"yes, lisa, state unfair" Friday night I went out for beers with the local Libertarian apparat, most of whom tried to sell me on the virtues of Sensible Seattle's I-75, which would "make marijuana possession by adults Seattle's lowest enforcement priority." While it's ludicrous that marijuana is illegal, state law prohibits Seattle from decriminalization, and so the initiative is effectively toothless. If the impotence weren't enough to scare me off, their webpage would suffice:

Arresting responsible adults for possessing small amounts of marijuana is simply unfair.

Now, Usenet veterans may be familiar with Godwin's Law:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

Over the years, I've developed a similar rule, which I'll now enshrine as "Joel's Law":

As a political discussion grows longer, the probability of an appeal to "fairness" approaches one. And it is Joel's bias that, once this occurs, the discussion is over, and whoever appealed to "fairness" has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

OK, so I overstated the rule to make the analogy work. Nonetheless, one of my rules of thumb is that anytime you use the word "fair" in an argument (fair trade, fair wage, fair play, fair share, fair deal, etc...), you don't have much worthwhile to say. While I accept that there's some biological instinct for "justice," most people use fair to mean "I got what I wanted," and usually the word carries no objective meaning. [It occurs to me that Mary C's blog is called Science Fair, but I think she pulls it off :) ] One could rebut the Sensible Seattle folks by claiming that, for example, allowing people to smoke marijuana is "simply unfair." Which leads to an impasse. And so I am perpetually dismayed that intellectual property arguments so often center around "fair use." For instance, there's a mini-discussion going on over on Copyfight over how to get people to pay attention to the recording industry's attempts to curtail activities which are currently considered "fair use." The EFF has even introduced a video game, in which you play a blue-green hottie navigating the vagaries of "fair" and lawful use. Joel's Law says that the Lessigs of the world, whose focus is on "fair use," have already lost. When you buy a car, or a TV, or a computer, or a sofa, it's yours. The seller/maker doesn't retain any "rights" to prevent you from, say, driving over 90mph, watching more than 10 hours of programming a day, adding an extra hard drive, or putting your feet on the cushions. To the extent you grant that the maker of (say) a CD retains the "right" to prevent you from making and selling copies of it, you've already assented that the CD-maker gets to control your use of it. And once you've agreed to that, you're in the position of whining about "fairness." This isn't the killer anti-copyright argument. It's not likely to sway those who believe that makers of music, literature, art, and software should have the legal right to control people's use of instantiations of their IP. But it does make me hyper-critical of Lessig and his ilk, who -- as far as I'm concerned -- are running around screaming "not fair!" Godless comments: The main problem, in my opinion, is that when people say "it's not fair!" they're employing a nebulous optimality criterion. Once you define exactly what you're trying to accomplish, it's much easier to weigh different policies and ask which of them best accomplishes your goal. Ideally one would choose to optimize a quantitative scalar variable as a function of the chosen policy. For example, if one's goal is to "rapidly increase the average standard of living", you would choose one policy. If your goal was instead to "reduce the differences in income between different groups", you would choose a different policy. The point, however, is that "fair" must be defined in terms of an optimality criterion. (Note that this does not preclude choosing several goals simultaneously. One can choose a weighted sum of objectives and return to the scalar case. Here's an example with regularized least squares [link in PDF].)