heptagrammaton’s Reviews > Rules: A Short History of What We Live By > Status Update

... Cases are good to think with because the thinking never stops.

What is characteristic of times and places where there is an upsurge of regulations is not just size but also complexity and density.

[T]he dream of unambiguous rules flawlessly followed has always fed on upon the special case of calculation, the thinnest rules of all... [A]lgorithms, even calculating algorithms need not inspire such wafer thinness ... It was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that calculation became the paradigm of the kind of rule that needed no paradigm, ... no mind to interpret or adapt it.

... [A]n achievement in both mathemathics and political economy: [...] the division of labour, not the machines, made the algorithms mechanical—and made the actual mechanization of algorithms on a grand scale thinkable.

[T]he rules were not free-standing: models, examples, tips, and observation propped them um and filled them out [...] because no universal formulation could anticipate all the particulars with which it could be confronted in practice. The gap between universals and particulars is hardly news; what is striking about the early modern rules are the provisions they included to bridge the gap.