I've always wondered if it were preferable to have some more formal legal language to remove ambiguities. Would writing laws or parts of laws as 'programs' help cut out loop holes in say, tax law?
Sometimes legislators want the law to be ambiguous, because an ambiguous law can get 51% of the votes but a law that actually spells out all the details would only get 49% (or less).
And I’m not sure it’s possible to have a completely unambiguous language for dealing with relationships between human beings. The architects of Lojban have made some heroic efforts in this regard, and while that language does a lot to delimit ambiguity (e.g., if a sentence has no explicit tense markers, then it is not asserting whether the event is past, present, or future), but it can’t eliminate it entirely.
But isn't that true of almost every physical system?
In weather forecasting, for example, you can't have a deterministic algorithm that accounts for the impact of every air molecule and calorie of energy in the atmosphere. Instead, Scientists come up with statistical models that give us a "good enough" picture of weather for our purposes of predicting whether or not a hurricane may be heading our way or if we should plan on a picnic over the weekend.
The beauty of it is that Scientists aren't really political about short-term weather forecasting. (I won't get into long-range climatology politics :) The models are either shown to work better than other available ones or they're tweaked or replaced.
Maybe we need a similar approach to law making. If you create a tax or spending law, it needs to be an input into our economic models. Economic models need to be open sourced and running constantly with complete transparency on the inputs and outputs. Over time, we should improve those models like we have on the weather ones so that they give us the best picture we can have on how financial laws will change the Economy.
Likewise, we should model the impact of other laws on prison populations, crime rates, inflation, test scores, etc. Let's decrease the demagoguing and the politicking all these issues and start getting to the science of them.
Sure, we'll still have debates on what we want the outputs to look like, but at least we could focus the debates more on the outcomes that we want to see rather than on what it would take to get us there.
