Imagine there’s a law against tattoos, and I say “Yes some gang members wear them but so do many others. Maybe just outlaw gang tattoos?” You could then respond that I’m messing with edge cases, so we should just leave the rule alone.
A realistic example of this is that many onsen ban tattoos as an implicit ban on yakuza, which also ends up hitting foreign tourists with tattoos.
It feels to me like there’s a plausible deniability point that’s important here (“oh, it’s not that we have anything against yakuza, we just think tattoos are inappropriate for mysterious reasons”) and a simplicity point that’s important here (rather than a subjective judgment of whether or not a tattoo is a yakuza tattoo, there’s the objective judgment of whether or not a tattoo is present).
I can see it going both ways, where sometimes the more complex rule doesn’t pay for itself, and sometimes it does, but I think it’s important to take into account the costs of rule complexity.
Imagine there’s a law against tattoos, and I say “Yes some gang members wear them but so do many others. Maybe just outlaw gang tattoos?” You could then respond that I’m messing with edge cases, so we should just leave the rule alone.
A realistic example of this is that many onsen ban tattoos as an implicit ban on yakuza, which also ends up hitting foreign tourists with tattoos.
It feels to me like there’s a plausible deniability point that’s important here (“oh, it’s not that we have anything against yakuza, we just think tattoos are inappropriate for mysterious reasons”) and a simplicity point that’s important here (rather than a subjective judgment of whether or not a tattoo is a yakuza tattoo, there’s the objective judgment of whether or not a tattoo is present).
I can see it going both ways, where sometimes the more complex rule doesn’t pay for itself, and sometimes it does, but I think it’s important to take into account the costs of rule complexity.
I’m arguing for simpler rules here overall.