Experience and Data as Input

Holmes thought that the law is drawn from much wider sources than legal formalists of the day maintained: not just the law codes, but experience at large. “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” The algorithmists, analogous to legal formalists, see the source code as what matters. In machine learning there is still source code, but it is the training dataset that matters. The typical setup is this: the training dataset is assembled beforehand, then an algorithm is run by which the machine “learns” its parameters from the training data, then the trained machine is put to use to process new cases. The training data is what is given, the ground truth to be learnt from. The collected experience of society may be likened to a training dataset, and the learnt experience of a jurist may be likened to the learnt parameters of a machine learning system.