunately, the code frequently gets patched after the hearings, so they're walk-throughs of the specifications, not the code). In what I realize is a distinctly non-traditonal view, I think that judges and juries are responsible for debugging laws. Why have a jury of one's peers unless it is to allow the jury to say: ``a law that requires this person to be punished this severely for this action is plainly wrong''? Someone else has mentioned a legislator who ``holds hearings'' on a BBS system. I think this is great. There was that CMU study a few years ago that found that electronic discussions involved more people who often are not heard in face-to-face meetings. That electronic meetings, stripped of signs of status, were more democratic. As a result, more aspects of a proposed action may be considered. Imagine this democracy applied to the law-making process (of course, as always, only those rich enough to have PCs are heard from...). Unfortunately, the CMU study also concluded that typically a worse decision was reached by electronic meetings than by face-to-face meetings. I don't know how they evaluated the quality of the decision. Another interesting application of computers to the law-making process is taking place in (I think) Minnesota. There a legislator brought in a spread-sheet program and his PC. During the budget debates, he could crank through the results of proposed amendments on his PC, and say, ``Increasing funding for county road repair 10% will force us to cut funding of county schools by so much.'' He started having people come by his office to borrow time on his PC, and was handing out copies of his spread-sheet to other legislators. HE said that he felt the budget being produced was much better as a result of all this -- that previously the budget-making process was too complex for many legislators to know what they were doing. With the spread sheet, they got a better feel for the effects of amendments and changes in the budget. Imagine that. Something as simple as a spread-sheet. Imagine the effects of a missing semi-colon. (Where's my aspirin?) On the down side of computers in the law-making process is the recored of the Office of Management and Budget under Stockman. He relates in ``The Triumph of Politics'' how he and his staff kept cooking the numbers and tweaking the model until the results endorsed the supply-side mysticism. Our grandchildren will still be paying the price for that bit of garbage-in, garbage-out. The danger is that legislators who previously didn't understand the budget process will now not understand the computer models used to make the budget, and the budget debate will (as it has been in the US in the 1980s) a clash of computer models. Time to re-read Weiszenbaum, paying particular attention to his subtitle: ``Computer power and human reason: FROM JUDGEMENT TO CALCULATION''.