12 ms·
>Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. It costs time, effort and
by deltarholamda 5y ago
>Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence
The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. It costs time, effort and resources, not to mention it's a lot of work and people are lazy. There's always a reason for the fence.
>or the reason is completely lost.
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't needed anymore. But the point is to find out why it was there before you tear it down, and if you can'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.
Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton'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 There are a lot of social mores or codes that seem unnecessary, outdated or even bad, but they don't want to look at the reasoning behind them.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.
- mnsc 5y agoWhy did you need to make this political? It's just a matter of minutes before someone points out that conservatives love the Chesterton's Fence analogy because most fences are built to keep _those people_ out. And then we're off to the races.
- emodendroket 5y agoWasn’t the point of Chesterton coming up with this metaphor political? His whole point was that conservatism was, in his view, wise.
- jpitz 5y agoI thought that his point was "there's no substitute for understanding why" ?
- emodendroket 5y agoIf every change demands first a detailed study, a logical consequence is fewer things will ever be changed.
- deltarholamda 5y ago>because most fences are built to keep _those people_ out. A fine example of how the warning of Chesterton's Fence is ignored by inferring the worst possible motive without evidence or reason, and using that unsupported aspersion as a reason to rip something up.
- slowhand09 5y agoAnd there you go pulling the quote out of its context, changing its meaning completely. You ignored Chesterton's intentionally to make a point, or MISSED the point by not reading it thoroughly, or something I may have missed. But I'm attempting to understand before changing anything.
- mark-r 5y agoJust because you attempted, doesn't mean you succeeded.
- nescioquid 5y agoI'm suspicious of seductively clever writers like Chesterton. You'll find this quote on his wikipedia page: > "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." Having read some of his Christian apologetic essays, I suspected the fence argument was fundamentally motivated by religion, and again from the wiki page, it originated in from his book "The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic". EDIT: GP said "Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton's Fence analogy, because they think change is an unalloyed good." to which parent complained "Why did you need to make this political?". I found Chesterton's own words both relevant and sufficient warrant to broaden the discussion along the lines of the GP.
- dccoolgai 5y agoI read "Man Who was Thursday" and some of his other works... He always struck me as more of a "contrarian" than anything else. If he lived in a time when Christianity/Church was gaining popularity I think he would have declared himself a devout atheist. Reminds me of the "true neutral" alignment from the old Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks.
- anthonygd 5y agoYou're right. A conservative is a contrarian. They fight change. Chesterton's fence is a rational argument in favor of being conservative.
- dccoolgai 5y agoI don't completely agree. A contrarian, by definition, is responsive to the political context they are in. In Chesterton's time, there was a wave of anarchism finding purchase in academic and philosophical circles: hence he appeared as a conservative. A "conservative" from Chesterton's time doesn't necessarily map cleanly onto the modern notion of the same name... Supposing the allegorical "fence" to be something like clean air or water regulation, one could argue that it's modern "conservatives" more often than not arguing to disturb things without considering second-order effects.
- emodendroket 5y ago> The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. It costs time, effort and resources, not to mention it's a lot of work and people are lazy. There's always a reason for the fence. Since this is HN, I think a lot of us have experience with software. If you do, then I find it incredible that you have never discovered some complicated code that serves no real purpose, or at least no good one, and was presumably written to amuse the author more than anything else.
- deltarholamda 5y ago>If you do, then I find it incredible that you have never discovered some complicated code that serves no real purpose Hell, I've written some of that. Very complicated, usually awful code, but it did at one point have a purpose. If somebody wrote something complicated, just for amusement, then that is its purpose. That's a fence that can be rebuilt or thrown away, but you'd better be sure that nothing else references it or otherwise depends on it doing its quirky baroque thing.
- iainmerrick 5y agoBut the whole point of Chesterton's Fence is that you don't immediately assume it has no purpose, you put a bit of effort into double checking. If you checked and you're confident it's useless and you can explain why to a reviewer, then sure, remove it. Edit to add: thinking about it, I don't think I've ever found code in a legacy codebase that had literally no purpose. The closest might be code that was once used but now isn't referenced anywhere.
- Thiez 5y agoI see code without purpose all the time. I have some colleagues who seem to believe that they should assign `null` to class fields when disposing an object. And no, the object will not be recycled, and never was.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tshaddox 5y ago> The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. I think it’s more than sometimes reasons go away and sometimes people do unreasonable things. I don’t think anyone thinks that people literally build fences completely randomly.
- vlovich123 5y agoIn another thread about JWT there’s a discussion about how the Soviets tried to copy the design of the space shuttle because “the Americans must have had some reason we can’t see yet for that design”. Turns out the design was largely motivated by a secret military operation only relevant to the Americans (which never materialized either apparently). > The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason Sure. That doesn’t mean that the reasons are good or accessible to you to make that decision. Now when the reason is obviously apparent and widely known, that’s a totally different thing with the caveat being that conditions change and you may not have realized that in a complex system.
- dekhn 5y agoThe shuttle carried out multiple classified military missions, although fewer than planned. It had capabilities unique to its design. The difference is that the Soviets didn't have the economic base to support such an inefficient design.
- vlovich123 5y agoAnd yet the Russians, in this case, would have been better served ignoring the Chesterton fence. It's a neat analogy but it has limited utility as a general rule for either side.
- msla 5y ago> There's always a reason for the fence. Yes: To get the rocks out of the dirt so we can farm there. https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=18-P13-00048&segmentID=6 https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=18-P13-000... https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-walls https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-wall... Now, of course, New England with its rocky soil is no longer an agricultural powerhouse, so maintaining a stone wall in the middle of re-forested land is rather pointless from the perspective of anything other than an antiquarian interest. The whole world has changed and the walls weren't primarily intended as boundaries anyway.
- slowhand09 5y agoPointless unless it now marks lots, or pastures for animals. You've never see a fence or wall to delimit the upper pasture from the lower pasture? Or to mark the area where you leave trees to grow rather than weed them as samplings, thus forming a woodlot for future generations. Stone fences in days gone by were probably very desirable say as cover when fighting the British during the revolution. Original reasons may be obsolete, but it doesn't make future reasons invalid.
- bnralt 5y ago> The article makes the point that people do not build fences for no reason. Naturally everything that ends up happening has a cause and happens for _some_ reason; that's nearly a tautology. But I think the is that there are many things that don't happen for any _good_ reason, many often for bad reasons. And it's also common to find that the reasons for these things aren'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't figure out what it was. 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'd never use, the better. 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't have our additional requirement either. When I told our chair that the agency wasn't asking us for the additional paperwork, he replied "but that's how we've always handled this." At some point years before somebody on the board wanted to add additional paperwork (and it's questionable whether they actually had the authority to do this), and the rest of the board just mindlessly followed along for years.
- chernevik 5y agoThe point is, you can't evaluate whether a reason is good or bad (or more likely, out of date) until you know what it was.
- jyounker 5y ago> Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton's Fence analogy, because they think change is an unalloyed good. That's a bit of a strawman. One could just as easily argue that reactionaries in the USA don't want to admit why many fences were built.
- jquery 5y ago> Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton's Fence analogy Is this true? Who is leading the charge to distrust longstanding institutions such as universities… or the CDC? Who is trying to hold nature in balance? Even the right to terminate a pregnancy can be seen as a Chesterson’s fence that is looking to be torn down. The former leader of the “conservative” party was infamous for steamrolling norms. I’m not a progressive personally, but I think this is an unfair description of them. Too broad a brush.