If the point of this is to try to quantify things like lawyer time, witness time, etc., in large matters like this, that’s going to be a REALLY heavy lift that the above just scratches the surface of and would require pulling together info from a huge number of sources, including public dockets that are daunting both in size and difficulty to work with. Not to knock the effort so far. It’s just a huge lift that would take hours and hours and require a lot of knowledge about how US court systems work to get right.
If one were to venture such a thing, a good place to start (but by no means a comprehensive source) would be fee applications in bankruptcy courts. That said, I’d advise against it. Feels like a lot of work that is very unlikely to move the needle in this discussion.
I agree the systemic effort is likely not worth it.
I think part of the problem is that, almost by definition, the people who have any expertise at all in law have also been inculcated in a culture that is extremely averse to both risks and quantified estimates. That leaves people without expertise but higher tolerance for risk and quantification (like Habryka) to come up with their own numbers and perhaps not respect the expertise behind the caution enough. I was hoping to unstick that log jam by introducing specifics that could be discussed at the object level. And I consider your suggestion to look at fee applications in bankruptcy court to be a success on that front, although the problem is very far from resolved.
Would you be willing to sit down with me and operationalize or parameterize some beliefs, which we can then send a legal researcher after? Or something like a double crux collaboration.
I find it completely plausible that there are a ton of hidden costs I could never find as an amateur, but I do want to have hard data instead of merely taking your word for it. I think using your guidance to figure out the right questions to get hard data on might be a huge win.
Habryka has confirmed he’s happy to pay for your time. Given that and the fact that he’s currently paying an expensive non-expert researcher (me), I’m extremely confident that if we find questions with the right level of tractability and meaning, he’ll cover the eventual legal researcher as well, although I didn’t wait for answer before posting this.
When you make a recommendation that people’s silence is based on “sound legal reasoning” you are implicitly claiming that you know the expected cost of the actions, and that the cost outweighs the benefits.
Yes, getting a robust estimate that is airtight is going to be hard, but in the OP you are already making a claim that you have an estimate of the relevant costs, and you should be able to quantify that estimate, at least with error bounds that could potentially span one or two orders of magnitude.
If you can’t actually put any expected cost to your estimate, or you are genuinely so uncertain about the actual cost here that you can’t give any number, then I don’t see how the reasoning in the OP checks out, since in that case it seems quite plausible that people are making a mistake by overestimating the cost, and the benefits actually hugely outweigh the costs.
Like, I understand that sometimes an estimate can be based on personal experience and intuitions whose generators are hard to elicit, but my sense is in this situation, if you are confident in the costs outweighing the benefits, then you should be able to produce some kind of estimate here (though I am not saying that this is a total universal, a basketball player can be confident they can make a shot, with very little ability to explain why they think that).
I would definitely be up for it! Happy to coordinate a good time via DM. Will also send you my phone number that you can call any time in the next few hours.
And even if someone did all that work, we wouldn’t know to what extent the quantum of legal effort/drama in a particular fraud-bankruptcy case was a good predictor of the quantum of legal effort/drama in this one. We would need to know significantly more about the facts than is publicly known to adjust the quantums from similar cases into a semi-reliable estimate for this one.
If the point of this is to try to quantify things like lawyer time, witness time, etc., in large matters like this, that’s going to be a REALLY heavy lift that the above just scratches the surface of and would require pulling together info from a huge number of sources, including public dockets that are daunting both in size and difficulty to work with. Not to knock the effort so far. It’s just a huge lift that would take hours and hours and require a lot of knowledge about how US court systems work to get right.
If one were to venture such a thing, a good place to start (but by no means a comprehensive source) would be fee applications in bankruptcy courts. That said, I’d advise against it. Feels like a lot of work that is very unlikely to move the needle in this discussion.
I agree the systemic effort is likely not worth it.
I think part of the problem is that, almost by definition, the people who have any expertise at all in law have also been inculcated in a culture that is extremely averse to both risks and quantified estimates. That leaves people without expertise but higher tolerance for risk and quantification (like Habryka) to come up with their own numbers and perhaps not respect the expertise behind the caution enough. I was hoping to unstick that log jam by introducing specifics that could be discussed at the object level. And I consider your suggestion to look at fee applications in bankruptcy court to be a success on that front, although the problem is very far from resolved.
Would you be willing to sit down with me and operationalize or parameterize some beliefs, which we can then send a legal researcher after? Or something like a double crux collaboration.
I find it completely plausible that there are a ton of hidden costs I could never find as an amateur, but I do want to have hard data instead of merely taking your word for it. I think using your guidance to figure out the right questions to get hard data on might be a huge win.
Habryka has confirmed he’s happy to pay for your time. Given that and the fact that he’s currently paying an expensive non-expert researcher (me), I’m extremely confident that if we find questions with the right level of tractability and meaning, he’ll cover the eventual legal researcher as well, although I didn’t wait for answer before posting this.
When you make a recommendation that people’s silence is based on “sound legal reasoning” you are implicitly claiming that you know the expected cost of the actions, and that the cost outweighs the benefits.
Yes, getting a robust estimate that is airtight is going to be hard, but in the OP you are already making a claim that you have an estimate of the relevant costs, and you should be able to quantify that estimate, at least with error bounds that could potentially span one or two orders of magnitude.
If you can’t actually put any expected cost to your estimate, or you are genuinely so uncertain about the actual cost here that you can’t give any number, then I don’t see how the reasoning in the OP checks out, since in that case it seems quite plausible that people are making a mistake by overestimating the cost, and the benefits actually hugely outweigh the costs.
Like, I understand that sometimes an estimate can be based on personal experience and intuitions whose generators are hard to elicit, but my sense is in this situation, if you are confident in the costs outweighing the benefits, then you should be able to produce some kind of estimate here (though I am not saying that this is a total universal, a basketball player can be confident they can make a shot, with very little ability to explain why they think that).
Does it make sense to have a quick chat about this in realtime? I’d be open to that and think it would be more productive.
I would definitely be up for it! Happy to coordinate a good time via DM. Will also send you my phone number that you can call any time in the next few hours.
And even if someone did all that work, we wouldn’t know to what extent the quantum of legal effort/drama in a particular fraud-bankruptcy case was a good predictor of the quantum of legal effort/drama in this one. We would need to know significantly more about the facts than is publicly known to adjust the quantums from similar cases into a semi-reliable estimate for this one.