It mostly does, though.

That's the magic of intersubjective beliefs. Laws may be words on paper, but as long as everyone expects that everyone else expects everyone to follow them, they're mostly followed. Same with money - it's just pieces of paper and numbers in some computers, but by virtue of shared belief, it has real power.

To the extent making something illegal doesn't prevent it from happening, there are enforcement structures - but those could never actually police everyone. Their job is to catch the occasional person who wasn't convinced by the "words on paper", and by doing so, reinforce people's belief in the "shared delusion" of laws. Because when people stop believing, society disappears.

Not on its own, but by the work of very many societal systems, and on balance it is really these systems that are responsible for the societal effects, the laws merely being the guidelines.

So banning something by law does have an effect, but in the discussion of the dissolution of law it's clearly the courts, the bureaucracy, and the media that carry all the important functions of defence against subversion.

I believe the way to think about this is leverage. Courts, media, law enforcement, bureaucracy are all strictly necessary for the shared belief in law to hold, but it's the shared belief that does the lion's share of the work of keeping society coordinated. Taken together, the institutions achieve orders of magnitude greater effect than it would seem from the work they put into it. They do that by creating conditions in which a much more potent phenomenon can arise and sustain itself - that of the intersubjective belief in law.

(Which is why I consider attacks at public trust as existential threats to society - why I consider many white-collar crimes to be on par with murder, why I think current ad-funded journalism is a huge net social negative, and why I think many of hot SV startups need to be disbanded. They're all trying to erode the conditions that allow the "shared delusion" of civilization to function.)

Or, excuse the bad analogy, think of it as shield generators in Star Trek and other sci-fi. A starship will have this critical bit of technobabble that you could break with a wrench, but when activated, it directs energy into a field that can laugh off megaton explosions. It's the field that does the work, the generator only keeps it up.

> Or, excuse the bad analogy, think of it as shield generators...

> It's the field that does the work, the generator only keeps it up.

No matter how you continue this parable it will become an arms race, invariably.

One very famous such story is the magic oil lamp that kep burning when Massada was under siege. That's as you describe the faith which keeps the flame going.

The problem is in my view rather like Jakob the Liar, Plato's cave parable and the Emperor's new Clothe's. The emperor knows he's naked, but as long as he controls fuel flow, nobody will switch on the light, and if the abstraction is leaky he will be well positioned to throw a huge shadow, waving his arms around.

As they say, biology is all about ... I hope you know what I mean, I just forgot what do they say? Gradients, right?

> As they say, biology is all about ... I hope you know what I mean, I just forgot what do they say? Gradients, right?

Feedback loops. Everything is about feedback loops.

From my first hand experience of biologists, this comic faithfully recounts the modern view on biology: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/laws

So I guess sure, in the stochastic gradient descent sense biology is about gradients ;)

I guess to some extent it's a matter of taste how you score these things, but I don't see much to gain from a view that holds that belief exist in a real sense without the external actions.

That is to say that our understanding of the rules of the game, our norms, are not created at birth but rather accumulated as we experience the external world. So the acts of the lawyer and the judge matters not just for the parties involved in the case, but also to all that might hear of it. Therefore their impact on the whole of society is not to be measured merely by the number of legal entities they adjudicate between, but rather by the size of the total audience.

Though I will grant that the lion share of the moral choices we make have pretty straightforward answers (should I shove this dude onto the tracks for talking loudly about bitcoins while we wait for the subway? No, I'll just rant on twitter), and our norm setting systems rarely have to get involved for us to make those choices in line with the rest of society.

Sure, but mostly it works the other way, where the law is the result of the beliefs, not cause.

There are huge areas where the law is routinely broken (by civilians, law enforcement) and there is no consequences. (Petty theft, violence against poor people, tax evasion.)

Well it doesn't, but there are other people "supposed" to prevent it.

But yes, law people sometimes forget that it's all words on paper.

Supposed indeed. But in the US, the top tier of said people is also heavily political and partisan.

Anyway, the rule of law quickly becomes irrelevant when something takes over by force. Currently Myanmar is controlled by a military coup, for example, and there was an attempted coup by civilians in the US not too long ago (while the legal and military branches of it stood by and did nothing)