Flooded with Rules From All Directions

This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.

Previously, I wrote:

But there's plenty of activities within our government that aren't just rule-setting, and conversely, there are organizations that set de facto rules but aren't part of the government.

Here are a few. Underwriter’s Laboratories is a non-profit organization that calls itself “a global safety certification company”, and they are most commonly known for certifying the safety of consumer electrical products (though they do many other things). It’s almost impossible to interact with electricity in the United States without interacting with UL-certified equipment. Once you know what it is, you’ll start seeing the UL logo everywhere. UL is one of a small handful of firms that are recognized by OSHA as “Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratories” and are effectively an arm of regulation in the US, despite not being part of the government. UL is also an international organization, and participates in regulatory schemes elsewhere in different ways.

Perhaps UL doesn’t really make rules. In one sense, certifying that you’ve followed the rules is a separate activity from making the rules. But many regulators maintain their own force of inspectors rather than privatizing inspection at least in part because there’s nowhere near as clean a line between the two functions. Inspectors make judgements about what falls within the rules and what doesn’t, identify new rules that need to be made, and are otherwise deeply involved in the process of regulating.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) is “an independent, non-governmental organization made up of members from the national standards bodies of 168 countries.” They write standards which become adopted by governments and companies throughou the world. What are those national standards bodies who are members of ISO? In America, that would be ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. It’s a nonprofit.¹ You can become a member.

The International Code Council creates building codes. It’s a similar story: a nonprofit; you could become a member of; produces the base building code that most jurisdictions then adopt (often with some local changes). The benefits to society are that safety lessons only have to be learned once (or a few times) and construction workers can move around the world and not have to retrain. A drawback is that as a private entity, they own, copyright, and charge for access to the code that you have to follow. In 2019 they sued to shut down a startup which was posting building codes for free.

Perhaps ISO and the ICC don’t make the rules either. In a technical sense, it’s only when a regulatory agency or legislature chooses to adopt an ISO standard or ICC code as a rule or law that it becomes enforceable. Sure, many businesses start expecting other businesses to follow ISO standards — e.g. most businesses of a certain size must follow ISO 9001 despite no legal mandate — but if we’re going to allow voluntary association, we should expect things like that to happen. Meanwhile, ISO is the culmination of a century long effort to create standardization that has offered us tremendous value by reducing cognitive burden on everyone who has to interact with the rules in multiple locales.

However, imagine that you want to try to make a change to the rules of our society. Under any definition of the term self-governance, that should be possible. These organizations add roadblocks to doing so. If our legislators are used to accepting that the ISO or ICC does the best job on designing the laws around particular areas, and you want to change those laws, you’re going to have to find a way to influence the ISO or ICC, which isn’t a democratically elected body. How these organizations are governed is determined solely by them and often opaque.

This reminds me of the urban legend that goes around the tech community of a programmer who is a user of a product and frustrated with a bug in it. So they interview at the company and get themselves hired, probably in some other department. In the first few weeks they manage to fix this bug and submit their resignation. I’ve heard this story about a number of different companies, but the only public corroboration I’ve found is George Hotz claiming to have heard it about an Apple dev:

reminds me of the guy who got a job at Apple, made Wallet automatically delete your expired boarding passes, and quit the next week

It’s About The Amount

This is also a problem because it matters how many rules, as a society, we have. Nobody loves the law like a lawyer. For them, more laws means that the rules are clearer (or gives them more opportunities to find clever ways around them). But for the rest of us, the sheer quantity of laws is an enormous cognitive burden that leads to a sense of fear that we can never know all the rules we’re supposed to be following or if we’ve broken one. Randall Munroe, in his book What If 2, attempted to quantify how long it would take just to read the rules that apply to him and came to a number: 7 years of nonstop reading. None of us will spend 7 straight years reading law. Even lawyers only spend 3! And it’s only growing.

Standardization both increases and reduces this burden. On the one hand, it reduces the burden of going from one locale to another, as far fewer of the rules change from place to place. On the other hand, it vastly increases the number of people writing the rules. Every legislature and agency can send in their recommendations to the ISO and every legislature and agency can pull pieces from the ISO standards to turn into laws with far less work than if they had to write them directly. This makes it easier to enact far more rules.

It seems like people are constantly excusing this situation as if it were normal and even good. Civilization is complex, so the law must be, goes this line of thinking. My favorite excuse recently was comparing the legal system to scientific papers.

Unless you're working in the sciences, you likely won't understand papers within a field, even if you think you do. Same thing as if you were to attempt to read the law without being a lawyer.

There's a key difference between a scientific paper and the law. Society doesn't owe you an understanding of a particular scientific paper. A scientific paper doesn't describe how you must or must not behave and why. It might be tremendously useful to you, but that's different from describing a system that you must live within.

The law is how we are — all of us — supposed to behave, and the idea that it's too complex for us to understand without paying $400/hr to a highly trained professional is unjust on the face of it. We’ve normalized it, but it seems a farce to call it fair or reasonable. It would be like parents sending their children on a scavenger hunt for an unknown number of books of house rules written in Farsi hidden around the neighborhood, and then punishing those children for not figuring the rules out.

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1. Given American love of capitalism, I suppose it could be a for-profit. After all, the credit reporting agencies are!