Nope. A few minutes later, a flight attendant comes to my seat, with the gate agent following behind, to tell me that I have to put a surgical mask on top of my respirator. Seems like the gate agent must have come aboard specifically to ask the flight attendant to do this.
When I tell her that my respirator does not have a valve, and is allowed by airline policy, she says that she can't determine whether or not it has a valve, and asks me whether I'm willing to comply with her request. I say "yes" as I'm afraid of the consequences of saying no. They leave b...
I don't think these examples are quite security theater. A good bike lock makes your bike harder to steal; a "theatrical" bike lock would mostly just make it look harder to steal. Even a skinny cable lock, the sort you can cut with fingernail clippers, keeps it from being stolen by passers-by who don't have fingernail clippers.
(Of course, the same argument applies to the TSA, so maybe I'm just wrong about what "security theater" means.)
Exceptions (which I think is what you mean by edge cases) DO indicate that a rule is incomplete or not universal.
Yes! But rules don't have to be complete or universal to be acceptable.
Rules about people should be more formally correct than is implied by this post.
I think I see what you're getting at. My instinct kinda runs the other way, though: if people don't fit neatly into categories (and you care about the edge cases), it might be better to throw out the rule entirely rather than formalize it and categorize those edge cases. Could you give an example of where formalizing would be helpful?
I think this might conflate "science" with something like "statistics". It's possible to study things like personal experience, just harder at scale.
The Hollywood-scientist example illustrates this, I think. Dr. Physicist finds something that wildly conflicts with her current understanding of the world, and would be hard to put a number on, so she concludes that it can't and shouldn't be reasoned about using the scientific method.
If the counts weren't public until after voting were closed, do you think people would vote significantly differently?
My instinct says they wouldn't.