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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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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.