there in black and white
Nov. 6th, 2010 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quarrelOne early evening back when I was living in southern California, I treated myself to an early dinner at a Mimi's Cafe. By pure chance I found myself sitting near a women's-night-out party. It was clearly a social event, neither a birthday nor family-related.
They played a game as they waited for their larger-than-normal order to arrive. It wasn't a complex game. In fact, if you want to get technical, it wasn't a game at all. One person had a list of objects and point values. She read them off one by one — items like lipstick, a purse, a blank check — and everyone scored points based on whether they had that object with them. Things went well until the organizer got to "jewelry". It was worth something like five points per piece.
Someone asked, "Do earrings count as two?"
That's the moment I realized that the problems I had to deal with from rules lawyers and from unclear game rulebooks I'd written as clearly as I could were well and truly universal. Fully unambiguous rules and objective adjudication are unreachable ideals in the real world. I'd been convinced of that for years in my own line of work, but this was the first time I observed proof in the wild.
I have no reason to believe this lesson does not also apply to laws.
They played a game as they waited for their larger-than-normal order to arrive. It wasn't a complex game. In fact, if you want to get technical, it wasn't a game at all. One person had a list of objects and point values. She read them off one by one — items like lipstick, a purse, a blank check — and everyone scored points based on whether they had that object with them. Things went well until the organizer got to "jewelry". It was worth something like five points per piece.
Someone asked, "Do earrings count as two?"
That's the moment I realized that the problems I had to deal with from rules lawyers and from unclear game rulebooks I'd written as clearly as I could were well and truly universal. Fully unambiguous rules and objective adjudication are unreachable ideals in the real world. I'd been convinced of that for years in my own line of work, but this was the first time I observed proof in the wild.
I have no reason to believe this lesson does not also apply to laws.
