Friend of the blog Keith wrote in a comment recently:<\/p>\n
“My theory is that any law should be no more than 2 or 3 pages long and should be written in such a way that a 6th grader could understand it. Then maybe the American people would pay more attention.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That’s an appealing idea, and it got me to thinking.\u00a0 And as an engineer, I started drawing an analogy to technology as it’s what I know best.<\/p>\n
If you buy a television, the features and operation are usually explained in a Quick Start Guide that is just a few pages long.\u00a0 That’s plenty of information for most people to make a purchase decision and to actually hook up and use the thing.\u00a0 I think that’s sort of what Keith was getting at.\u00a0 It would be cool if legislation had a Quick Start Guide that explained everything you needed to know to support or oppose a bill in just a few pages.<\/p>\n
But the reality is, that like televisions, political problems often have a ridiculous level of complexity required to actually make the thing work.\u00a0 The ATSC standard (what the television has to do inside to actually receive broadcasts) is hundreds of pages long all by itself, and makes for lousy beach reading.\u00a0 But as a user, you don’t care about those details, only that the TV has an ATSC compliant tuner\u2014a fact that fits nicely on the Quick Start Guide.\u00a0 It would be great if all the complexity of Congressional bills could be abstracted similarly.<\/p>\n
And this does sort of happen.\u00a0 Legislation is usually digested into sound bites for public consumption.\u00a0 This is sort of like the Legal Quick Start Guide.\u00a0 The problem is, there is no one authoritative author of that guide.\u00a0 Every party and every media outlet create their own (and different) abstractions and push them at you.\u00a0 It would be kind of like if the TV came packaged with Quick Start Guides written by Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung for your new LG television.\u00a0 I suspect that wouldn’t be too helpful.<\/p>\n
Then the analogy then goes completely off the rails when you get into the pork that usually gets thrown into legislation.\u00a0 It would be as if Panasonic tucked a coffee maker into the back of the TV, but didn’t bother to advertise it.<\/p>\n
This is about the point where I decide that I am glad Congress didn’t design my television, and I think I also understand why there are so few engineers in politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Friend of the blog Keith wrote in a comment recently: “My theory is that any law should be no more<\/p>\n