Comment by cjbgkagh

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.