It depends on whether your mental model is "applying a sequence of filters to a result set" or "editing attributes of a query". If the latter, you'd expect them

It depends on whether your mental model is "applying a sequence of filters to a result set" or "editing attributes of a query". If the latter, you'd expect them to be equal and the opposite would be surprising. Just from the point of view of a Rails user, generally I want to do the latter. This will replace things I use .with_scope() for right now, which a "sequence of filters" model wouldn't work as well for.