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The policy writing process is just as important as the software development process.
@Kleros_io 👩⚖️🤝👨💻
@Kleros_io 👩⚖️🤝👨💻
@NiklasAnzinger wrote a nice exegesis of this sentence in his blog. Quoting him at length:View quoted post on X
> Our entire antiquated process of adversarially writing high-stakes laws on paper at the last minute, deploying them in production to hundreds of millions of people without any testing, and then getting them interpreted in unpredictable ways by regulators and solicitors will be seen as a bizarre relic of an older time.
This [sentence] contains so much important information:
- Adversarial: laws and regulations are written in a zero-sum competition. You win or you lose.
- High-stakes: these laws and regulations have an outsized impact. Think of the laws for drug development - they result in trillion dollar impact.
- Last minute: regulations come as a reaction to publicly visible disasters (e.g. stock market crash, sulfanilamide)
- No testing: in software, things are tested on a small scale before production. Ain't no such thing in legislation. Bugs are there forever.
- Interpretation: laws aren't like computer code. Language is (sometimes deliberately) ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways.
- Predictability: regulations promise stability. They often do the opposite, because of the interpretation problem.
- On-paper: on-paper isn't scalable or machine-readable. Compare that to on-chain transactions with a clear logical sequence (e.g. smart contracts).
The alternative to bad regulation is not zero regulation. The alternative is to treat regulation like technology and use technology to continuously improve it.
niklasanzinger.substack.com/p/insights-fro…
