From a young age
I was accused of being very “Lawyerlike” because I was always looking to try to get out of trouble on some sort of technicality.
Sometimes, especially among my teachers, it worked.
If you have similar memories you will want to read “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”. . it isn’t all perfectly rational, but it’s a damned good facsimile therof.
This sort of thing is why I think I have always enjoyed the company of lawyers- or at least a certain type of lawyer. A lawyer who is a rational person, interested in what is just and moral, and not an ambulance chaser, is the kind of person with whom I can have the most reasoned debate, and that is because of a few simple things:
1:They stick to the topic. Most people, when trying to make a point, will scatter it with so many irrelevancies that it makes the whole conversation disjointed and fragmented. if you want to argue your position, take one point, make it, either prove it right or wrong, and move on to the next, don’t tangentialize.
2: They answer. You ask them a question, and they answer it. They will answer to the best of their ability; they may answer in an evasive way or in a way that does not betray too much about their position, but they won’t evade and try to avoid answering qn honest question
3: They learn. If you make a point to a rational person, and he disagrees, and you can convince him of the veracity of your point, he will not fail to change his mind on the subject.
In ‘The Paper Chase” (The 1973 version) Professor Kingsfield says something very profound: “You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush; you leave thinking like a lawyer” Of course this is at a time when the law still made a certain amount of sense; in many respects, I fear, it no longer does. And a lot of the Law these days seems to be about reassigning blame. Science should also be like this, but these days Science is as much about belief as it is about anything, and it has become a religion which requires a specific set of beliefs of it’s followers.
But for those men and women who were trained to think rationally, in whatever discipline, I have the greatest respect, and I will take their counsel above all others.
As a computer programmer (with BS and MS degrees in Comp Sci) I consider myself rational (mostly). My greatest asset for troubleshooting is the ability to “walk around” the problem and see it from a different angle, which is why when there’s a problem no one else can find it usually ends up on my desk.
It amazes me how little grasp of logic most people have. For instance, a few years ago there was an earthquake that shook NYC (where I work), the building rocked pretty well, and they evacuated. Everyone was standing on the sidewalk outside the building. I wanted to yell “People, you’re standing in front of a 100 year old masonry building in NYC (where earthquake-proofing comes pretty far down the design-list) during an earthquake! If rocks start falling off the building they’ll be soaking you up with paper towels!” I was in the middle of the park across the street, the worst thing I was going to have land on me was pigeon shit.
Where’s Darwin when you need him?
We have darwin proofed most of humanity.
I think the lawyers that did not get beyond the mush stage all went into politics.
And degrees are not proof of the possession of logic.
They can help, but cannot always predict.
Paul b: Oh, degrees have nothing to do with it, neither (unfortunately) does a long career as a programmer. I suspect many programmers-turned-managers were promoted to keep them away from code. My logical abilities are one of the reasons I’ll never be promoted to management, I’m far to valuable where I am now. Well, that and a lack of diplomacy, people don’t like when I ask if I can have some of whatever they’re smoking, because it’s obviously some good shit. Like the guy who told a friend of mine he needed better than 30 ms response time on a satellite link, my friend said he’d see what he could do about increasing the speed of light (15 ms up, 15 ms down) or moving the satellite closer.
” my friend said he’d see what he could do about increasing the speed of light (15 ms up, 15 ms down) or moving the satellite closer.”
My favorite smart ass answer to “what’s the problem?” is similar: The speed of light is too slow, but we’re working on it…
Good lawyers are DAMN HARD to find!