Probably Obvious #1: Rules vs. Exceptions
Often, I feel the desire to write something, but it feels too "obvious". And then I wait a while and see that if I had taken the time to write it out I could have pointed people to my writing when it was useful, and probably would have developed the idea better just by having written it. So I'll start an intermittent series where I describe something that may or may not be obvious, and I'm sure will occasionally be blatantly wrong.
Let's start with a real softball: the choice between whether something is a "rule" or "exception" in any kind of system is purely aesthetic.
If I say "there are no even primes except 2" that's fine. If I say, "anything is a prime that has at least two unique divisors, one and itself, therefore 2 is a prime, but no other even numbers are" that's also fine. These are the same, in terms of the precise system they describe, but of course they encourage different kinds of thinking. The first one gives a general rule people can use to easily test if something isn't a prime in half of all integers, while the second gives implies the causal reason why 2 is prime and other even numbers aren't.
Aesthetics aren't meaningless. If a teacher says, "everyone who got at least an A-" can go to lunch now" that has a very different impact than if they say "everyone can go to lunch now, except Johnny" (implicitly, because he's the only one who apparently couldn't ace this easy test). Obviously the second one signals that an authority is singling Johnny out, by name.
I think that a lot of people confuse the idea that the fact that aesthetics have an impact means they describe something differently. It's all silly definitions and I'm not tied to these exact words, but the point is that I can select the same formally recognizable options while connoting my way to all kinds of different ends, but these two processes operate at different planes of the human sphere, planes that don't always interact. I can't connote my way to new citizenship, I have to submit paperwork even if the country is happy to have me. I could possibly connote my way into a new relationship, but it depends on the other person's recognition and use of that implicit language, much as Rao describes "Powertalk".
The difference between a rule and an exception largely lie in this "connotative plane" and it is a plane we have yet to map out very well. That's because unlike the formal plane, it's much more dynamic, so rather than a map, we need a videogame tutorial. Remember kids: games are the new maps.
