<story><title>Chesterton’s Fence (2020)</title><url>https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deltarholamda</author><text>&amp;gt;Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence&lt;p&gt;The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. It costs time, effort and resources, not to mention it&amp;#x27;s a lot of work and people are lazy. There&amp;#x27;s always a reason for the fence.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;or the reason is completely lost.&lt;p&gt;This may be true. A fence in the middle of a wood may have been put there 90 years ago because of old property demarcations, or an effort to keep the dread bearded grindlesnatch from attacking the village. The property is now owned by one person, and climate change killed the bearded grindlesnatch, so the fence isn&amp;#x27;t needed anymore. But the point is to find out why it was there before you tear it down, and if you can&amp;#x27;t find the reason, you should be extra careful about yanking it down. Perhaps now the fence harbors a mini ecosystem of berry bushes that has increased the potential environment for wild game.&lt;p&gt;Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton&amp;#x27;s Fence analogy, because they think change is an unalloyed good. There are a lot of social mores or codes that seem unnecessary, outdated or even bad, but they don&amp;#x27;t want to look at the reasoning behind them. Second order effects are easy to dismiss as speculation, so they usually are dismissed; but any change, radical or otherwise, will have second order effects, so careful thought must go into them.</text></item><item><author>marcosdumay</author><text>Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence, or the reason is completely lost. So knowing why it&amp;#x27;s there is impossible, and if you condition taking down the fence on that, you are effectively prohibiting taking the fence down.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why every time somebody argues against it. It&amp;#x27;s because at some point you have to abandon that rule, and all the interesting discussion is about when to abandon it, not on how to follow it.</text></item><item><author>dccoolgai</author><text>Chesterton&amp;#x27;s Fence doesn&amp;#x27;t tell us _not to change things_ or even prescribe some level of _incrementalism_ it just asks us to make a good-faith effort to _know_ why the thing we want to change is the way it is before we change it.&lt;p&gt;To follow the metaphor, maybe the reason the fence is there is because the county water supply is behind the fence and they put it there to stop cows and livestock from fouling the water.</text></item><item><author>femto</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d argue that incremental change strikes the balance between tearing something down and being paralysed by potential consequences.  Also, you can only learn so much by passive observation.  Eventually you have to apply a small stimulus (incremental change) and observe the response.  If the response is bad reverse the increment.&lt;p&gt;Caveat is that if you reach a local maxima a more drastic change may be required, but the journey to the local maxima has probably taught you enough about the system that you can safely make the bigger jump.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bnralt</author><text>&amp;gt; The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason.&lt;p&gt;Naturally everything that ends up happening has a cause and happens for _some_ reason; that&amp;#x27;s nearly a tautology. But I think the is that there are many things that don&amp;#x27;t happen for any _good_ reason, many often for bad reasons. And it&amp;#x27;s also common to find that the reasons for these things aren&amp;#x27;t discernible. Someone made a mistake decades ago, and now no one wants to correct it because there must have been a reason for it, but we can&amp;#x27;t figure out what it was.&lt;p&gt;Years ago I was the member of a local governing board, and there were many people there who thought that because we were part of a bureaucracy, we should act more bureaucratic. The more work we did, the more we required of other people, the longer the meetings, the more trainings for systems we&amp;#x27;d never use, the better.&lt;p&gt;I remember one particular situation where another agency was asking our input about an application in our jurisdiction, and the chair told me to tell the applicant about all the extra paperwork they would need to file with our board. I contacted the agency the application was actually filed with, and they told me they already handled that, and they were only notifying us in the off-chance there were any special considerations in our district the agency needed to be notified of. As far as I could tell, the dozens of boards who oversaw other jurisdictions didn&amp;#x27;t have our additional requirement either. When I told our chair that the agency wasn&amp;#x27;t asking us for the additional paperwork, he replied &amp;quot;but that&amp;#x27;s how we&amp;#x27;ve always handled this.&amp;quot; At some point years before somebody on the board wanted to add additional paperwork (and it&amp;#x27;s questionable whether they actually had the authority to do this), and the rest of the board just mindlessly followed along for years.</text></comment>
<story><title>Chesterton’s Fence (2020)</title><url>https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deltarholamda</author><text>&amp;gt;Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence&lt;p&gt;The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. It costs time, effort and resources, not to mention it&amp;#x27;s a lot of work and people are lazy. There&amp;#x27;s always a reason for the fence.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;or the reason is completely lost.&lt;p&gt;This may be true. A fence in the middle of a wood may have been put there 90 years ago because of old property demarcations, or an effort to keep the dread bearded grindlesnatch from attacking the village. The property is now owned by one person, and climate change killed the bearded grindlesnatch, so the fence isn&amp;#x27;t needed anymore. But the point is to find out why it was there before you tear it down, and if you can&amp;#x27;t find the reason, you should be extra careful about yanking it down. Perhaps now the fence harbors a mini ecosystem of berry bushes that has increased the potential environment for wild game.&lt;p&gt;Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton&amp;#x27;s Fence analogy, because they think change is an unalloyed good. There are a lot of social mores or codes that seem unnecessary, outdated or even bad, but they don&amp;#x27;t want to look at the reasoning behind them. Second order effects are easy to dismiss as speculation, so they usually are dismissed; but any change, radical or otherwise, will have second order effects, so careful thought must go into them.</text></item><item><author>marcosdumay</author><text>Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence, or the reason is completely lost. So knowing why it&amp;#x27;s there is impossible, and if you condition taking down the fence on that, you are effectively prohibiting taking the fence down.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why every time somebody argues against it. It&amp;#x27;s because at some point you have to abandon that rule, and all the interesting discussion is about when to abandon it, not on how to follow it.</text></item><item><author>dccoolgai</author><text>Chesterton&amp;#x27;s Fence doesn&amp;#x27;t tell us _not to change things_ or even prescribe some level of _incrementalism_ it just asks us to make a good-faith effort to _know_ why the thing we want to change is the way it is before we change it.&lt;p&gt;To follow the metaphor, maybe the reason the fence is there is because the county water supply is behind the fence and they put it there to stop cows and livestock from fouling the water.</text></item><item><author>femto</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d argue that incremental change strikes the balance between tearing something down and being paralysed by potential consequences.  Also, you can only learn so much by passive observation.  Eventually you have to apply a small stimulus (incremental change) and observe the response.  If the response is bad reverse the increment.&lt;p&gt;Caveat is that if you reach a local maxima a more drastic change may be required, but the journey to the local maxima has probably taught you enough about the system that you can safely make the bigger jump.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jyounker</author><text>&amp;gt; Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton&amp;#x27;s Fence analogy, because they think change is an unalloyed good.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a bit of a strawman. One could just as easily argue that reactionaries in the USA don&amp;#x27;t want to admit why many fences were built.</text></comment>