CONCEPT
Thick Rules and Thin Rules
Daston's 2022 distinction between rules accompanied by copious contextual judgment (thick) and rigid, mechanically executable specifications (thin) — and the historical observation that thin rules always depend on thick rules cleaning up after them.
In Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022), Daston distinguished between two fundamental types of rules that have operated throughout human history. Thick rules are accompanied by extensive contextual guidance — examples, exceptions, commentary on application, instruction in the judgment required to apply them wisely. They recognize that no rule can anticipate every situation and explicitly invite the discretion that real cases demand. Thin rules, by contrast, are rigid, predictive, and designed to be executed without discretion. The history of rules, Daston showed, is a history of the gradual thinning of thick rules into thin ones, driven by desires for predictability, efficiency, and the elimination of human variability. But behind every thin rule, she observed, is a thick rule cleaning up after it — a human exercising judgment about the cases the thin rule fails to accommodate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction illuminates an asymmetry that Daston's