5 ms·

Chesterson's fence is about understanding: tradition may be smarter than you, maybe not, but it would serve well to understand the reasons why it's a tradition

• convolvatron 4y ago
  well and good. the issue I have is that when no one can be found that knows anything about why it was put there in the first place. every day I have to climb over that damn fence to get groceries. at what point do we tear it down to see what happens? in software, I would rather tear it down and find out what it was there for. most developers I've worked with in the past couple decades operate in an atmosphere of constant fear and would never consider doing that. even if the cost of putting it back is zero. better to climb over it every day than risk introducing some unknown inconsistency. maybe we'd be better engineers if we actually learned about the systems we're using.
  • TopYemen 4y ago
  • osigurdson 4y ago
    If you have good tests, the reason is often much more clear.
  • friedman23 4y ago
    > in software, I would rather tear it down and find out what it was there for. if you don't have regression testing there's a chance you don't find out until something disastrous happens
    • 8note 4y ago
      There's a reason it's called a scream test. You take out the fence, then watch closely for the disaster. Likely the fence was unnecessary because most fences are built to accomodate for somebody's personal tastes and aesthetics
  • celsopitta 4y ago
    When you remove something from the software you are improving your understanding of it. I don't see how this example adds to your argument.
    • convolvatron 4y ago
      i'm sorry I was unclear. yes - I strongly recommend removing the fence and seeing what happens. climbing over it every day and giving it a glare just leaves you in the dark.
  • sanderjd 4y ago
    The recourse when nobody can be found who knows or remembers why the fence is there, is to figure it out based on first principles. It's fine to do "tear it down and see what happens" as a consciously chosen trade-off for expediency. But in my experience people often act like there's just no way of knowing if you can't find someone to ask, and that's very rarely the case.
    • msla 4y ago
      In software, sure, reasoning from first principles is likely to work. With older traditions, it could just as easily lead you to just-so stories and other false explanations, such as the endless number of false etymologies which make all seasoned linguists deeply suspicious of any cute etymology, especially one which could be used to make a point.
      • sanderjd 4y ago
        Sure, I was talking about software. I think lots of other things are attackable from first principles. But sure, some aren't.
    • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      So true. "What do you mean add in logging and watch it over several months?!?!?! I'll have to climb the fence for several more months, that's not acceptable!". ok...
  • II2II 4y ago
    > at what point do we tear it down to see what happens? Without knowing the purpose of something, we cannot know the cost of removing it. A few weeks someone commented to me on how they thought that some chain link fencing along a railing should be removed because it was unsightly, until they saw a toddler playing near the railing and realized that the toddler could easily squeeze through if the chain link fencing wasn't there. If they never saw the toddler, they would have thought the fencing pointless. If the people they asked failed to think of the size or behaviour of toddlers, their conclusion would remain unchanged. Yet, had that chain link fencing been removed, the results have been tragic. Because of the nature of my work, I can think of many other circumstances where safety measures have been put into place where only a few people would understand their purpose. In most cases the reason is less obvious than that bit of fencing. Unfortunately, few of them have the element where someone realizes the purpose out of chance before the damage was done. Much the same can be said of software. It may seem like it is fine to pull out a piece of code, test it outside of a production environment, and give it the okay when everything works. Yet it may not be fine. That code may have been inserted to deal with a problem that client X was having to deal with one of their requirements or to deal with a peculiarity of their production environment. Because it is particular to a particular client, the development team may not know of it (e.g. the developer who did the work is long gone) or it may have simply been forgotten. Just because the purpose is unknown in the present doesn't mean that removing it is devoid of consequence. Those consequences may range from impacting their procedures, to financial loss, to safety. At the end of the day, you need to understand why something exists to determine if it is still relevant. It should be removed only once you know that it is no longer relevant.
    • notriddle 4y ago
      I hope they added a sign, “keep children away from train,” to the fence.
    • midoridensha 4y ago
      This reminds me of the story of Muntz TVs. Mr. Muntz was a self-taught engineer who made a company that produced TVs at significantly lower prices than everyone else, and there's stories of how he'd work with his engineers and just randomly remove parts he didn't think were necessary, to cut costs. Many times, it worked, so the production design adopted these changes. The problem was, while these minimalist-component TVs seemed to work OK in the lab, or in most customers' homes, they didn't work very well in edge cases (like people in locations with poorer signal strength).
• 0134340 4y ago
  And you can just as well use it to vouch for change. If you don't understand why a change is being pushed for, maybe try to understand it first before trying to tear it down so therefore 'change is smarter'. Hopefully that now makes clear the ignorance and clickbaitiness of the title. Pretentious titles and articles never fail to show their faces on the daily here.
  • drekipus 4y ago
    This is pretty strawman. You've got to broaden the mind a bit. "We need change to have silly hat day and every one needs to scream at noon., if you don't understand the need for this change, maybe try to understand it first before trying to tear it down." - you can't understand it because I made it up, just then, nonsensically. It is a valid change that me and my supporters are pushing for. The difference with tradition is that there is a time bound element to it. Tradition is made up over time by rituals and force. Your parents make you wash your hands before dinner and it becomes a ritual. By the time you're 18 years and become sufficiently atheistic to question everything to do with rituals and mysticism, you forgo washing your hands without fully understanding why that ritual was there to begin with. Sure, now that we have understanding about germs and diseases, we know why this tradition is a good thing. But we don't know everything about the mind and about humans evolution, we've got hundreds of thousands of years to catch up on with our new scientific method, so to throw everything out without understanding it would be naive.
    • 0134340 4y ago
      If you want to call it strawmanning then I was mirroring the tactic of the author in the article. I thought it ignorant and pretentious to call tradition "smarter" as if changes, in general, are dumber; that's a strawman. And of course it's obvious, some things that are in place are in place because they're good, you should understand it first. And then you should likewise understand the need for changes; both are valid. Nowhere in my reply did I invalidate tradition, more defending the need for changes sometimes and pointing out the folly of the title.
      • 4y ago
• msla 4y ago
  Beware the Courtier's Response, which is using "You just don't understand" as a thought-terminating cliché on yourself and a rhetorical bludgeon on others. If nobody can cogently explain why the tradition matters, without falling back on muddled thinking or mere appeals to tradition, take it out and see what happens.
  • drekipus 4y ago
    Is that acceptable for a potential death of millions? (Let's say) To use a cliche or overly simple examples, if no one can understand the importance of governance and economic coupling, then why not just try to make a Soviet union and see what happens? I'm not making a farce, I think that just removing things to see what happens can potentially be more negative than it is positive. We should be looking to tweak and change some traditions slowly but surely to make sure that whatever spinning plates happening at a super meta level - is still spinning at the end of it. We don't know what we would be throwing out.
    • msla 4y ago
      With government, we have heuristics honed over millennia for detecting things which are likely to end extremely badly, and we can explain them in logical terms. For example, resurrecting the USSR is bad because the USSR was an empire lead by a succession of dictators and oligarchies, and we have good, logical reasons founded on plenty of history telling us why empires, dictators, and oligarchies are all bad. The illogical reasons are the ones which reduce to "It's bad because it's new" and "It's good because it's old" with no further content, just rhetorical smoke bombs and hand-waving.
      • drekipus 4y ago
        Most, if not all forms of government end up extremely badly. Society is just difficult to manage. The reasoning why it's bad is usually after the fact, no one willingly chooses the bad option. But yes, I agree with you that saying "it's good because it's old, bad because it's new" is illogical. I don't think many people are saying that though. If people are convinced that a new thing is good, the change happens. I think people are much more likely to suggest that change is good simply because it is new, which is also dangerously illogical. People were convinced that the new USSR was good, so it happened. Dictators will undoubtedly happen again, and they don't get there by keeping things the same.
• afpx 4y ago
  Except few people ask why. And, that's frustrating. It reminds me one of my daughter's science shows. In an experiment, they hire an actor to repeat a nonsensical ritual in a waiting room. When new people come in, without being asked, they copy the ritual. The ritual continues indefinitely well after the actor leaves the room. In another experiment (I think referenced by Sapolsky), an animal (primate) watches a human perform a ritual that produces a reward (treat). When the animal is given the same challenge, they dispose of all of the ritualistic steps and only do the relevant steps. But, when a young Human watches, they will repeat the entire ritual.
  • oliwary 4y ago
    Interesting. Presumably over time the evolutionary selection of rituals the article talks about would weed out the ones that are useless though. I wonder if the act of closely following a ritual even if we do not know its purpose is a form of human meta-ritual? That makes it easier to learn from previous generations without having to understand the potentially harsh lessons that lead to the creation of the ritual in the first place?
    • carlmr 4y ago
      > That makes it easier to learn from previous generations without having to understand the potentially harsh lessons that lead to the creation of the ritual in the first place? This I suspect is very much a part of it. Humans have more complex things to learn, learning to do a bit extra may be better than learning to do to little. I.e. erring on the side of caution. As an example of a ritual, you have the train conductors in Japan that point at stuff and say it out loud. [1] This is a ritual which on the surface level has no use. But this ritual does have a purpose. It's really hard to get things right every time, especially with routine inspections. It was found that by pointing and calling the thing you inspect, even with routine, fewer errors happen. The rituals may be a way to deal with complexity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
  • deleted 4y ago
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• Dalewyn 4y ago
  One of the most important lessons and pieces of wisdom I've learned in life so far is to always thoroughly understand something before proposing any changes to it. Why is something the way it is? There's always a reason, both justifiable and unjustifiable. Change for the sake of change, that is changing something without understanding why it's like that in the first place, is the epitome of stupidity.
• danjoredd 4y ago
  In the Art of Manliness podcast, there was an episode recently on how athletes with traditions and rituals tend to perform better than those without, even if they are tiny. Its something inside our monkey brains that helps us with our confidence and performance. Weird stuff, but interesting