> I'm also interested in hearing from people who dispute that this is even a thing.
My intuition is that it's definitely a thing, but I appreciate that you're engaging with this question!
The first argument that I can think of on the other side is this:
Systems always effectively make decisions about how to handle every case, even if the rules about how to handle some cases are tacit, implicit, ambiguous, unacknowledged, disputed, or typically punted to some other system. Someone might be mad at a programmer for explicitly handling some situation that had previously not been addressed explicitly (or just skeptical or curious about whether the programmer did a good job), but the programmer's solution might not be worse or a more inappropriate exercise of power or judgment than whatever was happening before.
This ties in to a lot of other issues about formalizing procedures and interactions. You might want to look at James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State and perhaps Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge for examples of people who are skeptical about doing this -- but I'm sure there's another side there.
My intuition is that it's definitely a thing, but I appreciate that you're engaging with this question!
The first argument that I can think of on the other side is this:
Systems always effectively make decisions about how to handle every case, even if the rules about how to handle some cases are tacit, implicit, ambiguous, unacknowledged, disputed, or typically punted to some other system. Someone might be mad at a programmer for explicitly handling some situation that had previously not been addressed explicitly (or just skeptical or curious about whether the programmer did a good job), but the programmer's solution might not be worse or a more inappropriate exercise of power or judgment than whatever was happening before.
This ties in to a lot of other issues about formalizing procedures and interactions. You might want to look at James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State and perhaps Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge for examples of people who are skeptical about doing this -- but I'm sure there's another side there.