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Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
Daston's 2022 Princeton landmark tracing the history of rules from ancient Greek recipes through medieval monastic codes to contemporary machine-learning systems — the book that developed the thick/thin rule distinction applied throughout her AI analysis.
Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, 2022) is Daston's sweeping account of how rules have been conceived, codified, and applied across three millennia of human civilization. The book's argument is that what appears to be a single category — rules — actually contains radically different types of normative guidance, and that the history of rules is the history of tension between two poles: thick rules accompanied by extensive contextual judgment, and thin rules designed for mechanical execution without discretion. The book traces how thick rules repeatedly thin under pressures of scale, efficiency, and accountability — and how, equally repeatedly, thick judgment must be reintroduced to handle the cases thin rules cannot accommodate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's range is extraordinary. It begins with ancient Greek recipes — technai that bundled procedures with explicit guidance on exceptions, materials,