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Comment by mfringel | Hacker News Reader

The primary issue with Chesterton's long-revered fence is that puts the entire burden of proof on the person who desires to take it down.

What if the fence was put there for purposes of adverse posession? Those who would defend the fence, absent any documentation, would ascribe the most noble uses to it, as their desire is to maintain the status quo, or at least the status pro se. They would, to use Chesterton's term, 'go gaily up to it' and defend it with their lives, saying "clearly this fence always existed, and thus should always be."

Chesterton's 'modern reformer' is a strawman as bald-faced as any, and it's all too easy to use "Chesterton's Fence" as a defense of mindless conservatism.

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>What if the fence was put there for purposes of adverse posession?

Answering that question is the very reason for pausing to investigate its purpose. Questioning past purposes before reforming is not equivalent to "defending the fence absent any documentation." Your own characterization of this "mindless conservatism" is itself a straw-man of the behavior Chesterton's fence recommends.

The alternative is an endless cycle of deconstruction that impedes any progress, as every possible step or rational for it brings a possible mask to power. The Nietzschean project, though fun, has produced nothing besides criticism, and would never succeed in taking any kind of action about said fence.

> Answering that question is the very reason for pausing to investigate its purpose.

So you answer the question and determine the fence is there because of adverse possession. And then everyone else you present your findings to says, "that's not a good reason, so clearly you're not using Chesterton's fence and we shouldn't make any changes." See the issue?

Chesterton's fence and/or the Principle of Charity only have the potential to lead you to a good answer if the other party is putting in a good faith effort. But as soon as that's not the case, these cognitive rules of thumb basically become tools of oppression. And if you've ever watched congressional testimony where the parties are forbidden by rule from criticizing each other, it's easy to see that lots of people purposely take advantage of this.

Also, in the context of business the PoC means assuming that people are acting in their self interest, but in the context of politics or whatever it means assuming that people aren't acting in their self interest. As a rule of thumb for improving your thinking then these sorts of ideas probably make sense, especially for things like entrepreneurship or software engineering, but at an epistemological level the phrase "not even wrong" comes to mind.

> So you answer the question and determine the fence is there because of adverse possession. And then everyone else you present your findings to says, "that's not a good reason, so clearly you're not using Chesterton's fence and we shouldn't make any changes." See the issue?

I must confess that I don't. I guess this depends on why you are doing this: if your goal is to convince other people that you should remove the gate, you must accept that it is a possibility that other people may not find your argument convincing. That is their prerogative, right? If you need their permission to remove the gate, there is nothing you can really do without convincing them anyway.

If, however, you are doing this for your own benefit, it may help you understand the system and propose/tweak your own solution to the problem better.

Or maybe I don't understand what you are saying here.

> the entire burden of proof on the person who desires to take it down.

That's exactly the point though - If a person can successfully defend the existence of a fence against your insistence for change, they've not demonstrated that the fence is required beyond all doubt, they've demonstrated that YOU are not capable enough to be the one that changes it, since your knowledge of the domain can't even defeat a "silly" insistence of maintaining the status quo.

Isn't it just a nice little parable intended to clearly transmit the idea?

Parables are the lowest form of argument. A valuable principle should be stated directly. It is absolutely worth making the caveats explicit, because there will always be people who try to enforce the exact letter of the principle.

Implicit in my comment was that it would be strange/tiresome to present it as a solid argument.

I more or less don't believe that principles are actually possible to act on in a principled manner. If everyone all at once took a deep breath and started calling the things they call principles ideals, we could probably avoid a lot of bad discussions (because implicit in that labeling is the observation that compromise sometimes happens).

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