So this non-lawyer read the initial complaint, looked into two cases, and thinks he has a meaningful understanding of how the lawsuit is going to go? Why is some random layman's opinion given any weight here?
OP here. Initially I was not going to respond to your comment, because you are right, I am not a lawyer. My background is in journalism. I would not trust me to represent anyone, including myself, in a legal proceeding.
However, after thinking it through a little bit more, I did want to say something in my own defense, so that your comment doesn't discourage anyone else who is curious by nature.
This was a topic that piqued my curiosity, and so I put in the time to read the filing and research other relevant court cases. I did not mention them all in my blog post, but I did a fair amount of review of case law that might be relevant here. Likewise, in my books, I review academic studies and then put them in plain language that a general readership can understand.
Isn't this what we should be encouraging on Hacker News? "Hey, there was a subject I was curious about, so I endeavored to learn a little more about it; doing so led me to update my priors, and here is what I know now." Dismissing that because I lack the right credentials feels a little gate-keepy.
I'm not claiming to be a legal expert. I merely learned something about the law and published it in case it piques someone else's interest as well. The title of the post makes it clear that the point is about me realizing my assumptions were inaccurate, not about what I think the outcome of the case will be.
While I agree with your statement here, in the future you could anticipate these sorts of objections with a standard disclaimer :) -- something I intent to do myself after reading all these posts. Its extra work but necessary given that there's always someone that will object.
That’s usually part of my evaluation on whether something is worth taking seriously. The difficulty is going down that road, you’ll nullify a great portion of what’s posted here and elsewhere. To put it bluntly, people talk out of their ass.
Some people call it credentialism and they think an argument should be able to stand on its own. And those that think this, you’re welcome to have someone who isn’t a trained surgeon operating on your heart just because they make a convincing argument as to where the problem is and what the fix is. I’ll go with the bloke who is trained and has a few surgeries under their belt.
Some arguments are absolutely able to stand on their own, particularly in fields where credentials don’t necessarily hold any value. A doctor is far more vetted than a stockbroker, for example, and that stockbroker is unlikely to make any major returns on their costumer’s investments, even with good “knowledge” of the market. They certainly won’t go much higher than the market averages without major insider knowledge. Credentials can only go so far, especially when you can get credentials in a fair amount of fields without any practical knowledge or understanding of said subject.
The countering question is: why does the economic/legal model have to be so over-engineered that nobody outside the Priesthood is capable of grasping the nuances?
One should think that keeping the complexity minimized would be a goal of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive society.
That's an interesting question, but not a good counterquestion. Your question acknowledges and accepts that the legal system is too complex for us to give weight to a layman's opinion, and hence is completely in agreement with your parent question. A counterquestion, albeit a poor one, would be "is the economic/legal model so overengineered that no one outside the priesthood is capable of grasping the nuances?" The question is loaded and the answer to the non-loaded version is obvious, so it's not a great counterquestion.
If the legal system runs athwart the lay opinion, there ought to be some wisdom driving the tension, and that wisdom ought to be better explained than "Shut up, peasant."
Fair enough - but the place it will be explained is in the judge's decision. We don't have that yet.
So all we have is a lay opinion, and others of us recognizing that it's a lay opinion and may well not hold water. That's not "Shut up, peasant", that's "You're a peasant just like us, so we don't think you actually know any better than we do."
It's a noble goal but the reality is the world is obscenely complex, and made evermore complex by adversarial forces trying to blow holes in each others' cases.
But is it realistic to get to a point where laymen across the board have a clear understanding of every facet of the law, even with great communication? Or is it so complicated that you’ll just have to defer to those that have spent years training in it?
To the other person’s point, I’m not convinced that it’s overengineered per se, it just deals with an incredibly complex system.
However, after thinking it through a little bit more, I did want to say something in my own defense, so that your comment doesn't discourage anyone else who is curious by nature.
This was a topic that piqued my curiosity, and so I put in the time to read the filing and research other relevant court cases. I did not mention them all in my blog post, but I did a fair amount of review of case law that might be relevant here. Likewise, in my books, I review academic studies and then put them in plain language that a general readership can understand.
Isn't this what we should be encouraging on Hacker News? "Hey, there was a subject I was curious about, so I endeavored to learn a little more about it; doing so led me to update my priors, and here is what I know now." Dismissing that because I lack the right credentials feels a little gate-keepy.
I'm not claiming to be a legal expert. I merely learned something about the law and published it in case it piques someone else's interest as well. The title of the post makes it clear that the point is about me realizing my assumptions were inaccurate, not about what I think the outcome of the case will be.