3 ms·

Legibility is a bell curve. The author could have stopped earlier, sure, but at the cost of reaching a smaller fraction of the audience. Words are cheap. No

• TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  However, a number of readers were irritated and left unconvinced. Chesterton's Fence sounds like Pascal's Wager - it's perfectly convincing and rational until you realise it's misleading and oversimplified. Of course you shouldn't get rid of things just because you want to change them. But unless a fence-builder left an explicit record explaining why the fence is there, your belated estimate of their reasons is at least as likely to be wrong as your desire to remove the fence. And that doesn't matter, because the original reasons are irrelevant. The fence may have been built for a good reason, and the reason may no longer apply. It may not have been built for a good reason, but a good reason now exists. Skip straight to the problem, ask stakeholders (fenceholders?) if you can find them, run predictive modelling, maybe some A/B testing if it's Schrodinger's Fence, make a backup just in case, and then do what you need to do. The original fence builder is likely long gone and may not want to talk to you anyway. (Although if it all goes horribly wrong, maybe try looking on LinkedIn?)