Wednesday, September 9, 2015

World's crankiest grad student criticizes "lock the web open" post

http://blog.archive.org/2015/02/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web/ is a great post, but the most entertaining part is the furious vituperation from an enraged logic student:
RE: “Larry Lessig’s equation was Code = Law. ” This formulation is not even false. It commits the logical fallacy of equivocation by confusing two different kinds of things with the same appearance. Computer code is prescriptive in that it tells a machine what it MUST do. In contrast, legal code in a free society only tells an individual what they MUST NOT do, the actions to be avoided in order to keep the balancing action of the justice system from being put into motion against them. Subsuming computer code and legal code under the same concept implicitly endorses fascism, which entails the use of the laws to dictate the actions of individuals. Lastly, there is a conceptual error in use the “=” in place of “is” in “Code = Law”. Mathematical equivalence is not interchangeable with logical identity. This type of error blanks out the qualitative aspects of entities by using a quantitative linking term.

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