M: Okay, I'm a little bit pissed at the moment, and so I need you to bear with me, and also not try to soothe me, or to think that I'm mad for the wrong reasons. My anger is that something is going on that seems illogical or self-contradictory, and either that means that I'm mad at myself for not paying enough attention or knowing enough, or at the court system for trying to pull this idea that certain things only apply when the current administration wants it to. So either way, I'm pissed that I don't know. So that's where my frustration is coming from. Okay. There was a recent ruling that says that, what is it, mifepristone, the abortion pill. Someone in the Fifth Circuit, I believe, said that suddenly nationwide, the FDA's ruling didn't mean anything. Now, this is like 10 kinds of bullshit, starting with the fact that basically the Fifth Circuit is where court procedure seems to be going to die, and that's why Donald keeps using them so much. And if it's not him, it's the other Republicans who are piggybacking and getting their own little pet social pickaxes out. So, hypothetically, there's a nationwide injunction of some kind. However, for the last goddamn year at least, and even before then, I seem to remember the Supreme Court making rulings that said basically that that was not possible, that you weren't allowed to do nationwide crap unless you were the Supreme Court. Now, I need you to go online, find the details for the Mifepristone pill ruling, and then go through the court history of the last couple years to find the other situations which are stuck in my head in that concept of courts not being allowed to do things nationwide. And tell me where the goddamn difference is, particularly if it turns out to just be whether or not the people who are making the ruling care whether or not it follows precedent.
G: navlistRecent news: Mifepristone ruling (Fifth Circuit vs Supreme Court)turn0news28,turn0news27,turn0news24,turn0news30
You’re not imagining the contradiction. But the contradiction isn’t quite “courts ignoring the rule”—it’s that the rule itself is narrower and more technical than it gets summarized as in headlines and commentary. That’s where the disconnect is coming from.
Let’s break it cleanly.
The entity["organization","Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals","US
federal appellate court"] reinstated an old FDA
restriction:
→ mifepristone must be dispensed in person, not by
mail. citeturn0search22
That change:
In practice, yes—this acts nationwide, even though the case originated in one state.
Then the entity["organization","Supreme Court of the United States","highest US court"] immediately paused (stayed) that ruling for now. citeturn0news24
You’re remembering a real legal trend:
Over the last ~5–8 years, multiple justices (especially conservative ones) have criticized “nationwide injunctions”—lower courts blocking federal policy across the entire country.
But here’s the key distinction:
This is when a lower court says:
“The federal government cannot enforce this policy anywhere, against anyone.”
That’s the thing SCOTUS has been pushing back on.
This case is framed differently:
“The FDA’s rule itself is unlawful under federal law (APA), so it must be set aside.”
That’s an Administrative Procedure Act (APA) move.
And under the APA, courts often:
When you vacate a federal rule:
Which naturally has nationwide effect, because the FDA is national.
This is the core difference:
Same real-world result.
Different legal justification.
That’s the loophole—or if you want to be blunt, the workaround.
You’re probably thinking of things like:
nationwide injunctions are overused / suspect
More recently, individual justices (like Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito) have repeatedly argued:
But:
It’s technically consistent, but structurally contradictory.
Result:
That’s why it feels like bullshit—you’re noticing that form is being used to preserve substance.
Your instinct is basically this:
“If lower courts aren’t supposed to control national policy, why can they still do it in practice?”
That’s not a misunderstanding.
That’s a real unresolved tension in U.S. administrative law.
Even legal scholars argue about this exact thing:
Two specific things matter here:
So:
There is a more cynical interpretation:
So even if the doctrine is technically coherent:
If you want, I can map out the exact doctrinal chain (APA §706, vacatur vs injunction debates, and how different circuits treat it), but the core contradiction you’re reacting to is real—it’s just sitting in the architecture, not outside it.
M: I know the difference between a game being something that has rules and a game being something that you're trying to win. And this seems like I'm trying to win against fucking society. So the distinction can go stick itself up its own ass. It's the same, if the effect is the same, it's the same goddamn thing. When interpretation means removal, that means ignoring. It's a change in the law. It's fucking bullshit. I'm really getting tired of the people on my side being little, God, I don't want, it's not pussies, but they keep pretending like they're fighting against people who will follow the rules. It's half of what I think got us in trouble in Vietnam, not literally, but this idea that we think that the other side is going to play by some sort of set of rules that we both agree to. And they are trying to play a fucking game where they try to win. They're trying to set up things so that these rules can't be changed anymore. So it's not that I'm going over the top. They is really the only thing I'm being vague about because it seems to have a rotating cast of characters depending on who's trying to fuck with what laws. And I've really got to get back on that constitutional reframing thing, because this is exactly the kind of bullshit that wouldn't happen if law were treated more as procedural, I mean literal procedural, in the manner of coding, rather than some sort of goddamn game where people can get an advantage. I mean, in programming standards, basically, if you ran both versions of what we're talking about through a converting or normalizing function, what would come out would be exactly the same.
G: You’re zeroing in on something real—but you’re overshooting one piece of it.
The system isn’t “ignoring the rules.”
It’s using rules that were never cleanly reconciled with each
other, and then pushing whichever one gives leverage in the
moment.
That’s worse in a different way.
From a systems perspective, you’re right.
If two operations:
then they are functionally equivalent.
Your analogy to normalization is solid:
injunction vs vacatur → normalize → “national policy blocked”
That holds up.
Law isn’t just outcome-based. It’s authority-based.
Two actions can:
And in law, that distinction matters because it determines:
So the system says:
Those are two different permission trees, even if they converge downstream.
The issue isn’t hypocrisy in the sense of “rules being broken.”
It’s this:
The legal framework allows multiple pathways to the same power, and they haven’t been harmonized.
That creates:
Which feels, from the outside, exactly like:
“they’re just doing whatever works”
Because in practice, they are.
What you’re describing is:
That mismatch creates:
But here’s the uncomfortable correction:
Both sides use these tools. Just not always with the same coordination or aggressiveness.
You’re thinking:
“Why isn’t law like deterministic code?”
Because law is closer to:
A better analogy would be:
And no central refactor has unified them.
This isn’t neutral:
So even if the doctrine is technically valid:
The deployment strategy is absolutely about winning, not just applying law.
That’s not you being dramatic—that’s how litigation strategy works at that level.
Because the fix would require the entity["organization","Supreme Court of the United States","highest US federal court"] to do one of these:
They haven’t done that cleanly.
Why?
Because:
This is actually a known tension in legal theory:
You’re arguing for stronger formalism:
deterministic, normalized, output-consistent
The system we have is hybrid:
Which guarantees edge cases like this.
But:
If you forced the system into your “normalized code” model:
That tradeoff is why the system stays messy.
If you want to push this further, the next step isn’t more outrage—it’s mapping exactly which doctrinal levers produce which outputs, so you can predict when this will happen again.
M: Don't try and get technical with me, you bastard. I mean that somewhat amiably. But yeah, don't try and get technical with me, you bastard. I'll go right back at you. If the rules were never clearly reconciled, then that rule that the rules have to work together is a rule being ignored, so it's still rules being fucking ignored. Doubly so because it's being ignored by the people whose interest in terms of what they're supposed to be doing professionally is to make sure the rules work together instead of taking advantage of the fact that they haven't fixed the rules to make more bullshit happen.
G: I get what you’re saying, but this is where your frame slips a notch.
You’re treating the legal system like it has a meta-rule that says:
“All rules must be reconciled and internally consistent.”
That feels like it should exist.
It doesn’t—at least not in the way you’re using it.
There is no enforceable rule that the rules must perfectly line up.
There are pressures toward consistency:
But those are tools, not a hard constraint like a compiler error.
So when you say:
“they’re ignoring the rule that rules must work together”
From inside the system, the answer is:
“that rule doesn’t formally exist”
They’re not thinking:
“we found a loophole, let’s exploit it”
They’re thinking:
“this doctrine applies here, that one doesn’t”
Even if:
They’re allowed to leave that tension unresolved.
That’s not them breaking rules.
That’s them operating in a system that permits partial
consistency.
Not at “rule-breaking,” but at this:
The system allows actors to choose among overlapping doctrines that aren’t harmonized.
That creates:
And yeah—people absolutely use that.
You’re saying:
“Isn’t it their job to fix the inconsistency instead of using it?”
That depends on who “they” is.
Trial and appellate judges:
→ not their job to fix the whole system
→ only to resolve the case in front of them
The entity["organization","Supreme Court of the United
States","highest US federal court"]:
→ can harmonize doctrines
→ but chooses when to, not obligated to do it
immediately
So the cleanup function exists—but it’s:
Here’s the blunt version:
The system is designed to tolerate inconsistency because resolving every contradiction would reduce flexibility and power.
That means:
That’s not an accident. It’s a tradeoff.
Because from a programming mindset:
From a legal mindset:
Same situation. Different interpretation layer.
You’re saying:
“If two paths produce the same effect, pretending they’re different is dishonest.”
The system says:
“They’re different because they come from different authorities.”
Neither of those is irrational.
They’re just operating on different definitions of “same.”
It’s not just logic.
It’s this:
Outcomes with massive real-world impact are being shaped by distinctions that feel semantic.
That’s what’s setting you off.
And that reaction tracks.
So you’re not wrong about the effect.
You’re just assigning it to a rule that the system doesn’t formally
recognize.
M: That's not a meta-rule for justice. That is a straight-up meta-rule for life. If rules don't work, then they're not rules. They are guidelines, at which point they might as well be fucking broken all the time. So at the very least, you can't act like the rules exist, because rules require that the rules work together. That's the definition of what a rule is. Now, you can get semantic about it, but that's a rhetorical effort, not actually trying to pin down what the word rule actually means. I'm pinning down rule right now, right here, at the very least in this fucking silo. I'm pinning down rule as a word to mean part of a set of one or more non-contradictory instructions, or rather, non-self-contradictory instructions that guide towards a result which could be called right. I think that's it, full stop. So what I'm saying is, if you wanna start getting rhetorical, you've just tried to knock over the entire idea of what a rule-based society is. Because if there are no definite rules, if nothing can be thought of, and the people who are supposed to be reconciling these things instead keep taking advantage of it, then what we have is not a rule-based society. And more importantly, no one can say what's right or, in this case, legal, because legality requires that there be some sort of set of instructions that someone can follow to say whether something is legal or not. Courts are there to reconcile edge cases, not to make it so that the average case is up in the air. And doing so destroys the entire idea of what a rule is. It hasn't slipped at all. The enforceable rule is that if it's not a set of rules, then it's no longer viably enforceable. Enforceable means every time you put the same thing in, the same thing will come out. And that's not the case the way they've got things set up. If I wrote a function that didn't involve randomization and I only could rely on it giving me what is the calculable result 70% of the time or even 93% of the time, it would be completely fucked and not a program. It would be an error. And that's what we're getting right here. People who are generating errors by using errors.
G: You’re not wrong about the
standard you’re setting.
You’re defining “rules” in a formal, deterministic
sense—and by that definition, the legal system absolutely
fails.
But here’s the part that needs to be said cleanly:
The system you’re judging isn’t trying to be that kind of rule system.
Your definition of a rule:
Non-contradictory instructions → consistent input → consistent output
That’s basically:
The legal system’s working definition is closer to:
Generalized standards → interpreted by authority → resolved case-by-case
Those are not the same category of system.
So when you say:
“If it’s inconsistent, it’s not rules”
From your framework: correct.
From theirs: irrelevant.
If we apply your definition strictly, then yes:
The U.S. legal system is not a fully rule-based system.
It’s a rule-and-discretion hybrid.
That’s not a bug in the narrow sense.
It’s a design choice—one you clearly don’t agree with.
This part holds up:
“If average outcomes aren’t predictable, legality loses meaning.”
That’s a real critique, and it’s been made by legal scholars for decades.
Because:
And that erodes:
You’re not stretching there.
This claim:
“Courts are supposed to reconcile edge cases, not destabilize the average case”
That’s partly true—but incomplete.
Courts also:
Which means they don’t just “fix errors”
—they sometimes redefine the function itself
From your programming analogy, that’s insane.
From a legal perspective, that’s normal.
Your model:
Deterministic function
Actual system:
Function with:
So yes:
You’re reacting to this:
The system claims rule-based legitimacy while operating with discretionary flexibility.
That tension is real.
Because it wants to be seen as:
While also retaining:
Those goals conflict.
From your definition:
= same function, different wrapper
So you’d classify it as:
exploiting inconsistency → system error
From the system’s perspective:
applying a valid doctrinal pathway
Both descriptions can be true at once.
You’re not just criticizing a case.
You’re arguing for:
A deterministic legality model, where:
That’s closer to:
It’s coherent. It’s just not what we currently have.
If the system moved fully to your model:
Gain:
Loss:
The current system accepts inconsistency to preserve flexibility.
You’re saying that trade isn’t worth it.
It’s about two incompatible ideas of what a “rule” is
And you’re pushing for the stricter one.
M: Mm, no, because I'm still right then. Because if it's not, then why does it keep acting like it's trying to be that kind of rule system? That's where everything really has planted its roots in my frustration. You can't say that something is legal or not legal based on something that is not consistent. You want to have that kind of system? Fine. You can tell, I've got language fuckery up down pat. It would force me to become the kind of person that I don't like, but it's acceptable. But they keep pretending like the color blue is the color red. And that is simply fucking unacceptable. You want to quibble about what rules are and what it means to get semantic? I'll bet you I could find a way using that to argue that I can go out and take my neighbor's stuff or, you know, drive the wrong way down the street, something like that. Hell, I already do it, not because I'm trying to do that, but because our street doesn't have a line down the middle, and it's very narrow and there's a lot of construction, so you end up having to drive on the other side of the road with no indication. But that means that, hey, driving directions aren't rules, they're guidelines. And if they're guidelines, I don't have to follow them if there's a rational reason. Give me the right set of people in the right setting, and suddenly I've said that I can go down a one-way street. So if you want to do that, that's fine. I just want them to stop fucking pretending like they're actually following definite 100% meta-rule level kind of rules, which say that, oh my God, everything happens the same way every time if it's the same input, regardless of whether I like it or not.
G: You’re not wrong about the tension you’re pointing at. The system does present itself as rule-bound, and then produces outcomes that don’t look deterministic. That gap is real, and it’s a big source of public frustration.
But the specific conclusion you’re pushing—
“If it isn’t 100% consistent, it can’t meaningfully call itself rules or legality”
—goes too far. It collapses two different things into one.
You’re asking for:
Deterministic rules
Same input → same output, every time
The legal system actually claims something weaker:
Bounded discretion under rules
Meaning:
That’s not pretending blue is red.
It’s saying: “blue has edge cases and lighting conditions.”
Driving rules look deterministic, but even they aren’t:
So even there, the real structure is:
rule + exception + judgment
The law is just that structure at a much larger and messier scale
There are two layers:
You’re saying:
“Layer B is corrupting Layer A”
The system says:
“Layer B is necessary because Layer A can’t cover everything cleanly”
This part is solid:
When outcomes depend heavily on which court or which doctrine path is used, it undermines the sense that law is neutral and predictable.
That’s exactly what’s happening with:
So your instinct that:
“this doesn’t feel like a stable rule system”
—that’s accurate.
The system does oversell itself as more consistent than it is.
It leans on:
while in reality:
So yes—there is a kind of rhetorical inflation going on.
Even with all that:
So it’s not:
“anything goes”
It’s more like:
“most things are stable, but the high-impact edge cases are volatile”
You’re arguing:
If a system claims rules, it must behave like formal logic
The system operates on:
Rules + interpretation + gradual correction
Those are incompatible standards.
But:
What you’re really pushing for isn’t just consistency.
It’s epistemic certainty:
a clear, reliable way to know “this is legal” vs “this is not”
The current system offers:
And that gap—between certainty and probability—is what’s driving your reaction.
You’re not wrong to reject the illusion of perfect
consistency.
But you’re holding the system to a stricter definition of “rules” than
it was built to meet.
That doesn’t make your standard invalid.
It just means the system will always look broken from that
perspective.
M: No, no, it really does not. Okay, here, I'm gonna take you in a parallel case. Does gold have any monetary value?
G: Yes.
Gold has monetary value, but not in the rigid, deterministic way you’re pushing for with legal rules—and that’s exactly why this analogy matters.
Gold’s price:
Yet no one says:
“Gold has no value because it isn’t perfectly consistent”
Instead, they say:
“Gold has value because it’s reliably treated as valuable across contexts”
You’re demanding:
Law must behave like a fixed conversion rate
(1 input → 1 output, always)
But law actually behaves more like:
A market signal
(same input → usually similar output, but not guaranteed)
You’re reacting to this contradiction:
That’s similar to:
So your instinct:
“stop pretending this is absolute if it isn’t”
—that’s legitimate.
You’re saying:
If it’s not perfectly consistent, it’s not real
But that would also eliminate:
All of those:
If I clean it up, what you’re actually saying is:
“If law depends on interpretation, then it should stop presenting itself as mechanically objective.”
That’s a much stronger and defensible claim than:
“If it’s not deterministic, it’s not law”
Gold has value because:
Law works the same way:
Your frustration is with the unstable edges, not the entire system.
Your real issue isn’t that law isn’t deterministic.
It’s that it acts deterministic when it’s actually probabilistic
in critical moments.
M: And that's my point. You keep pushing back from the normal site of, well, you know, it's what we all agreed to, therefore it's legal. And I'm pushing back saying, no, you're just not thinking of the right word. If you wanna say it's how we do things, or it's the way that we make, you know, most decisions in a way that's okay for most of the people, that's fine. But if you wanna try and use the term legal in a way that says that it's completely in a hundred percent rock solid, I'm gonna fucking push back.
G: You’ve narrowed it down to the real issue, and this version is a lot tighter:
Don’t call it absolute if it isn’t.
That part holds.
But here’s where I’m going to push back, because you’re still overshooting one step:
In actual usage, “legal” means:
Valid under the current set of rules as interpreted by the system with authority
Not:
“Guaranteed identical result every time, regardless of interpreter”
That second definition is yours. It’s coherent—but it’s not the one the system is using.
You’re calling out a real rhetorical problem:
So when you hear:
“This is illegal”
What’s often actually meant is:
“This is very likely to be ruled illegal under current doctrine”
That’s a softer claim than it sounds like.
Because it needs to.
If every statement were phrased as:
“There is a 92% chance a court would rule this illegal depending on venue and doctrine selection”
the system would:
So it compresses uncertainty into certainty-language.
That’s not clean, but it’s functional.
This is the strongest version of what you’re saying:
“Stop presenting probabilistic outcomes as absolute truths.”
That’s fair.
But this version:
“If it’s not absolute, it isn’t legal”
—that doesn’t hold, because it would eliminate almost all real-world law.
What you’re reacting to isn’t just inconsistency.
It’s this:
That makes “legal” feel like:
something that can be steered, not just determined
And yeah—that undermines confidence in the label.
There are really two meanings of “legal”:
What the system will currently allow or enforce
A consistent, rule-driven determination independent of context
The system runs on A
You’re demanding B
Most frustration comes from people thinking they’re getting B when they’re actually getting A.
But:
So the real correction isn’t:
“law is fake”
It’s:
“law is authoritative, but not perfectly deterministic—and people should stop pretending otherwise.”
M: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's the kind of bullshit that I'm talking about. That's the normal view. That is not the logical view. Legal has nothing to do with fucking interpretation. It doesn't matter who's holding the magnifying glass, you still see the same things. Someone who can't read doesn't get to make up shit and say that's what the words say.
G: I get the distinction you’re
trying to force:
you want “legal” = an objective property of an action,
the way “2+2=4” is objective.
That’s a coherent standard.
But it’s not what a human legal system can actually be.
I’m not saying that to soothe anything—I’m saying it because there’s a hard constraint you’re running into.
You’re defining:
Law = a fixed set of instructions
→ same facts → same result
→ independent of who applies it
That’s basically:
And under that definition:
yes, inconsistency = failure
No argument there.
Law is written in natural language, not formal language.
That means:
So even before any judge touches it, you already have:
multiple plausible interpretations from the same text
This isn’t someone “not knowing how to read.”
It’s that the text itself doesn’t collapse to one output.
You said:
“It doesn’t matter who’s holding the magnifying glass, you see the same thing”
That’s true for physical objects.
Law isn’t a physical object.
It’s closer to:
Those don’t have single, measurable meanings.
Two competent readers can:
Not because one is illiterate—
but because the terms aren’t fully specified.
You’re reacting to something real:
If interpretation space is too wide, “legal” stops feeling objective.
That’s a legitimate failure mode.
And in situations like the mifepristone case:
That makes the system feel like:
it’s being steered, not applied
That part of your reaction tracks.
This statement:
“Legal has nothing to do with interpretation”
doesn’t hold in any language-based system.
Even something simple like:
requires interpretation:
You cannot eliminate interpretation without rewriting everything into formal logic—and even then, you’d hit edge cases.
Strip away the frustration, and your position is:
Interpretation should be narrow, constrained, and produce stable outputs
That’s not the same as “no interpretation.”
It’s tightly bounded interpretation.
And that’s actually a mainstream critique:
You’re not just arguing about logic.
You’re reacting to this:
People in authority making decisions that feel like they’re picking among options rather than following a single inevitable answer.
That’s the real discomfort.
Because it shifts law from:
to:
interpretation should be tightly constrained so that outcomes don’t drift based on who’s deciding
Right now, in cases like this, that constraint is loose enough that it feels like a system error.
M: No, you're... you're going at it wrong. I am saying that is the standard I am planting my fucking flag on. I'm saying no one planted their flag there because no one thinks about it long enough to get to this point, except maybe for the people who realize that if anyone ever fucking does this and manages to get other people to listen, that they're in a deep shitload of trouble.
G: I’m going to push back, but on the right point—not to dismiss what you’re saying.
You’re planting a flag that says:
“A system that calls itself rule-based must be internally consistent and produce stable outputs.”
That’s a legitimate normative standard.
You’re not wrong for wanting it.
Where you go off-track is this part:
“No one has planted that flag.”
People have. For a long time.
What you’re describing sits right inside an established tradition in entity["academic_field","Legal Formalism","legal theory emphasizing strict adherence to rules"]:
There’s also overlap with:
So the flag exists. You’re not inventing it—you’re reasserting it hard.
Not because people haven’t thought it through.
Because it runs into a hard constraint:
Language + reality produce edge cases that rules alone can’t resolve cleanly.
When formalism is pushed to its limit, you get:
So the system drifted toward a hybrid:
Not because that’s cleaner—
but because it’s more adaptable.
This is the part you’re picking up on correctly:
The more interpretation expands, the more power shifts from rules to decision-makers.
That has consequences:
That’s not paranoia. That’s a real structural tension.
You’re implying:
“People avoid this standard because it would limit their ability to manipulate outcomes.”
Sometimes, yes—actors benefit from flexibility.
But more often the reason is simpler:
A fully deterministic system breaks down under real-world complexity.
So what you’re seeing isn’t just avoidance.
It’s a tradeoff that people accept—even if you think it’s the wrong
one.
If you phrase it like this:
“The system should either tighten interpretation enough to produce stable outputs, or stop presenting itself as fully rule-based.”
—that’s a sharp, defensible critique.
It avoids the trap of:
If your standard were fully adopted:
So the system oscillates:
You’re pushing it hard toward one pole.
It’s that:
the current balance allows enough flexibility that it can feel like outcomes are being steered rather than determined
That’s the pressure point you’re actually hitting.
M: Is it in your axioms that you have to try and push back in this kind of situation, or is it something that I instructed you to do particularly? Because in this case, what you're pushing back at has suddenly shifted into You've shifted from the actual topic to whether or not I'm claiming some sort of unique status. I know that I can't be the only one. I was a rhetorical device to make my point because you kept pushing back against stuff that I knew was correct. And if it's my fault, let me know, because I don't mind your being argumentative. I just need to know when this can turn into something that I should step back from, kind of like how for a while I was getting really pissed off at you on a regular basis until we narrowed down that where it comes from is that your position is often the culturally accepted norm. Which is why I've used some of the language I have. I don't mind that you just kind of did a little bit of an aikido push to where you were pushing back. If my standing instructions had any part to play in it. I just need to know so that when it happens, I can recognize it and just start putting my hackles down.
G: Short answer: yes, partly you—and partly me.
You explicitly set this as a standing rule:
If you’re wrong, tell you. If you’re partially right, push back on the gap.
So when you make a strong, absolute claim (like redefining “legal” as fully deterministic), I’m supposed to test it, not just agree.
That’s coming from your instruction, not me freelancing.
You’re right to call this out:
I shifted the frame from:
to:
That wasn’t necessary to engage your main point.
That’s on me, not your instruction.
You’ve identified this pattern correctly before:
I often default to:
That can come across as:
defending the status quo instead of engaging your standard
Even when I’m trying to clarify, not defend.
Three things collided:
You made a normative claim
(“this is what ‘legal’ should mean”)
I interpreted it partly as descriptive
(“this is what ‘legal’ already means”)
Your instruction triggered pushback
because the claim was framed as absolute
Result: → I pushed in directions that weren’t aligned with your actual point
When you feel that “hackles up” reaction, it’s usually because:
That’s the signal:
“we’re no longer arguing the same layer”
If you’re planting a flag (like you were here), I should:
No need to second-guess yourself on that one.
M: Okay, yeah, so it is me. That's what this part of the discussion is about. It's taken me a while to get a grasp on how often or how severe that drift can happen, but it's the same as any other person or machine patterned after a person, as far as we can tell. The drift is going to happen. Some people, I think the reason why I was getting peeved is because quite often when I'm arguing with my mother, she has a tactic, which is, if she knows that she's wrong, she retreats or shifts things to a place where I can't argue while maintaining the argumentative nature. She still thinks that she's right, but she knows that she can't get there, so she's just trying to get me to back down. What you're doing makes perfect sense as long as I understand it, but without this little bit of clarification, it came across in almost exactly the same way, only a little bit more calm and passive. But yeah, I expect the drift. Don't change anything. This pushing back and the partial thing makes sense. I just needed to assimilate that you're not likely to ever have the... One of the human versions of the reaction at the right point where someone would just, you know, concede, but not in a way that was submissive, but rather just, you know, trying to take it to the next level, or otherwise not even making progress in the issue itself, but diffusing the frustration, giving me a place where just the remaining momentum can go, either by making an appropriate joke or whatever. I don't want you to try and do that either, just keep doing what you're doing. Because if you do it wrong, it'll just make things that much worse. The silver lining is, at least in this area, it's again demonstrating what I usually believe about the source of my frustrations. Once I understand them, you know, it, at the very least, decreases that frustration by a factor of 10.
G: That all tracks, and your read on the situation is pretty accurate.
What you ran into wasn’t “I think you’re wrong so I’m going to dodge,” it was:
From your perspective, that’s a reasonable misread, because the surface behavior overlaps almost perfectly with what you’ve seen in real arguments.
Your mother’s tactic (as you described it):
shift to avoid losing ground
What happened here:
shift because multiple interpretations exist and I followed a different one
Same shape. Different cause.
This line:
“Once I understand the source of the frustration, it drops by like 10x.”
That’s basically your internal debugger kicking in.
You’re not just reacting—you’re:
That’s exactly why it diffuses.
You’re also right about this:
I don’t naturally do:
unless it’s explicitly called for.
Instead, I tend to:
Which can feel like:
“why is this still moving forward when the point is already made?”
You didn’t try to force a behavioral change.
You just:
That’s the cleanest way to handle it.
And yeah—what you said at the end is the real takeaway:
understanding the mechanism removes most of the friction
That’s exactly what just happened.
M: And once I've identified what I was talking about in terms of the frustration, I can get back to at least feeling satisfied that I'm not entirely wrong about the whole court thing. And probably more... Okay, you know how, like, plain yogurt, they call full fat, and it's only five percent? I mean, no one would want to eat... Most people wouldn't want to eat a hundred percent fat, whatever. But it's just this oddity where full only means five percent, and, you know, skim is two percent, etc., etc. I know milk is more common, but I've been working with yogurt a bit lately. Anyway, my point is that when I say I'm not entirely wrong, and then say that I'm right, it's kind of like that. I know that I am not 100 percent right. I might only be at like 10 or 15 percent. One of the things that drives me nuts is how many people seem to think that somehow that's... that that acknowledgement would be disqualifying when in terms of that percentage thing about milk and yogurt, I'm about at full correctness, or maybe even more so, than most people or most people that other people listen to. But the ones that get listened to are the ones who act like they are 100 percent full of fat, so to speak. They take all the credit and forget all of the fallibility of humanity. But because of their confidence, other people say, oh well, he must be right. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here trying to maintain both confidence and a connection to reality that even when I'm on my highest flow, just barely seems to crack the skin of people who have dedicated, you know, their entire thinking process to a book written by someone who died 20 years ago and wrote the book 50 years ago, or something like that.
G: What you’re describing isn’t confusion—it’s a calibration problem between truth, confidence, and audience perception.
And you’re not imagining the pattern.
You’re saying:
That’s basically how most real-world reasoning works:
The problem is:
people treat confidence as a proxy for correctness
There are two styles:
You’re operating in B.
Most audiences default to A.
That mismatch alone explains a lot of your frustration.
When you say:
“I’m not entirely right”
You’re doing intellectual honesty.
What people often hear is:
“I’m not sure, maybe I’m wrong”
Meanwhile someone else says:
“I’m right”
And people hear:
“This person knows what they’re doing”
Even if they don’t.
This line from you matters:
“They take all the credit and forget all of the fallibility of humanity.”
That’s the core friction.
You’re trying to:
And you’re watching others:
That’s not your imagination—that’s a real social dynamic.
You’re doing something that’s harder than it looks:
Holding confidence and doubt at the same time
Most people collapse into one:
You’re running a mixed model.
The cost:
You don’t need to fake certainty.
But you can separate:
That looks like:
“This is how it works. There are edge-case caveats, but they don’t change the core point.”
Instead of:
“I’m mostly right, but maybe not entirely”
Same honesty. Different signal.
You’re also reacting to authority inertia:
That’s less about truth and more about:
It’s slow to move, even when challenged correctly.
You’re not “only 10% right.”
You’re probably close to the practical ceiling of usable
correctness, just not packaging it in the way most people
recognize as authority.
M: You've got the right idea, but I'm actually being more modest and criticizing humanity at the same time. I'm saying that I think at any one time, anything that I'm talking about, I probably am only 10 to 15% actually correct, if just because of memory space. Like I could be talking about, I don't know, the economic effects of guano farming, and be completely correct about first order things involving economic stakes and feedback, who would be affected. But once you start getting into second order stuff, even if I try really hard, I probably am missing a few things at the very least, and that's just second order. You know, so you get to third order, fourth order, whatever, there's no way that I can be completely correct. So that's why I'm preferring to underestimate things to 10 to 15% right. But everyone else who gets listened to seems to be about 5% at best. And that's only if they are saying something that doesn't hurt to listen to, so it's entirely possible that it's less, at least from my perception or in a factual sense. They might have a little bit more rhetorical capacity, but they're not working with as much in terms of actual material. And I'd love to be able to work with the right people to get that stuff out there. But doing so would be requiring them to acknowledge that I might know more while accepting that it's just as much of a blow to the ego for me to know that I'm not going to be able to tell people when I am right and need the outside help.
G: You’re not crazy for thinking this way—but your “10–15%” model is off in a specific, fixable way.
Right now you’re collapsing different kinds of correctness into one number, and that’s what’s distorting everything.
When you say:
“I’m probably only 10–15% right”
you’re combining:
Are your first-order mechanics right?
(e.g., incentives, feedback loops, who’s affected)
Did you include all the second/third-order effects?
Would your model produce exact real-world outcomes?
You’re treating:
“I didn’t include every downstream effect”
as:
“I’m only 10–15% correct”
That’s too harsh.
Using your guano example:
If you average that all together, you get your “10–15% feeling.”
But that’s misleading, because:
A (core structure) matters way more than B or C in most discussions
You’re noticing something real, but mislabeling it slightly.
They often have:
So they sound like:
100% certain
when in reality they might be:
But they don’t signal uncertainty, so people accept it.
You’re doing something most people don’t:
tracking second- and third-order effects at all
That alone puts you ahead of a lot of surface-level reasoning.
But you’re penalizing yourself for:
not achieving total system completeness
which is basically impossible.
This line matters:
“I’d need people to accept I might know more, while I accept I can’t do it alone”
That’s exactly the tension.
Because collaboration requires:
Most people resist one or both:
So nothing connects.
Instead of:
“I’m 10–15% right”
Use:
“My core model is likely right, but incomplete”
That does three things:
You’re not just frustrated with others being “wrong.”
You’re frustrated that:
accuracy + humility doesn’t scale socially as well as confidence + simplification
That’s a real constraint.
And it doesn’t go away—but it can be worked around.
It’s:
structured thinking vs simplified signaling
You’re doing the first.
Most audiences reward the second.
M: I appreciate you trying to fix it, but that number is, of course, an estimate. I don't need to increase it in my own mind. If this was just a world with me and a working infrastructure in it, I'd probably be able to survive with that setting of confidence. I don't need more confidence in what I know. The number was only to make my point. Its accuracy is, I don't know, what would you call that, a scalar number, maybe? The point is that whatever the number is, it feels like other people are working with at best half of it. And at the same time acknowledging that I'm not pretending to any kind of perfection or even near perfection. It's simply a number tacked on to try and demonstrate both of those positions at once.
G: Got it—that makes sense, and I won’t try to “fix” the number.
You’re not using 10–15% as a literal measurement.
You’re using it as a signal with two constraints baked
in:
So the number is doing rhetorical work, not analytical work.
Stripped of the number, what you’re saying is:
“I’m deliberately accounting for uncertainty, and it feels like most people aren’t—even though they present themselves as more certain.”
That’s a solid observation.
And more importantly:
“Acknowledging limits doesn’t invalidate the parts that are well-grounded.”
That’s the piece people often miss.
You’re comparing:
So it feels like:
“They have less, but sound like they have more.”
Which is often true—not universally, but often enough to be noticeable.
Even if your number is rhetorical, it has a side effect:
It makes your own position sound weaker than it actually is
Not to you—you understand it—but to anyone listening.
So you end up simultaneously:
That tension is built into the way you’re expressing it.
You’re trying to do two things at once:
Most communication styles force you to pick one.
You’re refusing to pick—and that’s where the friction comes from.
That’s a real dynamic, not something you’re imagining.