Sixteen Volts

The English speakers say that "the exception proves the rule", whereas idiomatic Finns say that the exception certifies ("vahvistaa") the rule. This paradoxical concept is not really so paradoxical if we consider the rule in question to be statistical instead of absolute, so that it can allow individual exceptions. However, as Steve Sailer explains in his post "Readers take exception to "the exception that proves the rule"", a fact that is known to be exceptional counts as evidence that the opposite statistical tendency is true. In other words, if somebody or something is famous for being X and Y at the same time, this very fame is evidence for the validity the rule "If you are an X, then you are not Y", not against it.

One practical example of this phenomenon that I immediately thought of was a famous "Heino" murder case from Finland a few years ago. Some high school boys from good families had perhaps watched The Sopranos a little bit too much, and as they were running their gangsta crew which may or may not have resembled "Tea Partay" (whose viral fame, by the way, is one more data point to Steve's observation), they eventually escalated to killing some husband and wife who owed them money. After that case, every single time that the debate about crime, especially juvenile crime, arose somewhere, you could count on some leftist piping in to argue that it is wrong to say that violent crime is overwhelmingly a lower class phenomenon and that poor people are more criminal than the middle class or the rich, because as this case conclusively proved, rich people are just as criminal as others! I never bothered to reply to ask them why they have to always use the one and the same example case over and over. If the rich really are just as criminal as the lower classes and the underclass, you'd think that there would constantly be new similar cases for them to bang the drum about, yes?

Another practical example of this phenomenon that I can think of would be the anti-porn feminists, who seem to have no choice but to resort to that infamous age-old issue of Hustler whose cover featured a (simulated) picture of a woman's legs being fed into a meat grinder, with the ironic message that the magazine treats women as merely meat. If rape porn, violent porn and child porn really are so ubiquitous, couldn't these anti-porn feminists make their case in an absolutely undeniable fashion simply by marching to the nearest magazine rack, buying the latest issues of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, and then laying out some selected contents of these magazines?

Of course, I also could not help but start wondering what might be a real-life exception that proves the rule "The exception proves the rule", in the sense described in Steve's post. I could not immediately think of one, but perhaps my readers would fare better. However, I am in an intolerant mood today, so I will erase every comment that tries to offer an example answer without understanding what the question was. Meanwhile, to conclude this post, I'd like to point out Steve's post also has one otherwise great paragraph, though you probably have to be a programmer to fully appreciate the humour:

Computer programming is something of a hybrid of the two. Indeed, writing a complex legal contract rather closely resembles writing a computer program full of if-then-else statements in a sort of 13th Century Anglo-French version of COBOL.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, September 07, 2006 at 10:39 AM