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https://lessig.medium.com/chatgpt-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-ai-242f181723af>
"In my first book,
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), I told the story
of why I had become a lawyer. My uncle, Richard Cates, had been the lawyer
working for the House Committee on Impeachment (along with a much younger
lawyer, Hillary Rodham (soon to be) Clinton). In 1974, just before Nixon
resigned, Cates visited us in Pennsylvania and took me for a long walk. I
wanted to know why he was doing what he was doing — persecuting Richard Nixon!
I was 13. Uncle Dick was the only Democrat in our extended family. He was also
the only lawyer. My father despised lawyers. I loved everything about my
father.
Uncle Dick explained his job to me. It was, as he said, nothing more than to
teach the facts of the case — the Watergate coverup — to Members of Congress.
As I remembered his words in Code:
It is what a lawyer does, what a good lawyer does, that makes this system
work. It is not the bluffing, or the outrage, or the strategies and tactics.
It is something much simpler than that. What a good lawyer does is tell a
story that persuades. Not by hiding the truth or exciting the emotion, but
using reason, through a story, to persuade.
When it works, it does something to the people who experience this
persuasion. Some, for the first time in their lives, see power constrained
by reason. Not by votes, not by wealth, not by who someone knows — but by an
argument that persuades. This is the magic of our system, however rare the
miracles may be.
Those words changed me. They certainly changed who I wanted to be. A dozen
years later, I would begin law school. Four years after that, I was clerking
for Justice Scalia. And in that clerkship, too, if in only glimpses, I saw what
Dick had spoken about. By then, I was no longer a Republican. Certainly not a
conservative. But at that point, Scalia had a practice of hiring one liberal
clerk. I was the token liberal for the OT 1990 term. And in that year, I
sometimes saw law work as Dick had described it. I saw the quiet reasoning of
law clerks flip the vote of the Court — twice, one time, from unanimous in one
direction to unanimous in another; the other time, from 9–0, to 7–2 the other
way round. And I saw Scalia repeatedly argued away from his initial
conservative views, to views that were more consistent with his theory of
originalism. The last time I saw him before he died, I joked that he had ruined
me as a law professor: That as a clerk, he had shown me again and again how
reason could drive him to do the “right” thing (as in the originalist thing)
rather than the conservative thing; and that I had predicted the same again and
again after I became a law professor. But again and again, I told him, he had
let me down. Scalia laughed his famous laugh, and we spent the next hour
arguing — with reason—about whether my criticism was correct.
Yet it is increasingly hard to sustain such confidence in reason’s power today.
There are as many Americans today who believe the 2020 election was stolen as
believed it was stolen on January 6. Reason is not responsible for that fact.
Time and again, we all have the experience of engaging with someone about
something relatively difficult. Time and again, we walk away believing that
either we can’t persuade or that reason doesn’t work. The enterprise feels
hopeless; most simply give up."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
