[imranq]

That's a really good question. I took a class with one of the professors who started Snorkel.

The way he broke it down was either you can incorporate rules into your data or into your model. Because we want our model to be as general purpose as possible, it turns out you can squeeze some extra performance by "bronze/copper" quality data with handwritten rules in your dataset.

You can think of the model getting an extra boost from the latent knowledge within the rules.