If so, it's a very noncentral example. The explanation for process crimes is that they are much easier to prove than the regular crimes they lead to. But the whole reason that people use trumped-up process is that proving that someone trumped up the process is difficult.
the thing this post missing is the connection between the Process Crime and Actual Crime. the child have no reason to use the stepstool, beside to eat the cookies, in the vast majority of situations. is it true about lying to banks, or is in situation when Everyone guilty of some crime and the state get to lawfully punish whoever it want, by some criteria that are not written in the law?
this is empirical question with empirical answer, and when i saw disagreements about Process Crimes and Pedantic Rules in real life, it was of the form of "there are legitimate, non-criminal reasons to break this Process Rule" or "this Pedantic Rule is pretty costly to this set or rule-abiding citizens".
very good post imo. explaining a common occurrence people have intuition for but with explicit reasoning and clear examples.
Some rules are there because they make the enforcement of other rules much easier. There’s many things we don’t care about per se, but that doing (or not doing) will create easy to spot evidence of crimes we do care about that would be much easier to hide.
I suspect this explains a lot of annoying paperwork.
I.
Let's start small.
Imagine for a moment that your household contains 1. small children, and 2. a rule against small children eating cookies before dinner. Let us grant as a premise that rule 2 is a sensible and just law, handed down with wisdom and due authority in order to avert genuinely unpleasant intrinsic consequences for all concerned.[1]
(I'm using "intrinsic consequence" here to mean something like "the bad thing that would happen in the absence of rules or authority stepping in." If I eat too many cookies and make myself sick, that's an intrinsic consequence. If I eat too many cookies and my parents ground me, that's an external consequence - I can correctly argue that I wouldn't be grounded if my parents were just chill about it.)
It can be hard to convict a suspected culprit of breaking rule 2. After all, they obviously ate the evidence. However, other signs of the heinous crime might be harder to hide.
There are undesired intrinsic consequences of eating a jar full of cookies before dinner. There aren't as many intrinsic consequences of just putting your hand in the cookie jar. Maybe it's chiller in there and the innocent child was just letting their hands cool off. Maybe they like the smell, and so they took the lid off and put their face close to inhale the sweet aroma of chocolate chip. Why but tyranny for the sole love of power would anyone make and enforce a rule against stopping and smelling the Caramel DeLites?
Some despots might go so far as to outlaw putting stepstools next to the counter where the cookie jar is.
One way of parsing all of this is to say that the rule is still that small children shouldn't eat cookies before dinner, and all the rest - moving the stepstool, taking the lid off, having their hand in the cookie jar - all of that is just evidence that the small child ate a cookie. But another way is to have rules against the actions that have no intrinsically bad consequences, but are easier to spot. The stepstool being next to the counter is only circumstantial evidence of cookies being eaten, but it's pretty ironclad evidence that the stepstool has been moved from the closet to the counter.
Sometimes moving the stepstool will be framed as a rule, sometimes just as evidence. From the perspective of the poor persecuted petitioner, falsely accused of pre-prandial pilfering and protesting, it may not seem like there's a difference.
II.
Let's get bigger.
It can be hard to prove that money was obtained by doing crimes. If you and I meet behind the gas station at midnight, you hand me some cash and I hand you some illegal drugs, and there isn't a camera pointed right at us with a good angle, then (speaking very broadly, I am not a lawyer) law enforcement is going to have to do a bunch of work to prove the cash came from somewhere illegitimate.
On the other hand, if I try and deposit a lot of cash at the bank, and the bank asks what I did to get the cash, and I say something like "I got it working at my job at the Dunkin' Donuts" then the bank writes down that answer. We're not at the stage where anyone is trying to prove or disprove if Dunkin' Donuts actually pays workers like a lot of cash! That might take work. But we are at the stage where we can mostly prove that I deposited a lot of cash and I claimed it was working at a donut shop.
It's kind of the streetlight effect of the criminal justice system, except it actually makes sense. If you might have dropped your keys under a lamppost or in the dark field, it's pretty reasonable to start looking for your keys under the lamp first. If there's a very visible indicator of something you don't want, often it makes sense to look at the visible indicator.
Like the stepstool, in some variations this is framed as a crime, in others just evidence of a crime.[2]
Process crimes, on the other hand, totally are crimes.[3]
III.
"Process crime" is a specific term. It refers to actions interfering with the judicial process. In other words, the court system will sometimes argue that someone is deliberately trying to make the court system work badly, and this in itself is a problem.
Archetypal examples include:
Leave out perjury and false statements for a moment; those both involve having to prove Bob said a false thing which might be easy or hard depending on context. The point is the justice system is trying to figure out if Bob did something intrinsically bad and hard to prove, and in the process of doing that he's doing other things which aren't intrinsically bad, but are really easy to prove and make it harder to figure out what actually happened.
Al Capone famously was put in jail for tax evasion. The system was pretty convinced he was doing much more intrinsically worse things, but those things were harder to prove. I think it's a comfortably consensus opinion that the court was harder on this particular case of saying false things to the IRS than it is on many other such cases, in large part because most cases of people having more money than they're supposed to involve less murder than Mr. Capone.
IV.
I worry I talk about formal law enforcement too much given my usual context is whether someone should be asked not to attend a conference. Let's get small again.
I administer a reimbursement program for rationality events. When people ask for reimbursements, I ask for the event announcement and a copy of the receipt.
It is hard for me, sitting in Boston hundreds or thousands of miles away from a local meetup, to tell if the meetup is being well run and competently managed. When I'm in a more suspicious and paranoid mood, I think about how someone could make up an entire meetup, send me some unrelated pictures of people hanging out, and whether I'd ever notice. Mostly I don't spend too many resources on this; the rationalist community is a high trust environment.
But sometimes I spot seeming contradictions.
A meetup whose receipt is dated the week after the event took place. A meetup that gets announced with a location in a bar, whose receipt is from a grocery store and includes a bunch of uncooked hamburger patties. Attendee counts that are three or four times what the last event or next event in that style reported, at venues that would have hit capacity limits.
I ask a few questions. People misremember, or miscommunicate. People get stressed or nervous or are uncomfortable talking about something. It happens.
(I'm mostly not asking for the receipts and announcements because I'm looking for this kind of thing! Mostly this is because I have obligations to report on how the reimbursement money was spent, and because I can learn some good metis by reading a few thousand event announcements.)
There's no intrinsically bad consequence that comes just from having an ACX meetup at a different location than the one you told the ACX Meetup Czar, or at a different time, or that a different number of people showed up. But it is easier to prove to my own satisfaction, and furthermore to paraphrase Mr. McKenzie it will be recorded with exacting precision, for years, by one of the people in the rationality community most capable of keeping accurate records and most findable by organizers in the community.
Likewise with smaller processes with even less paper trail.
V.
There's a process for being invited or disinvited from a dinner party.
It's a really informal process! If I text Carla and say "hey I'm having friends over for dinner on thursday after work, want to come?" she can text back "yeah can I bring my boyfriend?" and get a "sure!" Honestly, if she doesn't text back and shows up anyway that's usually fine with me.
But a dinner party isn't a public event. If she overhears me inviting Dean to the dinner party and decides to just show up, I'm likely to ask her to leave. If she doesn't, and just steps past me into my house, now we have a problem.
Something I want to point out: this is a problem even if Carla is in all other respects a perfectly fine dinner guest.
There's actually a lot of things that a dinner guest could do which I'd find annoying and might ask someone to stop, or might not invite them to future dinner parties because of, where I wouldn't feel like it was as big an issue as someone showing up uninvited or worse after being told not to come. There's a feeling like "yeah, Dean passive aggressively needling me about my housekeeping the whole night was bad, but I can make it stop or at least keep it from happening again very easily. I just have to tell them to stop. I have a ripcord."
On the other hand, if I text Carla not to come to my dinner party and she shows up anyway claiming the text never arrived, we're back towards the very, very petty versions of false statement or obstruction.
Once I had this lens in my head, I started to see a lot of social escalations in terms of interfering with the process. Not all of them to be clear, it's not a framework for all of life the universe and everything. I've found it one of three[4] good frames to use when small offenses start gathering a lot of heat and bandwidth.
"Why can't Carla come to the dinner party? Surely just being present isn't intrinsically bad."
Sure. Same with there being no intrinsic issue with a kid having the stepstool pulled up next to the cookie jar.
But "is she at the party when she wasn't invited?" is way easier to prove than "is she being passive aggressive?"
It makes sense to look under the streetlight here, and to care about process crimes - and the non-criminal equivalents. It's not just pedantry. This kind of thing is often pretty good evidence - rational evidence, if not always legal evidence - of rulebreaking that has intrinsic consequences we care about.
Youth rights partisans, I'm mildly sorry about making such a presumption.
Not a lawyer. Some lies to banks aren't crimes, some are, and the exact flow of questions and answers here are being hastily summarized and simplified.
Still not a lawyer.
One of the others is Thresholding. The other is my The Control System Going Out of Control.