Rational Project Management

you want to start with law?

Yes, law interests me, and I am passionate about law, and I seem to be relatively good at understanding it, and I have a license to practice law, so that seems like a good place to start. Obviously there are easier fields to rationalize in the abstract, but they are not necessarily easier for me.

there are several existing projects that are attempting to make all public statute and case law available online and machine-searchable

I only know of findlaw, and would be interested to hear about others. Basically, though, I'm not content to make law machine searchable: I want law to be machine readable. I want a computer to be able to not only pull up law that seems to relate to a search query, but also to be able to arbitrarily calculate and manipulate the elements of laws.

If you're feeling really ambitious, you could even go for good annotation.

I don't know what you mean. Can you please explain?

I consider it absurd and immoral that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and yet laws are mostly inaccessible to most of the population.

I do as well. What is terrifying is that even when people have access to what appear to be the relevant texts, these texts rarely produce a clear understanding of what one must and may do, for several reasons: the texts are written in a nonstandard dialect of English, the texts are written by judges and legislators who do not themselves have a clear idea of what they mean, and the texts are written by people who wish to conceal part or all of their agenda. The rule of law is a noble ideal, but we are very, very far from having a system that roughly approaches it.

Most legal problems do get solved once or twice in court and then the solutions propagate.

I'm not sure I agree. People continue to litigate divorce, breach of construction contracts, slip-trip-and-fall accidents, trademark disputes, and other situations that occur hundreds of thousands of times each decade. There is only so much factual variation in these scenarios; you have kids or you don't; you put up a "Caution: Slippery When Wet" sign or you didn't, and so on. If we really propagated solutions, you would think that by now we would have a flowchart that explained what happens in these situations.

Note that the law can be 'settled' and yet the courts can still be churning with thousands of clones of the same case. My current work involves getting refunds for lemon cars. The law is pretty clear: if your car is a piece of crap, you should get a refund. Many dealers nevertheless decline to give refunds for obviously broken cars because they gamble that the odds of getting caught and getting fined are low enough to justify the cost savings of refusing to pay. In the process, they come up with a lot of lies and spin and litigation to make it look like they aren't being rampant jerks. Thus, I have to waste everybody's time by suing them over and over again, convincing the court each time that the lies are lies and the car really is a lemon. In this sense, the legal problem of lemon cars is "unsolved," even though the 'solution' of an anti-lemon law was adopted by almost all 50 states over 25 years ago.

I would consider this particular problem "solved" if, upon noticing that she had a lemon car, a customer could download a program like TurboTax, enter some basic information, sign an affidavit, pay a filing fee, and then sit back and relax while the legal system got a refund for her at little or no cost to society.

I would consider this solution "propagated" if, upon noticing that, e.g., Sacramento County had such a system, the rest of the country also adopted it, so that all Americans could sit back and relax while the system got them refunds at little or no cost to society.

my practical experience is mainly in convincing angry people that litigating over the issue they are upset about is not going to be in anyone's interest

Well, look, that's moderately useful and very kind. There's nothing wrong with that.

I really like arranging for people not to sue; maybe I'm in the wrong business.

Not necessarily. They say that only Nixon could go to China; a lawyer who advises not suing is taken very seriously. Part of why I'm a plaintiff's lawyer is that a plaintiff's lawyer who says that there's too much work for plaintiff's lawyers might get taken more seriously.

also in writing very precise text that people won't have to sue over

I like to do that do! It's really fun. Let me know if you want to talk about it sometime.

Thank you! I was on the fence on whether to read it, but I'll go check it out.

Well, I apologize for jarring you. I meant law merely as an example of one place where I think better project management would be useful. I wrote the article quickly and without much editing; that's why it's not a Top-Level Post.

See my answer to mindspillage, above, on why I chose law as my example and what a more efficient system might look like.

I think the purpose of law is to (a) help people develop settled expectations about the likely consequences of various kinds of unusually important human social interaction, and (b) optimize those expectations so that they incentivize people to be, e.g., cooperative, fair, and nonviolent. Obviously a person with different ideas about how society should be ordered might have different ideas about what sort of incentives law should provide, but the basic trope of settling expectations and incentivizing good behavior should hold.

I am not sure which inputs and outputs you are referring to, but I would love to hear more about how you think my mind is going wrong -- it often does, and sometimes readers here can help me fix it.

By what standards does it currently strike you as inefficient?

Cost.