Escape Goats and Other Mythical Creatures - Code is Law

It seems as if the argument is never ending. Semantics, interpretations, and cultist like defendants of the indefensible stand on opposing sides of a nuanced argument waving constitutional white papers. It adds so much mud to the water, it's hard to say the dialogues are productive, so it's time to press the argumentative red button of absolutes.

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It's important to say that It's not that I don't believe in the practicality of the strong position. Meaning, that if my arguments are based on absolutes, then the conversation should be short and assertive. The simplistic idea that "the code allows it, so its ok" becomes the first scream to scare off waves of disagreements, specially when addressing negative behaviors.

As much as I'm not necessarily against the simplified analysis, It also concerns me to see our inability to measure the cost of certain negative behaviors. I say this simply because this concept, this absolutist stance bears very little resemblance to how things normally work. You could even say its completely alien to humanity and all it's social complexities.

Let's pretend for a second we take this approach to other behaviors, lets even move the scenario into a none virtual situation. How would it look? If I was to defend something loathsome as urinating into a sink, with the argument "the law allows it" - absolutely no one would find my rationale logical or healthy. I struggle to imagine someone defending such behavior even in its hypothetical existence.

If that visual made you turn your head sideways, that means I'm probably doing a decent job conveying my point. Basically, there is absolutely no way one single programmer or even a group of developers can design and built a system that is flawless and covers all possibilities of human interaction. Every single time I try to wrap my head around ideas that would improve social media built on top of cryptocurrencies, I can't help but to find myself finding more and more ways someone would abuse or rig my flawed system and it's myopic code.

What does that mean? Is the attempt to create such system futile? Those are questions that I might not be able to answer to anyone's satisfaction, but It doesn't mean I'm not willing to give it a try. However, the reason why I was thinking of our old friend, the escape goat "the code is law" is because it seems like many love using this excuse to justify certain
behaviors. In other words, the reason why I pee on the sink, because its legal, is a perfectly sound argument for some.

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In the quest for balance, for the unreachable ideals of self governance, I believe as a society we must learn to recognize these silly escape goats and stop the practice of logical contortionism. There must be some cognitive consistencies to our arguments, and if they don't exist, if we don't even want to think about logical consistency, then for sure we are standing on the wrong side of history my friends.

I've said it before, and I think it must be said a thousand times again. White Papers are not constitutions and even those have amendments. Code is law is not an argument to shut the conversation down, its an invitation to revise the code and nothing more.

Sorry for the left field rant... It happens when I'm reading reddit for too long.

@meno