Indeed. I was an elected official for a hyperlocal committee years ago. There was a specific hoop that our committee required people to do, but when I looked in

Indeed. I was an elected official for a hyperlocal committee years ago. There was a specific hoop that our committee required people to do, but when I looked into it I found that none of the other dozens of committees had it, and it required people to waste time doing things the city was already doing. Keep in mind that our boundaries would change every year, so whether or not a block of houses had to comply with our regulation depended on if they happened to fall into our jurisdiction that year. When I suggested to the chair that we shouldn't do this anymore, his response was simply "but that's what we've always done." The older people on the committee, who had been there for decades, often engaged in antisocial behavior (lying, calling other committee members in the middle of the night to complain about things) including purposefully wasting time (trying to get committee members to go to trainings for tech we didn't use, stretching out committee meetings with things that were supposed to be handled before even after repeated warnings). I think of this experience whenever someone invokes Chesterton's fence, and have to wonder how much experience people have with some of these organizations. Imagine how much time we would waste if we applied it to ideology - you can't dismiss any weird conspiracy theory (and many conspiracy theorists have a _lot_ of information they'll throw at you) or ramblings of schizophrenics on the street until you have a sound understanding of their theories. Most people would think that's a terrible way to go about life, one where you either waste all your time with the most unhinged elements of society or accept their beliefs as holding as much weight as anyone else's. What people often fail to realize is that unhinged people also exist in bureaucracies, and deciding that you'll let all of their actions remain until you fully understand them is a terrible approach. So bad, I'd argue it's a dereliction of duty, surrendering regulations to the most inscrutable nutcases (you won't ever be ever to understand them, so in theory you would have to let all their actions remain). This doesn't mean mindlessly get rid of all regulations, but you need to take a measured approach that deals with the world as it exists, and not pretend we live in an imaginary utopia where every action has a well reasoned and easily identifiable justification.