10 ms·

Chesterton's Fence: A lesson in second order thinking (2021)

205 points by ensocode 3y ago

ignoramous 3y ago
Well, sometimes you have to tear down the fences to bring about meaningful change based on first principles. Otherwise, we are only empowering the gatekeepers who have all the incentive in the world to persist with the status quo. See also: https://a16z.com/politics-and-the-future/ https://a16z.com/politics-and-the-future/
- trescenzi 3y ago
  The point isn’t to never tear down the fence the point is that you should wait to do so until you know why it’s there.
  - ignoramous 3y ago
    I think you read past "sometimes" and "based on first principles".
  - ludocode 3y ago
    The reason the fence exists should be written down, ideally as close to the fence as possible. It needs to be easy to determine why the fence is there. If someone puts up a fence without explaining why it's there, they deserve to have their fence torn down.
    - mistercow 3y ago
      I don’t understand this word “deserve”. It’s not about who gets the blame when the coyotes show up at night and kill all your chickens. It’s about making sure you don’t tear down fences that are, unbeknownst to you, protecting your chickens.
    - kstenerud 3y ago
      > If someone puts up a fence without explaining why it's there, they deserve to have their fence torn down. Uhh no, because your punishment rampage will be putting other things in danger. First, understand why the fence is there. THEN tear it down if it makes sense to do so. That's the whole point, and it was thoroughly explained in the article.
- hardkorebob 3y ago
  [dead]
- jmvoodoo 3y ago
  Tearing down fences without pausing long enough to at least figure out why they are there is how you get gatekeepers to begin with. Its entirely possible that the fence was put there for an extremely valid reason, or that you must mitigate a separate issue before removing it. This assessment can be completed using a first principles approach, and the fence can be removed afterwards. Removing the fence then learning why it was there can be a painful experience for you and those around you.
- mcswell 3y ago
  This in no way contradicts Chesterton's point, in fact he explicitly brings it up. He is not calling for an end to fence demolition, he is rather calling for common sense investigation into why the fence is there.
skybrian 3y ago
Interpreted properly, it's an argument in favor of curiosity. There's always a temptation to cut corners, to react without investigating. In casual conversation, nobody has to do homework, but you should be wary of arguments you can make off the top of your head. Ironically, bringing up Chesterton's fence and not doing any research is a rather common move. But I try to value curiosity even when I'm not actually curious enough to do research at the moment.
reedf1 3y ago
The issue with Chesterton's fence is something of a meta-problem in conversation and politics in general. It is the ultimate thought terminating cliche. If you accept it as given it allows you to build walls faster than you can investigate their removal, and by the time you have investigated it, they are building walls around your original position. It's an argument for inertia, fine in its basis, but over applied it becomes "Chesterton's big fucking infinite barrier", instead of a simple fence.
- paulsutter 3y ago
  Nonsense. Chesterton’s fence creates a clear criteria for eliminating fences and other accumulated junk
  - api 3y ago
    What if you investigate why the fence is there and find nothing or a list of contradictory or nonsensical reasons? This is incredibly common in real life. If you must understand something to remove it you do end up with a lot of things that can never be removed. It’s a big reason that laws and regulations build forever.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      At that point, you give up on the search for understanding and must evaluate the fence given the information that you do have and can make sense of. It's really not any different from any other decision making process. The principle exists to encourage critical thinking, not to obstruct progress.
      - api 3y ago
        I actually like the principle as a tool for critical thinking, but like the precautionary principle which can also be a tool for critical thinking it has a tendency in practice to be converted into a thought-stopping and action-stopping cliche.
    - latency-guy2 3y ago
hedora 3y ago
When I first heard this, it came up in an engineering discussion, where pulling out + replacing the thing was much lower cost than figuring out exactly what the person that implemented it was smoking. Since the cost of removing + reinstalling a gate is also much lower than the cost of Chesterson's proposed historical wankery, I assumed I was getting an all clear to do my job. I've also encountered this sort of wrong-think when trying to deal with planning commissions in the SF Bay Area. Anyway, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual goes into more detail if you'd like to implement Chesterson's Fence. It worked well in WWII, so I guess they were on to something. Page 28, points 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are all good generaly ways to put the article into practice. If you're in a management position, the next section, points 11-13 are also good approaches. However, the entire 36 page book is worth a careful read: https://archive.org/details/SimpleSabotageFieldManualStrategicServicesProvisional-nsia/page/n31/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/SimpleSabotageFieldManualStrateg...
- xivzgrev 3y ago
  The point is to take a pause to consider it. People are generally quick to throw things out or make commitments without thinking it through, see it all the time It sounds like your team considered it - we can’t see an obvious why, it’s much easier to replace, and if there’s a second order consequence we will learn
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    It can only become a sensible rule if you add an equivalent one for erecting the fence. Since nobody proposing it ever comes with a complete version, the only valid conclusion is that it's a sabotage practice. (And yeah, the previous paragraph is hyperbolic, but just by a bit.)
  - hedora 3y ago
    No, that is not the point. You are putting words into Chesterton's mouth. In his scenario, 100% of the people entrusted to road and fence maintenance considered keeping the fence and concluded it should be torn down. The people that installed it didn't think it was important enough to document its reason for existing. The only person advocating for its continued existence is a philosopher with no apparent expertise in fence maintenance, or any specific knowledge about the fence in question. He is demanding the proponents of tearing down the fence produce evidence from the known-lost historical record, and then to use that evidence (and only it) to litigate for removal of the fence.
cubefox 3y ago
A very similar thing applies to taboos in society. Various things were taboo in the past, often in various cultures, while recently people have made efforts to get rid of them. If we don't understand why these taboos existed in the first place, we may make a serious mistake.
- isnifailed 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - funcDropShadow 3y ago
    On the contrary, I am convinced many taboos that persisted for millenia had very practical reasons. The world has changed dramatically since the industrialization. Therefore many reasons don't apply anymore. But that doesn't change the value propositions of those taboos in the dark age or the stone age.
    - isnifailed 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 3y ago
        Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've already been doing it repeatedly with this account. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Religious flamewar, btw, is particularly off topic here and especially easy to avoid starting. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
        isnifailed 3y ago
        [flagged]
rafaquintanilha 3y ago
There is a lot of misinterpretation about this concept, which tends to reduce the problem to a "conservative vs progressive" debacle. A modern equivalent of his thought is the Lindy Effect [1], where every day a non-perishable thing survives (an idea, a technology, or in the original example, a Broadway show) adds another day in its expected survival. Simply put, the longer one thing lasts, the longer it is expected to last. The fence is his metaphorical way of saying that what may be holding a change (thus, a fence) may have its reason and its strength is positively correlated with its lifespan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
kqr 3y ago
I always liked the framing that Charles Darwin basically worked with the current forms of life as one huge Chesterton's wall: This is what species look like -- how the hell did they get that way and why? We can use his techniques to work with the little fences we find. I wrote some examples here: https://two-wrongs.com/lessons-from-evolution https://two-wrongs.com/lessons-from-evolution
bee_rider 3y ago
Chesterton will have to contend with our time honored tradition of tearing down fences. It might be the case that any particular fence is important, but being a culture that tends to tear-down fences has the second-order effect of being more adaptable. > Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. […the lamppost is taken down but it turns out the lamppost was good…] Poorly placed lampposts waste electricity and attract bugs (making the area worse off, and messing with their biology). They also have a maintenance cost. We should make a habit of tearing down lampposts. We should at least not maintain lampposts if there’s no articulated reason to have them there. The robed figure and the town share in the blame. The robed figure should, if he wants us to keep up the lamppost, be able to present a punctual argument to keep it. On the other hand, the town shouldn’t rely on some old robed figure to go around cryptically warning of the importance of lampposts, the town should have an office of public works that documents why the lamppost was made. Angry mobs are just a dumb way of making civic infrastructure decisions. By having a well-exercised, well-documented process for tearing down lampposts, the town will completely circumvent the problem! > Take the case of supposedly hierarchy-free companies. Someone came along and figured that having management and an overall hierarchy is an imperfect system. […] > Without a formal hierarchy, people often form an invisible one, which is far more complex to navigate and can lead to the most charismatic or domineering individual taking control, rather than the most qualified. […] > It is certainly admirable that hierarchy-free companies are taking the enormous risk inherent in breaking the mold and trying something new. However, their approach ignores Chesterton’s Fence and doesn’t address why hierarchies exist within companies in the first place. But there are tons of companies, we don’t have the choice of removing the fence or not. It is more like, we have a blueprint of a farm, and it includes a fence, which some suspect might be unnecessary, maybe even harmful. So let’s try a batch of farms without that fence. Then, document whether or not it worked out in the form of case-studies. Bam, the fence is no longer mysterious. These second order effects are often too hard to guess at from first principles. Let people try tearing them down, and see what happens. We don’t need fence protection services, we need a strong middle class and safety net so that people can try building that fenceless company, fail, and land on their feet. We see this in governance too, the US was set up to run 50 permutations of an experiment. Just have each state try their thing, and then observe that Massachusetts’s plan worked out best and copy them.
jimnotgym 3y ago
I had an interesting case of this recently. A predecessor seemed to have a series of processes, each of which seemed to be dealing with the errors created by the previous process. However, their notes made it clear that they thought that the mistakes had an external cause, blaming 'the system'. I felt that I could remove all of the steps and replace them with a correct first step. As an advocate of Chesterton's fence, I found it hard to simply accept that my predecessor had built a fence around a phantom, but it seems to be the case. By not finding any reason for the fence I kept hunting for the same phantom. This is the limitation of the model, the erector of the fence may have been wrong.
- V__ 3y ago
  Or the situation may have changed, making it impossible to find the original reason.
  - jimnotgym 3y ago
    It is a step at the end of a decade+ old system. My predecessor was only there for a year. I can't imagine how anything could have changed in this case. Upstream is a legacy product that runs without updates from the vendor. I have now from my predecessor when he left saying that he can't get anything changed at the vendor, because there is noone left there who knows how to change anything on this product. But I agree, as a generalisation the situation could have changed.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Seems like you applied the principle correctly here. When you first saw the fence, you did your best to find a reason for its presence. You only concluded that the fence had no purpose after you ruled out sensible alternatives. The principle is not that all fences necessarily have a purpose for their presence, it's that we should assume by default that any fence with an unknown purpose has or had a legitimate purpose at some point, until we are confident otherwise.
IshKebab 3y ago
This feels like one more in a long list of well-intentioned advice that ends up being used to justify bad practices. In this case, never refactoring. Others include: "premature optimisation" (never worry about performance) "Unix philosophy" (programs can't do more than one "thing"; where "thing" means whatever I want it to)
- apantel 3y ago
  The inverse of “premature optimization is the root of all evil” is “all bad performance is the result of sub-optimal implementation”.
- kstenerud 3y ago
  Asking people to take some time to investigate why something might be there before taking it out is justifying bad practices? How?
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Not at all what I was saying. I said it ends up being used to justify never refactoring. You'll get a situation where there's some code and nobody knows why it's there even after investigation. Can we remove it? No of course not - do you not know about Chesterton's fence??! There's actually a second reason why this advice is bad. It's basically victim blaming. The onus is on the person leaving a weird fence around to explain why it shouldn't be removed; not on the person finding a weird fence to have to guess a reason. You can say "well, bad people exist; you'd better assume there's a reason", but that's the same logic that leads to "bad people exist; don't wear attractive clothing". It's actually good advice if the only thing you care about is not being raped. But people quite reasonably care about other things (like enjoying life). Similarly Chesterton's fence is not bad advice if the only think you care about is not breaking your code. But people quite reasonably care about other things (like maintainability). This all makes it the worst kind of advice - technically correct but unwise.
    - kstenerud 3y ago
      Hmm, I take the exact opposite conclusion from what you've said. Don't take it out until you can demonstrate with high confidence that it won't break things in production. Lower maintainability is probably going to be less harmful than breakage (not to mention choosing the hills you're willing to die on). But then again it depends on the kind of company. Small and scrappy? Move fast and break things. Big and established? Be cautious.
studentrob 3y ago
Unpopular opinion: This conflicts with SV's "disrupt everything" mantra.
- kstenerud 3y ago
  Of course it does. But this is nothing new. Rich young people have been doing it for centuries. They make their short term gains that they congratulate their cleverness for, then suffer the consequences, and those that survive are the ones that re-learn the lessons of old. But on the other hand, it's sometimes the only way to get the old method out of the way so that new efficiencies can be gained with the technologies available today. Of course most will fail, but some will survive. Shoot first, ask questions later.
  - studentrob 3y ago
    Not arguing that it's a new thing, but there is always another way. Making the problem bigger is an interesting way to go about it. I will grant that doing so does expand the number of people impacted, and therefore the number of people interested in solving the problem is also bigger, as well, perhaps, as the apparent pay off for solving it. But ultimately, the solution is going to be something that could have been applied by the same people who expanded the size of the problem.
- eYrKEC2 3y ago
  Chesterton's Fence doesn't conflict with disruption -- it conflicts with uneducated disruption -- disruption that doesn't understand what it's even disrupting.
haswell 3y ago
On the subject of habit change, I think the author makes some interesting points, but there’s a failure mode lurking here. Sometimes unhealthy habits did form for a reason, but trying to understand those reasons isn’t always necessary or even helpful, and can seriously hold a person back from making positive life changes. Some habits are inherited through conditioning, and the original factors are long lost memories. I think the potential failure mode is a kind of Learned Helplessness. Here’s this thing that I do, and I don’t understand why no matter how hard I try. If I wait to change until I understand, I might never change. In these cases I think it’s most important to evaluate whether the habit is indeed something that I don’t want, and leave it at that while I go about making the effort to change it. Time and time again, I’ve found that the thing stopping me from doing the thing that I know I should want to do - is thinking about it too much. It’s possible to get trapped in thought processes that go nowhere because the habit itself doesn’t actually make rational sense. It’s often not until I’ve started to make a change that I realize why I was doing the old thing in the first place. When the fences are internal/psychological, I think there’s more latitude and just jumping in and trying new things can be incredibly useful. Understanding the function of unhealthy habits can absolutely be helpful, and habit replacement is most effective when you understand what you’re replacing, but don’t let a lack of understanding be a fence of its own.
upofadown 3y ago
Every successful open source project needs at least one participant that is willing to tirelessly point out why things are the way they are when others enthusiastically propose that they will change everything. Understanding an existing system is much harder than starting a new project. I have observed that this also applies to open standards as well...
dang 3y ago
Related: Chesterton's Fence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36234973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36234973 - June 2023 (1 comment) Chesterton's Fence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 - May 2022 (13 comments) Chesterton’s Fence (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 - Jan 2022 (142 comments) Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 - March 2020 (85 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 - Nov 2016 (26 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 - May 2016 (2 comments) Taking a Fence Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 - June 2015 (42 comments)
snagglemouth 3y ago
Very insightful. IMO this is exactly what leads to many engineering teams to want to re-write a system from the ground up instead of trying to fix existing systems. They underestimate the complexity and assume the problems with the current system were the result of poor skill quality, rather than confronting complexity and nuance that they also aren't expecting. So they promise a rewrite in a couple months, a couple months turns into 6, they get pressure from management to wrap it up and ship the new thing, so they rush and they do. Then that system sits there for a couple years until a new batch of engineers comes and argues that the system sucks and the answer is a rewrite from the ground up. Rinse and repeat.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jldugger 3y ago
I manage a highly complex AI service, and from time to time make config changes, and part of that duty is config cleanup -- removal and simplification. This is a necessary job in the past I have found copy-pasta where settings overrides for one environment are incorrectly copied to a similar one, leading to bad customer experience. As a personal policy, before submitting the cleanup PR, I go back in git history to when the config was introduced to understand why it was done the way it was, in case I am missing something. I call this "paying the Chesterton Tax." Usually its fine, though once in a while the original author gets annoyed at second guessing their work long after it was considered settled. One recent curious example was when I found a specific setting was applied for one out of a set of many similar subservices; when asking around for why only one of them got it when the current data suggested all subservices would benefit, a senior "architect" got annoyed with me asking questions. As best I can tell: the project was shelved after a few months when the architect solved the primary issue and got bored with it / delegated the polishing touches to a junior engineer who went on maternity leave shortly after. Which is a fine enough explanation for me to proceed, but nobody's eager to admit such social causes.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  > ...I go back in git history to when the config was introduced to understand why it was done the way it was, in case I am missing something. I call this "paying the Chesterton Tax. Maintaining code I wrote 15-20 years ago I find myself doing this with my own commits. I have to get back into the mental place I was when I wrote the original code and then it usually becomes clear if it was an expedient hack or a thought-out solution for a corner case. The worst feeling is "cleaning up" some code, discovering the edge case under which the "simple" case fails, then re-implementing the same solution.
  - safetytrick 3y ago
    Whenever I am in that expedient hack mode I've started commenting to explain my dilemma. My most valuable comments typically come out at that time. Such and such can't be done right now because of such and such. Often it doesn't matter if I ever resolve those comments or solve that problem I hacked through. The value comes from avoiding the rabbit hole next time.
TaurenHunter 3y ago
I've read this quote recently of GK Chesterton sounding like a revolutionary as opposed to conservative. From Orthodoxy: "All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post."
projektfu 3y ago
Having worked for a "flat" organization that grew past 200 employees (cf. Dunbar's number) and was on its way to a thousand, hierarchy did indeed form and it was often like a shogunate, although without the peasants. But orgs with clear org charts often have hidden political hierarchies as well. It would be nice if you could count on your supervisor and expect your supervisees to do as you ask, but a formal hierarchy is only effective if it's actually enforced and other hierarchies are suppressed. In practice, the formal hierarchy can become the tool used to enforce the goals of the alternative hierarchy. Chesterton's fence makes sense in a deliberative process but old fences are often just in the way. In a lot of ways, the default position on this front is mere obstructionism.
mmaunder 3y ago
Another approach is to temporarily remove the fence and the gate and monitor the effects. This is far less work than doing an organization-wide audit to first determine why the fence and gate exist. Chesterton's Fence leads to the ossification of large organizations. Determining why the fence exists can be so much work that it's easier to just leave it be and move on or go and work somewhere nimble.
- speed_spread 3y ago
  Even better: instrument the fence without removing it. You get the same knowledge without the chance of breaking stuff. If it's code, put it under a anti-feature flag.
- markild 3y ago
  This all depends on the risks involved. Can I handle it failing, sure, go ahead. There are so many variables that could be involved, not uncommonly including temporal ones. I don't think simply monitoring for a period and calling it healthy is of any guarantee. I do very much think you are right though. Being too risk averse will grind everything to a halt. Your whole process has to be designed around avoid these issues. Allow failures, fix continuously and _quickly_, don't repeat mistakes.
- ip26 3y ago
  It may be that the fence is there for a catastrophic black swan, so this method may not be suitable. The most interesting remedy is continually developing domain experts in both roads and fences within the organization who can reliably intuit the likely purposes of the fence when they come upon it.
- teucris 3y ago
  Ossification of systems is mostly due to zero order thinking - a paucity of examination into the purpose of established systems. If someone with the agency to change a system gets to 2nd order thinking in their decision making, that is a blessing to everyone.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  Chesterton's fence might not be ideal for a fast moving startup. Perhaps it is a better strategy to question the wisdom of anything that existed only for a few month/years. But if we are talking about society-wide or nation-wide changes, Chesterton's fence seams to be quite relevant. It is rather easy to destroy a society, but it is so damn hard to create a prospering society.
williamcotton 3y ago
The essay is called “The Drift from Domesticity”. If you’d rather not be downvoted in this discussion my recommendation would be to read the damn thing!
DaveFlater 3y ago
The purpose of Chesterton's Fence is what it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
renewiltord 3y ago
Indeed, and here[0] I apply Chesterton's Fence to the issue of widespread unlicensed operation of gasoline lines: > Gasoline is a dangerous and volatile substance. There are numerous incidents of people being harmed by incorrect use - not just the operator but also bystanders - and millions of dollars in facility damage occurring due to insufficient training. There is a reason why Oregon requires Class C UST Operators and above have training regarding emergencies. We should require more training, not less. Industrial substances need high standards. Within this calendar year we have been reminded of this repeatedly: train fires and derailment, the OceanGate submarine, the recent train bridge collapse carrying hazardous materials. >Gasoline can be fatal if consumed, is a known carcinogen, and is harmful to aquatic life so it needs regulation. Here is a safety sheet to warn you of the dangers https://lasierra.edu/fileadmin/documents/risk/safety/safety-data-sheet-training-form.pdf https://lasierra.edu/fileadmin/documents/risk/safety/safety-... >It's important that we treat this substance with respect. Licensed operators should be the only ones handling it routinely. But of course, there's no surprise that Big Oil would like to socialize the risks and privatize the profits, speaking nothing of the job losses this will cause. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481984
cjbgkagh 3y ago
It seems that many here are missing the point. Chesterton's fence is about the laziness of reformers that fail to understand at a minimum why a fence (rule) was placed there in the first place. It is noted that all humans are lazy and only some are reformers. The core problem is that society maintains itself so if you break society it's very hard / impossible to fix because the broken thing must now fix itself and sometimes it can't. At best there is another functioning society waiting in the wings that can take over at worst it'll take a very long time for civilization to relearn what it once knew. If the rule was and remains effective then the negative consequences for why the rule was there will be absent and if the reason is forgotten then the negative consequences would have been absent for a long time. The more effective the rule the more absent the data. This makes it a bad idea to use absence of evidence in support of removing rules, especially given such a heuristic would support removing the most effective and long standing rules first - which is a terrible idea. There can be enormous lags and noise in consequences. The negative consequences may not be felt for generations, long after the reformers have died, not only why the fence was placed was forgotten but why the fence was later removed is also forgotten. Cultural behaviours have evolved alongside people and evolutionary pushes are weak and noisy but given enough time can yield pretty good results. I think a core part of traditionalism is that wisdom that is built up over generations can be greater than what a single smart person can learn in their lifetime, and much more than what average people will on average learn in their lifetimes. Trying to optimize society on what a single person can learn in their lifetime would be like doing machine learning using at most a single epoch.
jofla_net 3y ago
I guess this could fall under Big Picture vs. Detail Oriented thinking.
joe_the_user 3y ago
Second-order thinking is the practice of not just considering the consequences of our decisions but also the consequences of those consequences. Everyone can manage first-order thinking, which is just considering the immediate anticipated result of an action. It’s simple and quick, usually requiring little effort. By comparison, second-order thinking is more complex and time-consuming. This seems like an arbitrary distinction. Just any consequence is the product of a chain of events. Throw a rock to break a window? That can be roughly described by the sequence "flex muscles, aim at window, impart velocity to rock, hit window, break window" so you could say really simple things are "second order thinking". Sure, the point "there's a benefit to thinking ahead" remains but the article seems to dress up simple things as deep epiphanies. Edit: Also, Chesterton's fence itself is a deeper point. It's the "second order thinking" buzzterm that seems misplaced here.
- alphazard 3y ago
  > This seems like an arbitrary distinction. Yes, it's like a dumb person trying to rationalize why a smart person made better decisions. The actual answer is that they considered more consequences, predicted consequences more accurately, and further into the future. But a dumb person not considering the infinitude of that situation might say "ahh it was the thing after the thing, if I just predicted one more step, I would have made the same decision". When a person or thing is more intelligent than you, there's no way to distinguish one step ahead from n steps ahead. All you know is that they are making higher quality decisions. If you're doing second order thinking, you will be outsmarted by people doing third order thinking, and so on.
dav1ch 3y ago
I think the Chesterton's fence parable falls short of pointing out the logical conclusion. The fence should have a plaque on it explaining exactly why it was erected and giving the reader enough information to decide if it's still necessary. And when we build new things, we should also leave a trail of explanations for our decisions.
- RaftPeople 3y ago
  Very good point.
eviks 3y ago
Examples as practically silly as the principle itself, which can't help you decide since inaction also has risks and second order and other effects (cue historical example of a natural disaster because some fences stood in the way) > The original employees who helped the company grow initially notice the change and realize things are not how they were before. Of course they can afford to buy their own sodas. But suddenly having to is just an unmissable sign that the company’s culture is changing, which can be enough to prompt the most talented people to jump ship. Attempting to save a relatively small amount of money ends up costing far more in employee turnover. The new CFO didn’t consider why that fence was up in the first place. What if the change the original employees notice is the hiring of the new CFO??? Should the entrepreneur not have done that? Has he even thought of that? In what world can you be so precise in you understanding of any organization to tie some stupid snacks to turnover in your group of most talented people?
Jolter 3y ago
That’s certainly a bunch of words. I think they could have made their point in an article half as long.
leobg 3y ago
> the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” Criminal law often does the opposite. There seems to be the illusion that “to understand all is to forgive all”. And so prosecutors and judges often feel like they should not understand the perpetrator too much, lest they cannot punish him. It’s a remnant of “guilt” being defined as “acting in one way when you could have acted in another”. So it becomes imperative to prove that the perpetrator really “could have“ acted in another way, but inexplicably chose not to. In other words, the people who put up the fence must have been stupid (ideally not human) for us to be able to say that it should be taken down.
perilunar 3y ago
Those seeking to dismiss Chesterton's Fence should find out why Chesterton's Fence was created in the first place. - - - Fences are rarely built for no reason at all; the question is not "is this fence necessary?" but "is this fence still necessary?"

205 points by ensocode 3y ago

Well, sometimes you have to tear down the fences to bring about meaningful change based on first principles. Otherwise, we are only empowering the gatekeepers who have all the incentive in the world to persist with the status quo. See also: https://a16z.com/politics-and-the-future/ https://a16z.com/politics-and-the-future/

trescenzi 3y ago
The point isn’t to never tear down the fence the point is that you should wait to do so until you know why it’s there.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  I think you read past "sometimes" and "based on first principles".
- ludocode 3y ago
  The reason the fence exists should be written down, ideally as close to the fence as possible. It needs to be easy to determine why the fence is there. If someone puts up a fence without explaining why it's there, they deserve to have their fence torn down.
  - mistercow 3y ago
    I don’t understand this word “deserve”. It’s not about who gets the blame when the coyotes show up at night and kill all your chickens. It’s about making sure you don’t tear down fences that are, unbeknownst to you, protecting your chickens.
  - kstenerud 3y ago
    > If someone puts up a fence without explaining why it's there, they deserve to have their fence torn down. Uhh no, because your punishment rampage will be putting other things in danger. First, understand why the fence is there. THEN tear it down if it makes sense to do so. That's the whole point, and it was thoroughly explained in the article.
hardkorebob 3y ago
[dead]
jmvoodoo 3y ago
Tearing down fences without pausing long enough to at least figure out why they are there is how you get gatekeepers to begin with. Its entirely possible that the fence was put there for an extremely valid reason, or that you must mitigate a separate issue before removing it. This assessment can be completed using a first principles approach, and the fence can be removed afterwards. Removing the fence then learning why it was there can be a painful experience for you and those around you.
mcswell 3y ago
This in no way contradicts Chesterton's point, in fact he explicitly brings it up. He is not calling for an end to fence demolition, he is rather calling for common sense investigation into why the fence is there.

skybrian 3y ago

Interpreted properly, it's an argument in favor of curiosity. There's always a temptation to cut corners, to react without investigating. In casual conversation, nobody has to do homework, but you should be wary of arguments you can make off the top of your head. Ironically, bringing up Chesterton's fence and not doing any research is a rather common move. But I try to value curiosity even when I'm not actually curious enough to do research at the moment.

reedf1 3y ago

The issue with Chesterton's fence is something of a meta-problem in conversation and politics in general. It is the ultimate thought terminating cliche. If you accept it as given it allows you to build walls faster than you can investigate their removal, and by the time you have investigated it, they are building walls around your original position. It's an argument for inertia, fine in its basis, but over applied it becomes "Chesterton's big fucking infinite barrier", instead of a simple fence.

paulsutter 3y ago
Nonsense. Chesterton’s fence creates a clear criteria for eliminating fences and other accumulated junk
- api 3y ago
  What if you investigate why the fence is there and find nothing or a list of contradictory or nonsensical reasons? This is incredibly common in real life. If you must understand something to remove it you do end up with a lot of things that can never be removed. It’s a big reason that laws and regulations build forever.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    At that point, you give up on the search for understanding and must evaluate the fence given the information that you do have and can make sense of. It's really not any different from any other decision making process. The principle exists to encourage critical thinking, not to obstruct progress.
    - api 3y ago
      I actually like the principle as a tool for critical thinking, but like the precautionary principle which can also be a tool for critical thinking it has a tendency in practice to be converted into a thought-stopping and action-stopping cliche.
  - latency-guy2 3y ago

hedora 3y ago

When I first heard this, it came up in an engineering discussion, where pulling out + replacing the thing was much lower cost than figuring out exactly what the person that implemented it was smoking. Since the cost of removing + reinstalling a gate is also much lower than the cost of Chesterson's proposed historical wankery, I assumed I was getting an all clear to do my job. I've also encountered this sort of wrong-think when trying to deal with planning commissions in the SF Bay Area. Anyway, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual goes into more detail if you'd like to implement Chesterson's Fence. It worked well in WWII, so I guess they were on to something. Page 28, points 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are all good generaly ways to put the article into practice. If you're in a management position, the next section, points 11-13 are also good approaches. However, the entire 36 page book is worth a careful read: https://archive.org/details/SimpleSabotageFieldManualStrategicServicesProvisional-nsia/page/n31/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/SimpleSabotageFieldManualStrateg...

xivzgrev 3y ago
The point is to take a pause to consider it. People are generally quick to throw things out or make commitments without thinking it through, see it all the time It sounds like your team considered it - we can’t see an obvious why, it’s much easier to replace, and if there’s a second order consequence we will learn
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  It can only become a sensible rule if you add an equivalent one for erecting the fence. Since nobody proposing it ever comes with a complete version, the only valid conclusion is that it's a sabotage practice. (And yeah, the previous paragraph is hyperbolic, but just by a bit.)
- hedora 3y ago
  No, that is not the point. You are putting words into Chesterton's mouth. In his scenario, 100% of the people entrusted to road and fence maintenance considered keeping the fence and concluded it should be torn down. The people that installed it didn't think it was important enough to document its reason for existing. The only person advocating for its continued existence is a philosopher with no apparent expertise in fence maintenance, or any specific knowledge about the fence in question. He is demanding the proponents of tearing down the fence produce evidence from the known-lost historical record, and then to use that evidence (and only it) to litigate for removal of the fence.

cubefox 3y ago

A very similar thing applies to taboos in society. Various things were taboo in the past, often in various cultures, while recently people have made efforts to get rid of them. If we don't understand why these taboos existed in the first place, we may make a serious mistake.

isnifailed 3y ago
[flagged]
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  On the contrary, I am convinced many taboos that persisted for millenia had very practical reasons. The world has changed dramatically since the industrialization. Therefore many reasons don't apply anymore. But that doesn't change the value propositions of those taboos in the dark age or the stone age.
  - isnifailed 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 3y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've already been doing it repeatedly with this account. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Religious flamewar, btw, is particularly off topic here and especially easy to avoid starting. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
      - isnifailed 3y ago
        [flagged]

rafaquintanilha 3y ago

There is a lot of misinterpretation about this concept, which tends to reduce the problem to a "conservative vs progressive" debacle. A modern equivalent of his thought is the Lindy Effect [1], where every day a non-perishable thing survives (an idea, a technology, or in the original example, a Broadway show) adds another day in its expected survival. Simply put, the longer one thing lasts, the longer it is expected to last. The fence is his metaphorical way of saying that what may be holding a change (thus, a fence) may have its reason and its strength is positively correlated with its lifespan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

kqr 3y ago

I always liked the framing that Charles Darwin basically worked with the current forms of life as one huge Chesterton's wall: This is what species look like -- how the hell did they get that way and why? We can use his techniques to work with the little fences we find. I wrote some examples here: https://two-wrongs.com/lessons-from-evolution https://two-wrongs.com/lessons-from-evolution

bee_rider 3y ago

Chesterton will have to contend with our time honored tradition of tearing down fences. It might be the case that any particular fence is important, but being a culture that tends to tear-down fences has the second-order effect of being more adaptable. > Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. […the lamppost is taken down but it turns out the lamppost was good…] Poorly placed lampposts waste electricity and attract bugs (making the area worse off, and messing with their biology). They also have a maintenance cost. We should make a habit of tearing down lampposts. We should at least not maintain lampposts if there’s no articulated reason to have them there. The robed figure and the town share in the blame. The robed figure should, if he wants us to keep up the lamppost, be able to present a punctual argument to keep it. On the other hand, the town shouldn’t rely on some old robed figure to go around cryptically warning of the importance of lampposts, the town should have an office of public works that documents why the lamppost was made. Angry mobs are just a dumb way of making civic infrastructure decisions. By having a well-exercised, well-documented process for tearing down lampposts, the town will completely circumvent the problem! > Take the case of supposedly hierarchy-free companies. Someone came along and figured that having management and an overall hierarchy is an imperfect system. […] > Without a formal hierarchy, people often form an invisible one, which is far more complex to navigate and can lead to the most charismatic or domineering individual taking control, rather than the most qualified. […] > It is certainly admirable that hierarchy-free companies are taking the enormous risk inherent in breaking the mold and trying something new. However, their approach ignores Chesterton’s Fence and doesn’t address why hierarchies exist within companies in the first place. But there are tons of companies, we don’t have the choice of removing the fence or not. It is more like, we have a blueprint of a farm, and it includes a fence, which some suspect might be unnecessary, maybe even harmful. So let’s try a batch of farms without that fence. Then, document whether or not it worked out in the form of case-studies. Bam, the fence is no longer mysterious. These second order effects are often too hard to guess at from first principles. Let people try tearing them down, and see what happens. We don’t need fence protection services, we need a strong middle class and safety net so that people can try building that fenceless company, fail, and land on their feet. We see this in governance too, the US was set up to run 50 permutations of an experiment. Just have each state try their thing, and then observe that Massachusetts’s plan worked out best and copy them.

jimnotgym 3y ago

I had an interesting case of this recently. A predecessor seemed to have a series of processes, each of which seemed to be dealing with the errors created by the previous process. However, their notes made it clear that they thought that the mistakes had an external cause, blaming 'the system'. I felt that I could remove all of the steps and replace them with a correct first step. As an advocate of Chesterton's fence, I found it hard to simply accept that my predecessor had built a fence around a phantom, but it seems to be the case. By not finding any reason for the fence I kept hunting for the same phantom. This is the limitation of the model, the erector of the fence may have been wrong.

V__ 3y ago
Or the situation may have changed, making it impossible to find the original reason.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  It is a step at the end of a decade+ old system. My predecessor was only there for a year. I can't imagine how anything could have changed in this case. Upstream is a legacy product that runs without updates from the vendor. I have now from my predecessor when he left saying that he can't get anything changed at the vendor, because there is noone left there who knows how to change anything on this product. But I agree, as a generalisation the situation could have changed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nerdponx 3y ago
Seems like you applied the principle correctly here. When you first saw the fence, you did your best to find a reason for its presence. You only concluded that the fence had no purpose after you ruled out sensible alternatives. The principle is not that all fences necessarily have a purpose for their presence, it's that we should assume by default that any fence with an unknown purpose has or had a legitimate purpose at some point, until we are confident otherwise.

IshKebab 3y ago

This feels like one more in a long list of well-intentioned advice that ends up being used to justify bad practices. In this case, never refactoring. Others include: "premature optimisation" (never worry about performance) "Unix philosophy" (programs can't do more than one "thing"; where "thing" means whatever I want it to)

apantel 3y ago
The inverse of “premature optimization is the root of all evil” is “all bad performance is the result of sub-optimal implementation”.
kstenerud 3y ago
Asking people to take some time to investigate why something might be there before taking it out is justifying bad practices? How?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Not at all what I was saying. I said it ends up being used to justify never refactoring. You'll get a situation where there's some code and nobody knows why it's there even after investigation. Can we remove it? No of course not - do you not know about Chesterton's fence??! There's actually a second reason why this advice is bad. It's basically victim blaming. The onus is on the person leaving a weird fence around to explain why it shouldn't be removed; not on the person finding a weird fence to have to guess a reason. You can say "well, bad people exist; you'd better assume there's a reason", but that's the same logic that leads to "bad people exist; don't wear attractive clothing". It's actually good advice if the only thing you care about is not being raped. But people quite reasonably care about other things (like enjoying life). Similarly Chesterton's fence is not bad advice if the only think you care about is not breaking your code. But people quite reasonably care about other things (like maintainability). This all makes it the worst kind of advice - technically correct but unwise.
  - kstenerud 3y ago
    Hmm, I take the exact opposite conclusion from what you've said. Don't take it out until you can demonstrate with high confidence that it won't break things in production. Lower maintainability is probably going to be less harmful than breakage (not to mention choosing the hills you're willing to die on). But then again it depends on the kind of company. Small and scrappy? Move fast and break things. Big and established? Be cautious.

studentrob 3y ago

Unpopular opinion: This conflicts with SV's "disrupt everything" mantra.

kstenerud 3y ago
Of course it does. But this is nothing new. Rich young people have been doing it for centuries. They make their short term gains that they congratulate their cleverness for, then suffer the consequences, and those that survive are the ones that re-learn the lessons of old. But on the other hand, it's sometimes the only way to get the old method out of the way so that new efficiencies can be gained with the technologies available today. Of course most will fail, but some will survive. Shoot first, ask questions later.
- studentrob 3y ago
  Not arguing that it's a new thing, but there is always another way. Making the problem bigger is an interesting way to go about it. I will grant that doing so does expand the number of people impacted, and therefore the number of people interested in solving the problem is also bigger, as well, perhaps, as the apparent pay off for solving it. But ultimately, the solution is going to be something that could have been applied by the same people who expanded the size of the problem.
eYrKEC2 3y ago
Chesterton's Fence doesn't conflict with disruption -- it conflicts with uneducated disruption -- disruption that doesn't understand what it's even disrupting.

haswell 3y ago

On the subject of habit change, I think the author makes some interesting points, but there’s a failure mode lurking here. Sometimes unhealthy habits did form for a reason, but trying to understand those reasons isn’t always necessary or even helpful, and can seriously hold a person back from making positive life changes. Some habits are inherited through conditioning, and the original factors are long lost memories. I think the potential failure mode is a kind of Learned Helplessness. Here’s this thing that I do, and I don’t understand why no matter how hard I try. If I wait to change until I understand, I might never change. In these cases I think it’s most important to evaluate whether the habit is indeed something that I don’t want, and leave it at that while I go about making the effort to change it. Time and time again, I’ve found that the thing stopping me from doing the thing that I know I should want to do - is thinking about it too much. It’s possible to get trapped in thought processes that go nowhere because the habit itself doesn’t actually make rational sense. It’s often not until I’ve started to make a change that I realize why I was doing the old thing in the first place. When the fences are internal/psychological, I think there’s more latitude and just jumping in and trying new things can be incredibly useful. Understanding the function of unhealthy habits can absolutely be helpful, and habit replacement is most effective when you understand what you’re replacing, but don’t let a lack of understanding be a fence of its own.

upofadown 3y ago

Every successful open source project needs at least one participant that is willing to tirelessly point out why things are the way they are when others enthusiastically propose that they will change everything. Understanding an existing system is much harder than starting a new project. I have observed that this also applies to open standards as well...

dang 3y ago

Related: Chesterton's Fence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36234973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36234973 - June 2023 (1 comment) Chesterton's Fence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 - May 2022 (13 comments) Chesterton’s Fence (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 - Jan 2022 (142 comments) Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 - March 2020 (85 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 - Nov 2016 (26 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 - May 2016 (2 comments) Taking a Fence Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 - June 2015 (42 comments)

snagglemouth 3y ago

Very insightful. IMO this is exactly what leads to many engineering teams to want to re-write a system from the ground up instead of trying to fix existing systems. They underestimate the complexity and assume the problems with the current system were the result of poor skill quality, rather than confronting complexity and nuance that they also aren't expecting. So they promise a rewrite in a couple months, a couple months turns into 6, they get pressure from management to wrap it up and ship the new thing, so they rush and they do. Then that system sits there for a couple years until a new batch of engineers comes and argues that the system sucks and the answer is a rewrite from the ground up. Rinse and repeat.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jldugger 3y ago

I manage a highly complex AI service, and from time to time make config changes, and part of that duty is config cleanup -- removal and simplification. This is a necessary job in the past I have found copy-pasta where settings overrides for one environment are incorrectly copied to a similar one, leading to bad customer experience. As a personal policy, before submitting the cleanup PR, I go back in git history to when the config was introduced to understand why it was done the way it was, in case I am missing something. I call this "paying the Chesterton Tax." Usually its fine, though once in a while the original author gets annoyed at second guessing their work long after it was considered settled. One recent curious example was when I found a specific setting was applied for one out of a set of many similar subservices; when asking around for why only one of them got it when the current data suggested all subservices would benefit, a senior "architect" got annoyed with me asking questions. As best I can tell: the project was shelved after a few months when the architect solved the primary issue and got bored with it / delegated the polishing touches to a junior engineer who went on maternity leave shortly after. Which is a fine enough explanation for me to proceed, but nobody's eager to admit such social causes.

EvanAnderson 3y ago
> ...I go back in git history to when the config was introduced to understand why it was done the way it was, in case I am missing something. I call this "paying the Chesterton Tax. Maintaining code I wrote 15-20 years ago I find myself doing this with my own commits. I have to get back into the mental place I was when I wrote the original code and then it usually becomes clear if it was an expedient hack or a thought-out solution for a corner case. The worst feeling is "cleaning up" some code, discovering the edge case under which the "simple" case fails, then re-implementing the same solution.
- safetytrick 3y ago
  Whenever I am in that expedient hack mode I've started commenting to explain my dilemma. My most valuable comments typically come out at that time. Such and such can't be done right now because of such and such. Often it doesn't matter if I ever resolve those comments or solve that problem I hacked through. The value comes from avoiding the rabbit hole next time.

TaurenHunter 3y ago

I've read this quote recently of GK Chesterton sounding like a revolutionary as opposed to conservative. From Orthodoxy: "All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post."

projektfu 3y ago

Having worked for a "flat" organization that grew past 200 employees (cf. Dunbar's number) and was on its way to a thousand, hierarchy did indeed form and it was often like a shogunate, although without the peasants. But orgs with clear org charts often have hidden political hierarchies as well. It would be nice if you could count on your supervisor and expect your supervisees to do as you ask, but a formal hierarchy is only effective if it's actually enforced and other hierarchies are suppressed. In practice, the formal hierarchy can become the tool used to enforce the goals of the alternative hierarchy. Chesterton's fence makes sense in a deliberative process but old fences are often just in the way. In a lot of ways, the default position on this front is mere obstructionism.

mmaunder 3y ago

Another approach is to temporarily remove the fence and the gate and monitor the effects. This is far less work than doing an organization-wide audit to first determine why the fence and gate exist. Chesterton's Fence leads to the ossification of large organizations. Determining why the fence exists can be so much work that it's easier to just leave it be and move on or go and work somewhere nimble.

speed_spread 3y ago
Even better: instrument the fence without removing it. You get the same knowledge without the chance of breaking stuff. If it's code, put it under a anti-feature flag.
markild 3y ago
This all depends on the risks involved. Can I handle it failing, sure, go ahead. There are so many variables that could be involved, not uncommonly including temporal ones. I don't think simply monitoring for a period and calling it healthy is of any guarantee. I do very much think you are right though. Being too risk averse will grind everything to a halt. Your whole process has to be designed around avoid these issues. Allow failures, fix continuously and _quickly_, don't repeat mistakes.
ip26 3y ago
It may be that the fence is there for a catastrophic black swan, so this method may not be suitable. The most interesting remedy is continually developing domain experts in both roads and fences within the organization who can reliably intuit the likely purposes of the fence when they come upon it.
teucris 3y ago
Ossification of systems is mostly due to zero order thinking - a paucity of examination into the purpose of established systems. If someone with the agency to change a system gets to 2nd order thinking in their decision making, that is a blessing to everyone.
funcDropShadow 3y ago
Chesterton's fence might not be ideal for a fast moving startup. Perhaps it is a better strategy to question the wisdom of anything that existed only for a few month/years. But if we are talking about society-wide or nation-wide changes, Chesterton's fence seams to be quite relevant. It is rather easy to destroy a society, but it is so damn hard to create a prospering society.

williamcotton 3y ago

The essay is called “The Drift from Domesticity”. If you’d rather not be downvoted in this discussion my recommendation would be to read the damn thing!

DaveFlater 3y ago

The purpose of Chesterton's Fence is what it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

renewiltord 3y ago

Indeed, and here[0] I apply Chesterton's Fence to the issue of widespread unlicensed operation of gasoline lines: > Gasoline is a dangerous and volatile substance. There are numerous incidents of people being harmed by incorrect use - not just the operator but also bystanders - and millions of dollars in facility damage occurring due to insufficient training. There is a reason why Oregon requires Class C UST Operators and above have training regarding emergencies. We should require more training, not less. Industrial substances need high standards. Within this calendar year we have been reminded of this repeatedly: train fires and derailment, the OceanGate submarine, the recent train bridge collapse carrying hazardous materials. >Gasoline can be fatal if consumed, is a known carcinogen, and is harmful to aquatic life so it needs regulation. Here is a safety sheet to warn you of the dangers https://lasierra.edu/fileadmin/documents/risk/safety/safety-data-sheet-training-form.pdf https://lasierra.edu/fileadmin/documents/risk/safety/safety-... >It's important that we treat this substance with respect. Licensed operators should be the only ones handling it routinely. But of course, there's no surprise that Big Oil would like to socialize the risks and privatize the profits, speaking nothing of the job losses this will cause. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481984

cjbgkagh 3y ago

It seems that many here are missing the point. Chesterton's fence is about the laziness of reformers that fail to understand at a minimum why a fence (rule) was placed there in the first place. It is noted that all humans are lazy and only some are reformers. The core problem is that society maintains itself so if you break society it's very hard / impossible to fix because the broken thing must now fix itself and sometimes it can't. At best there is another functioning society waiting in the wings that can take over at worst it'll take a very long time for civilization to relearn what it once knew. If the rule was and remains effective then the negative consequences for why the rule was there will be absent and if the reason is forgotten then the negative consequences would have been absent for a long time. The more effective the rule the more absent the data. This makes it a bad idea to use absence of evidence in support of removing rules, especially given such a heuristic would support removing the most effective and long standing rules first - which is a terrible idea. There can be enormous lags and noise in consequences. The negative consequences may not be felt for generations, long after the reformers have died, not only why the fence was placed was forgotten but why the fence was later removed is also forgotten. Cultural behaviours have evolved alongside people and evolutionary pushes are weak and noisy but given enough time can yield pretty good results. I think a core part of traditionalism is that wisdom that is built up over generations can be greater than what a single smart person can learn in their lifetime, and much more than what average people will on average learn in their lifetimes. Trying to optimize society on what a single person can learn in their lifetime would be like doing machine learning using at most a single epoch.

jofla_net 3y ago

I guess this could fall under Big Picture vs. Detail Oriented thinking.

joe_the_user 3y ago

Second-order thinking is the practice of not just considering the consequences of our decisions but also the consequences of those consequences. Everyone can manage first-order thinking, which is just considering the immediate anticipated result of an action. It’s simple and quick, usually requiring little effort. By comparison, second-order thinking is more complex and time-consuming. This seems like an arbitrary distinction. Just any consequence is the product of a chain of events. Throw a rock to break a window? That can be roughly described by the sequence "flex muscles, aim at window, impart velocity to rock, hit window, break window" so you could say really simple things are "second order thinking". Sure, the point "there's a benefit to thinking ahead" remains but the article seems to dress up simple things as deep epiphanies. Edit: Also, Chesterton's fence itself is a deeper point. It's the "second order thinking" buzzterm that seems misplaced here.

alphazard 3y ago
> This seems like an arbitrary distinction. Yes, it's like a dumb person trying to rationalize why a smart person made better decisions. The actual answer is that they considered more consequences, predicted consequences more accurately, and further into the future. But a dumb person not considering the infinitude of that situation might say "ahh it was the thing after the thing, if I just predicted one more step, I would have made the same decision". When a person or thing is more intelligent than you, there's no way to distinguish one step ahead from n steps ahead. All you know is that they are making higher quality decisions. If you're doing second order thinking, you will be outsmarted by people doing third order thinking, and so on.

dav1ch 3y ago

I think the Chesterton's fence parable falls short of pointing out the logical conclusion. The fence should have a plaque on it explaining exactly why it was erected and giving the reader enough information to decide if it's still necessary. And when we build new things, we should also leave a trail of explanations for our decisions.

RaftPeople 3y ago
Very good point.

eviks 3y ago

Examples as practically silly as the principle itself, which can't help you decide since inaction also has risks and second order and other effects (cue historical example of a natural disaster because some fences stood in the way) > The original employees who helped the company grow initially notice the change and realize things are not how they were before. Of course they can afford to buy their own sodas. But suddenly having to is just an unmissable sign that the company’s culture is changing, which can be enough to prompt the most talented people to jump ship. Attempting to save a relatively small amount of money ends up costing far more in employee turnover. The new CFO didn’t consider why that fence was up in the first place. What if the change the original employees notice is the hiring of the new CFO??? Should the entrepreneur not have done that? Has he even thought of that? In what world can you be so precise in you understanding of any organization to tie some stupid snacks to turnover in your group of most talented people?

Jolter 3y ago

That’s certainly a bunch of words. I think they could have made their point in an article half as long.

leobg 3y ago

> the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” Criminal law often does the opposite. There seems to be the illusion that “to understand all is to forgive all”. And so prosecutors and judges often feel like they should not understand the perpetrator too much, lest they cannot punish him. It’s a remnant of “guilt” being defined as “acting in one way when you could have acted in another”. So it becomes imperative to prove that the perpetrator really “could have“ acted in another way, but inexplicably chose not to. In other words, the people who put up the fence must have been stupid (ideally not human) for us to be able to say that it should be taken down.

perilunar 3y ago

Those seeking to dismiss Chesterton's Fence should find out why Chesterton's Fence was created in the first place. - - - Fences are rarely built for no reason at all; the question is not "is this fence necessary?" but "is this fence still necessary?"