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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22842 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Most SPAs are long because you want to force the other side to disclose so you make them rep to certain things.

There is also some legalese.

There is also some legalese.

There's a plausible argument that legalese is like a ceremony where you slaughter a cow and then look at the entrails to take the omens. It makes people feel that ceremonies were observed while having no effect on on the actual outcome. It works especially well on people who are a little dim.

"You write it up all nice and fine, and I’ll sign it."

Few things fit the midwit meme greater than people who are obsessed with "legalese". They view it like a talisman that can protect them from evil forces. But nothing can.

LLMs are going to gish gallop the shit out of every lawyer alive today. They probably deserve it.

It really is funny. As a lawyer, I laugh when people try to write something formal and start throwing around “big words.”

I’m not a lawyer, but I am extremely suspicious about claims of the form “oh yeah [X profession] is a bunch of bullshit, it’s actually really simple and easy but they make it more complicated than it has to be”, because people say it about my own profession (programming) all the time in cases where I know it to be false.

Do you have any examples of legalese that you think could be profitably and straightforwardly simplified?

There's a plausible argument that legalese is like a ceremony where you slaughter a cow and then look at the entrails to take the omens. It makes people feel that ceremonies were observed while having no effect on on the actual outcome. It works especially well on people who are a little dim.

In my experience, the legalese is there not for the people actually signing the contract, but instead for the people trying to resolve disputes about the contract years down the line. You're not trying to snow the other side; you're trying to get the completely unrelated judge or future lawyer to take your side in the future. Many of the strange phrasings are references to standard language which can be reliably interpreted in a particular way so long as the standard remains current, or attempts to cover every possible base and contingency.

LLMs are going to gish gallop the shit out of every lawyer alive today

It's not the lawyers you need to gish gallop, it's the judges. And if you do that, you're not going to like the results. You want courts to be predictable.

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