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Comment by thrashh | Hacker News Reader

I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules. I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.

I hope we never reach a state where technology actively defeats us.

The only time that I think it’s responsible to have total enforcement is when the rules perfectly capture reality and every facet of it …which to say is never.

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> Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born.

Gray areas are also where all manner of corruption is born. Officials soliciting bribes, nepotism, exploitative labor practices, these things love gray areas.

They also keep bad rules around and encourage selective enforcement to target the disadvantaged. Lincoln said it best: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.

For example, I encounter far less discrimination and less racism living in where I do now than in other places, and yet the laws are practically the same here as in anywhere else. The reason I experience less discrimination here is due to the encompassing framework that everyone here is subjected to as part of their experience growing up. The strictness of the laws is irrelevant to that issue.

If you want to change how people act, you need to change the entire framework that people are growing within.

I may be missing something, but increased enforcement sounds like a great way to solve the corruption problem?

Eg. Public servants make ends meet by fudging timesheets => Enforcement clamps down on practice => Employees bargain for higher pay to make up for difference => Public gets a more transparent accounting of their labor costs

To me adjusting the level of enforcement is like the “fine” knob. It absolutely needs to be adjusted according to the situation.

But it’s not the “coarse” knob. You can only turn enforcement up or down so much before you need a paradigm shift.

You make it sound like you have convincing evidence that is the case. Do you?

There's no set of laws that can efficiently govern dishonest people. Or in "low trust" environments, if you prefer think of it amorally.

Enforcement just moves around where the corruption is incentivized to happen. Is it at the bottom -- workers stealing extra pay or higher up where the enforcement happens?

Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.

That's sometimes true but I'd just note this has nothing to do with the original argument made praising gray areas.

The drug war is a place where there's an escalating war between dealing and enforcement, yes. But most dealers aren't having a lot of fun in this gray area.

Hmm, this sounds so appealing, yet I think it's terribly confused. I think you're confusing the "gray area" between what people and rules say and what people do, with "areas of slack". Slack areas are where people can take initiative to do what they want (following the rules or not). Gray areas can be that sometimes, were more like that in the past, but today, gray areas are often areas of over-determination - the rules are contradictory, you could be punished or suffer for violating any of them and you have to carefully calculate which violation will let you survive. There's no joy in that kind of shit. And, as mentioned by other posters, breaking some rules can kill people.

In systems that are safety-critical? Yikes.

The reason we now have electronic tracking of freight truckers is because they used to be notorious for taking uppers and driving as long as possible, causing all sorts of nasty accidents. That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.

> That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.

I believe it's "selfish greed" on behalf of the company, but a reasonable response to difficult constraints, on behalf of the driver.

Massively endangering others by the thousands is not a reasonable response just so they can shave a few hours off their trip

I think the argument more is that truckers ignore safety rules around maximum hours out of perceived (or actual) economic necessity.

Exactly. I want absolutely zero gray areas when I'm on a highway in the middle of Indiana at night and cross paths with at least a few hundred semi trucks. The less gray the better.

Hey some of us live here :)

To your point, a few winters ago I was driving up the NY Northway (north of Albany) in January, in a heavy snow storm, and cargo trucks were consistently passing me at 70+ mph.

One deer or one owl into traffic...it would have been a complete charlie foxtrot.

> vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules

The new rules save lives. Crash accidents involving large trucks statistic: https://zarzaurlaw.com/category/blog/trucking-accidents/

'Sure, that will save a few lives but millions will be late.' is a Simpsons quote, not a good argument.

For some reason the number of accidents has been increasing since 2008 (which is a min point, by the way).

I agree in general but there are some places where gray areas benefit the employer more than the employee and I think this is one of them. If everyone is forced to cheat the regulations to get their jobs done then it's no longer just a gray area and the regulations are pointless.

At least in this case, breaking the rules kills a lot of people - IIRC out of all the truck-caused fatalities, more than 1000 deaths/year in USA can be directly attributed to drowsy driving.

Sleep-deprived truckers should not be a thing, it has pretty much the same effects as driving drunk, but much more common so causes more crashes and more deaths. Breaching the rules for that should have as much tolerance as those intentionally driving drunk and endangering others that way.

I have mixed feelings on this. I actually think this is a reasonable response to overly rigid systems but also creates fertile ground for unethical behavior. Ideally, I think we need systems with rigid guardrails, but that the distance between them is proportional to the amount of risk incurred by what you call the practice of "art".

Bending the rules is great in some areas, but I don't think it should apply across the board. Ignoring rules is fine in low-risk scenarios (particularly when the risk is not borne by someone else) but I don't want, for example, my commercial airline pilot to get too artsy when it comes to his approach for landing, or the programmer writing critical code for the autonomous vehicle to unilaterally decide they know better, or the electrician I hire to flagrantly disregard consensus standards.

From previous work in safety critical code, I regularly confronted situations where rule-breaking was done as a means to an end, while not being cognizant confronting the risks that incurred because of cognitive biases. People also loved gray areas in this role because it limits accountability. I'm sure there were people who at Enron thought they were playing the gray areas as an artistic endeavor to maximize profit, but I don't think incentivizing that behavior is the best for society.

That’s great until we’re talking about safety. I’m not willing to have my family run over by a semi truck with a drowsy and over worked driver for the sake of protecting these grey areas.

Safety rules are written in blood, after all.

A good regulatory scheme will give people flexibility in how they comply with the rules so that productivity and innovation aren't (overly) constrained. If you find that you constantly need to break rules to be productive then it means you need regulatory reform, not less oversight or enforcement within the current regulatory context.

> I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.

A longish life has confirmed this to me, over and over.

> I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules.

I think we agree actually. I didn't say it was good that rule breaking is getting harder, just that it's a fact.

We have a lot of enculturation around a certain level of surveillance and visibility. Things are quickly becoming more visible and we will need to adjust. Preserving grey area can be part of that, but only if we decide to preserve it.

The breaking of the rules here is not for the driver's benefit, though. Its the owners greed pushing serious costs on their employees. Disruptive innovation doesn't always make things better.

If there's a useful gray area, then the law should change to legalize it.

What are some examples of artistic and ingenious rule breaking?

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