For one, you don't want too many rules. Too many rules leads to a restriction on creativity, growth, and innovation; progress becomes bogged down in a labyrinth of bureaucracy in which any hope of newness dies. Too many rules easily leads to abuse of authority, oppression, and the stifling of individuality. I'm picturing mounds of paperwork and the U.S. Congress. Neither of those is a particularly attractive image.
Too few rules doesn't work either. Even Fight Club, the ultimate anti-establishment anarchist organization, had rules (two of which I'm currently violating).
Think about the game of chess. Given a chess board and a full set of chess pieces, and being told nothing else, it's not easy to have fun. There's nothing substantive there; the board is just a piece of wood, and the pieces are the worst set of action figures ever conceived. But add in the rules of chess, restrictions on how pieces move, how to capture, win conditions, and so on -- then, there springs out a rich, complex strategy game, loved by some of humanity's greatest minds. By making the board and pieces more restrictive, by imposing more constraints on piece interactions, we've actually increased the amount of stuff we can do with them. We've turned a wood platform and some figurines into a deep, multifaceted battle of wits and planning.
Similarly, math and science are kind of like rules we use to understand and describe reality. Logic, a ruleset on how to think, has guided our thought process from the invention of the wheel to quantum supercomputing. Progress is achievable only through a framework whereby we have some rules on how to think. The human construct of language is a ruleset on how to make noises and create symbols in the same way other people make noises and create symbols. In this way, we can communicate within a framework.
I'm not sure what to think about rules. Do they impede progress, or do they facilitate it? Probably both. The truth is usually complicated.
-Me
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