Comment by bee_rider
3 years 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.
> Chesterton will have to contend with our time honored tradition of tearing down fences.
The point is not to prevent teardown of fences. It's to know why they were setup in the first place. If it was put there for no reason other than to spend what's in the budget, then there is no barrier to removing it. But if it was there for good reason then you need to prepare a counter argument for why it should be removed.
Fences don’t maintain themselves, and I don’t think we should give either side a pass. The town should have a general tradition of tearing down unjustified fences and keeping documentation for the justification of fences. It shouldn’t be assumed there was a good reason, the party installing the fence should have presented an argument for the fence in the first place.
Chesterton’s argument is that we should assume there was a reason in the absence of an argument for the fence. This is only the case if there’s a proliferation of necessary, unjustified fences. We should not let that sort of situation emerge in the first place.
You don't seem to grasp the thrust of the article. Chesterton does not set up two sides. And I don't know what you mean by "necessary, unjustified fences." Those two words stand in juxtaposition. If a fence is necessary, it can be justified. If it's not necessary, it cannot be justified.
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> but being a culture that tends to tear-down fences has the second-order effect of being more adaptable.
By killing many. In biology, species with higher rates of genetic diversity in their offspring sacrifice most of there offspring. E.g. trees fall into that category. Their seeds have more genetic diversity, when compared to children of mammals. But a single tree can produce tens of thousands of seeds in one year. And the environment conditions can change drastically every few meters for those seeds. Therefore, it is a successful strategy. But most seeds never grow into mature trees. Do we want to model human cultures on that strategy?