Simplicy and Open Society

It’s been a little bit of a long time since I last posted but I used the time to reevaluate my post style so hopefully it’ll be worth the wait. In this post I will be talking about the need to make any information which is made publicly available truly open rather just provided to the public. As many people probably know information can be presented in ways that make it harder or easier to understand the information. I would assert that presenting information in a way which is harder to understand when there is a simpler way to present that information.

Let us first assume that it is better to present the same information in a less understandable way. If the information is less understandable then fewer people can understand it. The point of making information public and open is so that people can use the information. If a person doesn’t understand the information then said person can’t use the information. So we run into a contradiction. So we have shown that a more understandable presentation is preferable for information which has been made public.

Something which is truly open would be understandable to anyone who is capable of using the information.  So why is this important to the idea of an open society? Well the most obvious answer is that if our goal it to be a completely open society any effort to obfuscate information would be counter productive, but there are answer that is even relevant to our current closed societies. This answer is that confusion in public information can lead to undesirable results for the society providing the information.

The best examples of this come from law. The point of having laws is provide information to people about what they can and cannot do. Having done that they provide information about what will happen should someone do something they should not do. The goal of having laws is that of making it so as few people as possible do things which they shouldn’t. Laws atleast in the country I live in are very complex and there are so many of them that most people have to visit a specialist, a lawyer, to figure if we are allowed or are not allowed to do things. We as citizens know what I would call common sense laws like that we shouldn’t rob people or commit murder, but what exactly is something like loitering or where it comes into play is something vague that most people don’t understand. Even for the specialists laws are vague and they need to have books and books of laws and interpretations to be able to practice their trade.

That being the case and seeing as having a specialist evaluate a person’s every action would have an astronomical cost one can say that it is possible for a person to brake the law without knowing it. In my country there are so many laws covering just about every aspect of life which makes braking the law unknowingly very likely. Since the point of laws is to make people not want to brake them we can say every time someone brakes a law unknowingly the body of law fails in it’s purpose.

So in order to minimize the number of times the law fails due to the ignorance of citizens it would benefit us to make our code of laws presentable in such a way that most if not all citizens can understand it and do understand it. The ways to do this are to make the laws simple and to make the overall number of laws as small as possible so that specialists are unnecessary to avoid braking of the law.

So in recap we’ve shown that information should be presented in the simplest of forms possible in order for it to be considered truly open. This is because complexity serves to hide the information from most people. I would like to note here that target audience should be taken into account to when judging simplicity. For example technical details of a computer system would be simple if the information was being presented to computer specialists but would be complex for the general public. Having shown this we say an example involving legal systems which is applies to both open and closed societies. So I think so can safely call obfuscation through complexity a fallacy to be avoided in an open society or even a closed society when information is made public.