In our idealised world, sufficient data is gathered before decisions are made. In reality, binding outcomes must be generated under uncertainty. This gap gives rise to a new discipline.
"binding outcomes must be generated under uncertainty." I disagree. The systems must be rebuilt to provide the judicial function that we need and that we pay for. Enough of running the money out the back door and leaving the people with judicial-like processed fakery.
Hi Janine - We are talking past each other. Before we get to what the system should do, there is a prior boundary, namely what it can, even in principle, achieve (or not). Even if we fixed all the dodgy judges and stolen assets, the same underlying constraint mechanism would be in play. So you are not wrong, just there is more to take into account.
We disagree on a very important point. When you say, “Facts are gathered. Authority is established. A decision is made. An outcome follows. “ You are presuming a form of government that we don’t have and we don’t want in the United States. We don’t have a government that grants us rights, so they aren’t granting them or curtailing them based on any amount of information, incomplete or otherwise. The government has no right to pre-action against our rights, excepting universally applied public interest laws regarding higher (more basic) rights. ie: I can’t drive the wrong way on a one-way street because that could kill someone. (Mind you driving is one of the most abused of our rights, so it’s not a great topic to pick.) I also can’t shoot my gun in the direction of people.
Once the government decides I deserve a fine for transgressing a law, I have a right to due process if I disagree. That’s where a proper judiciary with ears and decision power is required,
and would be unlawful to withhold.
If I’m not mistaken, you got a parking ticket you wanted to contest, but have been given only a charade of judicial hearing.
Corporations are a different animal altogether and, yes, they forecast all day, every day. They are not my, nor anyone else’s, government. I can leave their employ when they act up.
I really think these two need to be very deliberately separated in your analysis because, heaven help us all the day we are governed by a corporation. And to the degree that we already are, let’s get busy calling spades ”spades” and get to dismantling them.
I have watched your analysis closely for insights into perversions of my own US system of justice, since the two systems have so many similarities. I find myself thanking God more and more by the day for our US Constitution.
First, this is how humans actually act for the most part: They take an action and then justify that action. Some of the justifications can be quite divorced from the actual internal reasoning that governed that specific decision, sometimes hilariously so.
Second, it might be useful to add in the idea from medical testing, where decisions have to be made for a test to tune it - Correct positives and correct negatives are the desired outcomes, but every test generates false positives and false negatives. In Action Theory, I suggest that in any particular system, there is a tension that leads to one of the two anchoring criteria being automatically more critical, and explicit design choices need to be made when building a system such that the cost of either the false positive or the false negative is weighed and the system adjusted to minimize the cost of failure over many instances by avoiding the more costly failure mode more often than avoiding the less costly failure mode.
If you are dealing with a system of law or an enforcement process, which failure mode is less costly or less troublesome and which failure mode is more consequential? For example, when a legal system lets go of attribution to enhance instantiation, is that better or worse for society than the reverse? Which loss is of greater consequence? Should that potential loss be minimized by revising the statute that creates the system in question, or is it more likely to require the addition of an auditing system that gets bolted onto the operational process?
And who makes that choice of what is more important or less important? And does this analysis of failure mode costs show that the system can operate within acceptable cost or expose from the start that one or both failure modes are actually so damaging that the system itself should not be used?
In the UK hundreds of years of jurisprudence and process has chosen to put into place specific requirements of attribution and instantiation (etc.), none of which allow for the failure modes inherent in the Simple Justice Procedure, because doing so in the SJP automagically destroys the ability to create and carry out true justice. So judging the SJP after the fact of institutionalization will actually not get us to the prior and more important decision as to whether the SJP can ever provide true Justice when its system is designed from the start to break the protections against failure modes that are built into other justice systems that protect strict attribution and strict instantiation at the cost of an inability to handle all the violations.
Perhaps the problem is actually that there are too many laws creating too many ways to commit a crime or a violation, and insisting on maintaining strict attribution and strict instantiation is the discipline that exposes that untenable and authoritarian failure.
"binding outcomes must be generated under uncertainty." I disagree. The systems must be rebuilt to provide the judicial function that we need and that we pay for. Enough of running the money out the back door and leaving the people with judicial-like processed fakery.
Hi Janine - We are talking past each other. Before we get to what the system should do, there is a prior boundary, namely what it can, even in principle, achieve (or not). Even if we fixed all the dodgy judges and stolen assets, the same underlying constraint mechanism would be in play. So you are not wrong, just there is more to take into account.
We disagree on a very important point. When you say, “Facts are gathered. Authority is established. A decision is made. An outcome follows. “ You are presuming a form of government that we don’t have and we don’t want in the United States. We don’t have a government that grants us rights, so they aren’t granting them or curtailing them based on any amount of information, incomplete or otherwise. The government has no right to pre-action against our rights, excepting universally applied public interest laws regarding higher (more basic) rights. ie: I can’t drive the wrong way on a one-way street because that could kill someone. (Mind you driving is one of the most abused of our rights, so it’s not a great topic to pick.) I also can’t shoot my gun in the direction of people.
Once the government decides I deserve a fine for transgressing a law, I have a right to due process if I disagree. That’s where a proper judiciary with ears and decision power is required,
and would be unlawful to withhold.
If I’m not mistaken, you got a parking ticket you wanted to contest, but have been given only a charade of judicial hearing.
Corporations are a different animal altogether and, yes, they forecast all day, every day. They are not my, nor anyone else’s, government. I can leave their employ when they act up.
I really think these two need to be very deliberately separated in your analysis because, heaven help us all the day we are governed by a corporation. And to the degree that we already are, let’s get busy calling spades ”spades” and get to dismantling them.
I have watched your analysis closely for insights into perversions of my own US system of justice, since the two systems have so many similarities. I find myself thanking God more and more by the day for our US Constitution.
Martin, I find this quite interesting. Two ideas.
First, this is how humans actually act for the most part: They take an action and then justify that action. Some of the justifications can be quite divorced from the actual internal reasoning that governed that specific decision, sometimes hilariously so.
Second, it might be useful to add in the idea from medical testing, where decisions have to be made for a test to tune it - Correct positives and correct negatives are the desired outcomes, but every test generates false positives and false negatives. In Action Theory, I suggest that in any particular system, there is a tension that leads to one of the two anchoring criteria being automatically more critical, and explicit design choices need to be made when building a system such that the cost of either the false positive or the false negative is weighed and the system adjusted to minimize the cost of failure over many instances by avoiding the more costly failure mode more often than avoiding the less costly failure mode.
If you are dealing with a system of law or an enforcement process, which failure mode is less costly or less troublesome and which failure mode is more consequential? For example, when a legal system lets go of attribution to enhance instantiation, is that better or worse for society than the reverse? Which loss is of greater consequence? Should that potential loss be minimized by revising the statute that creates the system in question, or is it more likely to require the addition of an auditing system that gets bolted onto the operational process?
And who makes that choice of what is more important or less important? And does this analysis of failure mode costs show that the system can operate within acceptable cost or expose from the start that one or both failure modes are actually so damaging that the system itself should not be used?
In the UK hundreds of years of jurisprudence and process has chosen to put into place specific requirements of attribution and instantiation (etc.), none of which allow for the failure modes inherent in the Simple Justice Procedure, because doing so in the SJP automagically destroys the ability to create and carry out true justice. So judging the SJP after the fact of institutionalization will actually not get us to the prior and more important decision as to whether the SJP can ever provide true Justice when its system is designed from the start to break the protections against failure modes that are built into other justice systems that protect strict attribution and strict instantiation at the cost of an inability to handle all the violations.
Perhaps the problem is actually that there are too many laws creating too many ways to commit a crime or a violation, and insisting on maintaining strict attribution and strict instantiation is the discipline that exposes that untenable and authoritarian failure.