When I started law school, I discovered law is bullshit. I was not prepared for this.
In other fields, truth is found by experimentation or by reasoning from first principles. In law, there is nothing to experiment on, and no real first principles to reason from.
Judges and scholars sometimes speak of "natural law" as a thing that exists outside and above the legal system. This is nonsense. "Natural law" is code for "I'm pulling this out of my ass, but I'm pretty sure if you looked within your own ass, you'd find something similar."
In law, the closest thing to a basic principle is that people must be persuaded that the acts of the state are just. Everything flows messily from this.
Per Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is that which is offered to persuade w/o regard for truth. Ergo, law is bullshit.
This was extremely disorienting.
I was a software engineer, so I was accustomed to thinking thoughts, writing code, and then running my code it to see if it works.
You don't really get to test legal arguments like that. The only test is whether they persuade other humans.
Moving to a new field so deeply rooted in persuasion has changed the way I think about knowledge.
I am more mindful of the vectors by which bias and opinion sneak into ostensibly-objective reasoning, and I'm more skeptical of subsequent conclusions.
I know less than I used to.
@Lithros wrote an extremely thoughtful response thread, so if this train of thought interests you, continue here:
this absolutely cannot be real. the federal government cannot be this incompetent. there are not actual dollars being disbursed on the legal theory that 190-year-old people are alive
right?
a recent report from NYT implies that most of these old database entries are not associated with ongoing disbursements
Yesterday, I wrote a thread critical of Blake Lively.
I think Justin Baldoni's PR team used a bot network to boost me with over a thousand retweets, bringing millions of impressions.
I'm here to gossip with friends, not fix his reputation. So I'm mad about this. 🧵
Context:
Last week, I wrote a thread musing about Stephanie Jones' involvement in the Lively-Baldoni suit. It's not particularly favorable to either party, but it spills a lot of tea.
I'm proud of it. If you haven't read it, I bet you'll enjoy it. ⬇️
A New Year's Eve legal filing sheds new light on the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni situation.
It seems the @nytimes made a major error in their reporting. I'd like to know how it happened.
🧵
@nytimes The main character of today's story is not mentioned in Blake Lively's filings. The main character of today's story is a lowly emoji: the upside-down smiley face, icon of irony and sarcasm.
🙃
@nytimes The narrative meat of Blake Lively's lawsuit is laid out from start to finish in its twenty-five paragraph introduction, which includes twenty-one text messages.
iq is an important driver of job performance. griggs v. duke power prohibits employers from iq testing in the hiring process, so as a substitute means of filtering by iq, they demand education credentials (mostly university degrees).
the focus on degrees drives a lot of talent into needless years of institutional education when they could be producing & learning on the job instead.
it's a good story - but i have two problems with it:
Blake Lively's sexual harassment and retaliation complaint against Justin Baldoni is very well-evidenced for a pre-discovery complaint.
She quotes many juicy and damning text messages among Baldoni's publicity team.
How did she get those texts? It's a good tale, I think. 🧵
For this story, our protagonist is not Blake Lively or Justin Baldoni. In fact, our protagonist is not even mentioned by name in Lively's legal filings. Our protagonist is a veteran publicist by the name of Stephanie Jones.
Stephanie Jones is the founder and CEO of Jonesworks, a celebrity PR firm. Over the years, Jonesworks' client list has included such high-profile figures such as Venus Williams, Jeff Bezos, and Tom Brady. And since 2017, Justin Baldoni.