
The justice in coders - luu
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/83626351547/the-justice-in-coders
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MisterBastahrd
My experience with both engineers and code monkeys is that they are largely
less empathic than the rest of the world. This is probably due in no small
part that they tend to be from middle and upper middle class families and have
been told their entire lives about how special they are. They then move
directly into jobs with middle and upper middle class wages and are largely
shielded from social injustice, partly because most of them are white and
male, and partly because they are able to afford to live in areas where
exposure to the justice system is largely a thing you hear about on the news.

If you want to talk about justice or lack thereof, talk to a criminal defense
attorney. I know several who went to law school determined to become
prosecutors, and changed their minds when they realized how screwed up the
system is. When I asked one about a specific case, he said that the guy was
guilty as all hell, but the police department and the DA had violated the
defendant's rights. His reasoning is that if the justice system is corrupt,
then it's better for the guilty to go free until society makes the necessary
changes. The system needs to be better than the people it condemns in order
for there to be any justice.

------
rayiner
> I spent a great chunk of the book focused on the sovereigns that cyberspace
> would enable — geek driven sovereigns, as the law of those spaces would be
> code. And as a lawyer too often disappointed by the limited justice within
> my own field, I was hopeful that maybe here, something better would be
> built.

Justice requires empathy, and empathy is a character trait that humanity is
not well-endowed with. Certainly not engineers, as a class, nor lawyers.
Ironically, both groups of people skew towards having the same failing, which
is using rules and axioms as a crutch to avoid exercising empathy.

~~~
josephschmoe
Have you been slighted by engineers in some fashion?

Tell me how we have offended you as a class, so that we can improve this
tendency.

I am genuinely interested.

~~~
gknoy
While I agree that the GP paints with an overly large brush, I think the core
of his argument could be that, as engineers and coders, we think of and create
things based on __rules__. Something is either in your collection or isn't.
The bridge can hold that much weight or it won't. My program's tests pass or
fail. The rocket has enough delta-v to make orbit or doesn't. There is no
"maybe" in MANY aspects of what we do as engineers or as programmers. Much of
our work involves making sure that rules are kept inviolable, etc.

In contrast, acting on empathy often involves deciding to bend, suspend, or
redefine rules or exceptions to them. No TV after 6, except on weekends. It's
okay to leave time-out if the two year old needs to use the potty. (This has
been especially apparent to me as a parent, hence my examples ;))

Un-empathetic behavior by admins or developers of a system like the one
described here can probably partly be explained by a thought process like
this:

\- Cheating must never happen, or be ruthlessly punished, to protect the
"good" players \- We can undo / fix things, but we need some proof, since
cheaters could say that they had $ZZZ in our system. \- screenshots are about
the only proof that a user could provide \- Ergo, screenshots required to get
things restored.

Like most security theater, the goals could very well be good (stop cheaters).
The trouble is, in a case like this where the devs/admins were clearly at
fault, good customer service should trump that. I think most of us agree that
restoring what customers have lost -- even if it means some cheaters get back
more than they had -- would restore a lot more goodwill from the community
than taking a hard line to prevent cheaters will.

~~~
josephschmoe
I definitely agree - taking a hard line on cheaters is a great way to lose
your community, literally.

I got featured by Blizzard for my Starcraft II map and banned by an
overzealous bot in the same week for "hacking." Tried to contact support, but
no one apparently cared. Never played since.

This isn't an engineering or moral problem though. It's a business problem.
They're clearly making a bad business decision by refusing to acknowledge the
importance of active community players over hackers. This problem could have
been solved fairly with reasonable rules, but clearly was not.

