daf bit: Bava Kama 23

[cellio]

We talked last week about the categories of mu'ad and tam. A mishna on today's daf describes them, saying: cattle become mu'ad (known to cause damage, so the owner has to take precautions) after the owner has been warned for three days (regarding the act of goring), but return to the state of tam (it couldn't have been reasonably foreseen) after refraining from goring for three days. These are the words of R' Yehudah. R' Meir, on the other hand, says cattle become mu'ad after the owner had been warned three times, even on the same day, and become again tam when children keep touching them and they don't get gored. (23b)

In the g'mara they discuss the other two permutations -- that we follow R' Yehudah for mu'ad and R' Meir for tam, and the reverse. Final answer? I don't know.

Comments

[siderea]

It's late and I'm tired so I can't actually grasp my own thought clearly, but reading this, I had an immediate intuition, this applies to software development.

ETA: With all due respect to R' Yehudah and R' Meir, the mu'ad cattle only become tam when QA signs off on them.

[cellio]

Nice!

I also had a QA thought, but along a different line: wait, is R' Meir really calling for testing with important, hard-to-replace resources? Or does he hold that children are expendable? While it's not exactly the same thing, it made me think of are your servers pets or cattle?.

[isaac e. moses (from livejournal.com)]

I assume he's depending on natural experiments when available. In other words, for practical purposes, he doesn't allow a way for oxen to routinely exit Mu'ad status, but he does account for extraordinary circumstances in which the ox happens to prove itself.

[cellio]

Ah. That makes sense. After all, we can't assume that everybody got the memo about that one ox of Ploni's, so if people don't know, they might well let their kids get near. And then if nothing bad happens, Ploni would be interested in changing its status.

[siderea]

Hmmmm. The thing that strikes me as most odd about both R' Meir's and R' Yehudah's arguments isn't the general form of them, it's the specifics. I know that if I discovered that my hypothetical kids were patting an ox that had gored three people yesterday, I wouldn't be thinking, "Well, clearly, since this ox hasn't gored any of my kids today, this is not an ox we should anticipate will gore people." "Oh, but this ox hasn't gored anybody in three whole days." "Well, then, that's fine."

I find myself wondering if there's something about boviculture I do not grasp that make these parameters make sense.

[eub.livejournal.com]

"and become again tam when children keep touching them and they don't get gored"

I see parents have been remiss in their duties for thousands of years.

[cellio]

Or other relatives; most of us have some cousin or nephew or the like who we'd be happy to send out on ox-testing duty, right?