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It bums me out that people so often default to formal rules as the way to create a deliberately structured social space. Norms are harder to see and intervene on, but so much more powerful, and not as prone to the mire of technicalities and questions about intent versus wording.
Moreover, you will _always_ have norms, so it will _always_ be necessary to examine and manage them. Adding rules on top of that is often just extra work, and has a tendency to obscure the norms so that you pretty much entirely forget to manage them.
When the charge is "You're being kind of a dick", there can be no rebuttal of the form "Well according to section C, paragraph 4, a 'dick' is technically defined as..."
And this is great! Cuts out a whole huge category of distractions from the real problem at hand.
And this is great! Cuts out a whole huge category of distractions from the real problem at hand.
Work needs to be done to unpack what it means to be a dick in a given context and why it matters, but you get so much more clarity by treating it as a moral and/or interpersonal issue rather than a pseudo-legal one.
