
Ask HN: What would work well in a country built on the Unix Philosophy? - Numberwang
It seems to me counties end up with rules and institutions with increasingly less chance of improvement yet a accumulated complexity.<p>Would the Unix Philosophy when applied to country building help with this problem?
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sova
If all legislation followed the model presented by git (versioning,
increments, branches, merges, and total transparency) I think that it would
reflect positively on a true democracy.

The next step, however, would be to educate the populous so that all voters
were informed, and that voters would be presented (in an elegant fashion) with
what is relevant to their districts on the three tiers of national, state, and
local policy. I don't know if Unix has a good metaphor or reflection of this,
but unix is meant to be a) modular and b) minimalist, so if we can sponsor the
idea of true modularity in voting, I think we could see some full-
participation schemes that are not overwhelming. I don't have to vote on every
issue, but could vote on collections of issues that reflect my general
ideology or current understanding of what best suits the republic.

Another issue though, is ownership. In the Feudalistic Republic of the United
States (as of 2016) it's hard to describe a system that could be adopted
reasonably that promotes the idea that all the nation belongs to everyone in
it. We have some things like "the right to life, liberty, and property [often
misquoted as 'happiness' at the end here]" and how does one reconcile this
idea of property with a truly harmonious community? Good question.

So in short, the basis of the Unix philosophy would help (especially with law
versioning, that is just what needs to happen and is so brilliant and clear I
am surprised there is not greater traction for it). All Laws need time limits
(and easy renew options if they are good)... And the entire populous needs
higher quality information that [forces?] causes people to consider the
community at large.

/rattle like a snake

~~~
oftenwrong
I have been quietly advocating for version controlled legislation for a long
time. Here in Massachusetts, bills describe what they would change in the text
of a statute directly - a bit like an ed script. Here's an actual example:

>SECTION 2. Said section 35 of said chapter 123, as so appearing, is hereby
further amended by striking out the words “is an alcoholic or substance
abuser”, in lines 17 and 18, and inserting in place thereof the following
words:- has an alcohol or substance use disorder.

>SECTION 3. Said section 35 of said chapter 123, as so appearing, is hereby
further amended by inserting after the word “a”, in line 36, the third time it
appears, the following word:- qualified.

>SECTION 4. Said section 35 of said chapter 123, as so appearing, is hereby
further amended by striking out the fourth and fifth paragraphs and inserting
in place thereof the following 3 paragraphs:-

As someone who attempts to keep informed about changes to the law, this style
is a huge obstacle. It often necessitates a lot of manual piecing-together in
order to form a complete view of the final change. A simple diff view would
make it much easier to understand.

I have considered tracking changes to the law in git, including representing
bills as branches, as a side project idea, but I determined it would require
far more effort than I am willing to put in.

~~~
sova
Wow sir. That is really a great list of examples! It actually seems [very
very] feasible to make a simple system that could automate this based on the
language used. It would be a worthwhile endeavor, but like you say, would take
a lot of time/effort investment.

Perhaps an open-source effort that does this (tracks and updates current laws
and shows diffs) could be a worthwhile beginning?

I think every senator and representative that has ever had to amend
legislation would delight at the thought.

~~~
oftenwrong
I was only considering doing it manually. I don't know how feasible it would
be to automate the conversion process. The formatting and language used in
these "edit script"-style bills varies considerably, as they are written for
humans by humans with no standardisation.

~~~
sova
Honestly, this seems like one of the more realistic problems NLP could
actually solve. Yes there may be many variants, say 100 or even 1000 different
structures and vocabularies for updating versions, but a differential neural
network where you have inputs (like the pre-amended law) and outputs (like the
laws after the "amendments" or version bumps) would actually be perfect for
learning what means what and when to do it.

It would be the perfect grad project for someone interesting in bridging the
gap between computation/machine learning and legislation.

Of course, it would be a little tedious setting up the learning (thousands of
sets of input cases and output cases) but in the end the findings could be
used across the board.

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arkitaip
How do you define The Unix Philosophy as applied to a country? Software
doesn't come close to the complexity of an entire country so your analogy
could possibly be fundamentally mismatched...

~~~
Numberwang
Well I believe that fundamentally the complexity of a country is to a large
extent historical artifacts.

How do you think the relations between institutions would be different, how do
you think they would perform their functions differently? What would their
structures be?

Or focus on some specific example -How would voting be different? -How would
registering for a licence be different? -How would taxation be different?

~~~
sova
I think with taxation we could also do very cool things: Say your nation taxes
at 30%, what if every voter had a subset of that value (say, 12.2%) that they
could choose which district or set-of-needs to fund?

Like maybe I want my 12.2 to go to education for kids 6mnths-12years, or maybe
I want to fund state medicines, and my neighbor and I both pay the base rate
that covers necessities like roads and stuff, but he may fund shelters instead
of medicine specifically with his 12point2. It could be really wonderful.

In effect, people may become more participatory in their own governing
systems, and could actually direct funds instead of relying on bill-makers to
figure out where to spend monies/resources.

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angersock
The plumbing, presumably.

~~~
bbcbasic
The sewerage and garbage can be piped into /dev/null

------
oftenwrong
National PKI. Every citizen would have a key pair. I believe I have read that
Estonia has implemented this.

~~~
Numberwang
What could it be used for?

~~~
sova
Voting! And easily verifying a) your vote was/is counted and b) is accurate
for what issues/candidates you voted for. In fact, we could eliminate most
candidates because they are only there to "represent" the wills/intentions of
their constituents. Gloabl PKI pairings for voting would eliminate the need
for a lot of "representatives" and we could do more direct forms of democracy
instead!

