{"id":11457,"date":"2008-09-14T21:50:58","date_gmt":"2008-09-15T04:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2008\/09\/14\/11457.html"},"modified":"2008-09-14T21:50:58","modified_gmt":"2008-09-15T04:50:58","slug":"rules-of-thumb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2008\/09\/14\/rules-of-thumb\/","title":{"rendered":"Rules of thumb"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Just happened across the Rules of Thumb<\/a> website, a database\/catalog of rules of thumb.<\/p>\n

It's an interesting site, and an interesting idea, and it grew out of thirty years' worth of collecting rules of thumb.<\/p>\n

But the site seems to have a somewhat different idea than I do of what constitutes a rule of thumb.<\/p>\n

For example, although their main collection includes many items that fit my idea of a rule of thumb, it also includes items like this one:<\/p>\n

\n

Never tell a child how a used-car dealer prices automobiles, how a butcher makes sausage, or how a Texas politician makes money.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To me, that sounds more like a proverb or a joke (and, really, a variant of the old line attributed to Otto von Bismarck about laws and sausages<\/a>) than a rule of thumb as such. I'm dubious about whether advice counts as a rule of thumb in general (see below), but even if you allow advice, this one isn't even really advice--presumably the person who submitted it wasn't really saying that you should never tell a child those things.<\/p>\n

To me, a rule of thumb is a way to easily guess or approximate or estimate or predict something, usually something to do with numbers or values.<\/p>\n

For example, it can be a way to approximately measure something: their About page says that the number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, plus 37, is roughly equal to temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. Or a way to approximate how much of something you need: another one from the \"children\" section of their main collection says that, when planning a party for kids, you should have \"One adult for every five children under age five. One adult for every eight older children.\"<\/p>\n

My dictionary suggests that a rule of thumb can also be \"a general principle regarded as roughly correct\" or \"a method or procedure\" based on common sense. I think I'll buy the \"general principle\" part, but I'm a little dubious about the \"method or procedure\" thing; for example, I don't know if I would consider this one from the site to be a rule of thumb per se: \"If you don't want a cat to jump into your lap, don't make eye contact with it.\" I would call that advice rather than a rule of thumb. But apparently most people consider \"measure twice, cut once\" to be a rule of thumb (in fact, that's what led me to the site), and that's more advice or a procedure than it is a way to estimate a value, so maybe my definition is out of step.<\/p>\n

Anyway. Regardless of my nitpicks about definitions, it looks like a neat site, and it does contain plenty of items that are indubitably rules of thumb even by my definition.<\/p>\n

(P.S.: 45 minutes after posting this, I happened across an old entry<\/a> of mine that refers to a piece of advice about a procedure as a \"rule of thumb.\" So I guess I do use the phrase that way. But in that kind of context, I think I specifically use the phrase to mean \"if you don't have any particular reason to do the process in some other particular way, then it's a fairly safe bet that this will be a good general approach to take\" rather than (say) \"here's the procedure you should always follow.\" But I may recant this, too, after further thought and more examples.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just happened across the Rules of Thumb website, a database\/catalog of rules of thumb. It’s an interesting site, and an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}