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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough, an alleged Chesterton's fence is very likely to be one of these derelict electric fences. People who advocate the "Chesterton's fence" argument (which is similar to and equally misguided as the precautionary principle) are essentially saying "whoever built this fence either didn't understand why they built the fence, or didn't manage to explain their reasoning to other people affected by the fence, and therefore it's our responsibility to either respect the fence forever or invest an unbounded amount of resources trying to discover the reason the fence was built."

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Chesterton’s fence isn’t “respect it forever” or “spend infinite resources”. It’s “don’t tear it down until you understand why it’s there”. The whole point is to avoid breaking something whose purpose you haven’t yet understood, because the original builders might have had a good reason that isn’t obvious to you. Once you’ve understood it, you’re free to remove it if that reason no longer applies.

Case in point: the electric fence is broken, but that doesn't mean it needs to be fixed.

Like border enforcement

People are here "illegally". A handful are criminals. But a lot of the farm workers putting food on the tables of citizens, are "illegal."

If they're already here and not causing trouble they should be legal. The legalization process shouldn't take as many years and as much money as it does

There is one issue where fences can arise naturally (via evolution), and no one knows why it's there. If your society doesn't even understand evolution yet, are you supposed to just stagnate forever? It's an exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff, and Chesterton's fence is asking for pure exploitation. Probably because societies are pretty fragile, so unless you're really sure something isn't loadbearing, it isn't safe to modify it at scale. But, then again, there's no reason to not experiment on a smaller scale...

> Chesterton’s fence isn’t “respect it forever” or “spend infinite resources”. It’s “don’t tear it down until you understand why it’s there”.

You contradict yourself by describing exactly what I described, which is a requirement to spend an unbounded (I didn't say infinite) amount of resources trying to understand the reason the fence was built. What you just said is that if you cannot understand why it was built, you can never tear it down. This is precisely my criticism of the concept.

Of course, sometimes it might be easy to discover why the fence was built. But the problem with Chesterton's fence is that, if it were adhered to generally, it applies selective pressure for obscuring the reason fences are built.

  int some_old_unmaintained_code(void vector){
  // the qyick bwown fox bumped over a lazy do
  int i=i;

  // DON'T EDIT ABOVE THIS LINE;¥n¥n;¥n;;;;
  // DOING SO BREAKS CODE

^ this is an illustration of a Chesterton's fence

char* strcpy(char* destination, const char* source);

and its numerous replacements and "improvements".

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