[HN Gopher] Chesterton's Fence (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
Chesterton's Fence (2020)
Author : hasheddan
Score : 141 points
Date : 2022-01-25 11:46 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fs.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| mhb wrote:
| Wow. Chesterton's original essay was a pithy commentary on the
| value of humility. It doesn't really require a lot of further
| explanation, but here we are.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sometimes re-enforcement of humility is key. People who do
| computers for a living operate in a space where they both
| define realities and operate in those definitions; it's pretty
| easy to build up a poorly-earned god complex there.
| auntienomen wrote:
| I wonder what kind of collective trauma could be causing the HN
| community to frontpage articles about Chesterton's fence a few
| times a year.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Its downstream of the collective trauma experienced by those
| who as a result insist on changing everything all the time,
| often with no good reason.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Perhaps it is the trauma of non-consensual changes in software
| and especially user interfaces that we are forced to deal with
| regularly?
| dang wrote:
| I don't think that's happening. Here are the Chesterton's Fence
| stories that have made HN's front page:
|
| _Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking_ -
| 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 - Nov 2016 (26
| comments)
|
| _The Fallacy of Chesterton's Fence (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 - May 2016 (2
| comments)
|
| There was also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196731,
| which was on the front page for 5 minutes before we buried it.
|
| It's true that it's an internet cliche though--so much so that
| Chesterton seems in danger of turning into his fence.
| dogleash wrote:
| I think it's cheekier than that. It's a deliberate attempt to
| watch people miss points, argue, and split hairs over the
| mildest of mild rules of thumb.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Things get reposted all the time, is there something
| particularly odious about Chesterton's Fence?
| neartheplain wrote:
| Young developers often propose large-scale rewrites with little
| sense of the costs or risks involved. Changing old code often
| has unintended side-effects.
| parentheses wrote:
| must be the second order effects of said trauma
| exolymph wrote:
| ?? This phenomenon applies to every topic on the front page. We
| like to rehash the same concepts and subjects over and over.
| jqgatsby wrote:
| Before we stop frontpaging articles about Chesterton's fence,
| we must first understand why the articles are being frontpaged
| to begin with.
| [deleted]
| foobarian wrote:
| It's not trauma, it's fear of what would happen if there
| weren't articles on HN about Chesterton's fence a few times a
| year.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| What I tend to notice about this is how easily people seem to
| fall on both sides of this fence (pun slightly intended).
| People can be annoyed that a change broke their workflow (why
| didn't anyone bother to find out if this was in use), while
| simultaneously pushing to change other things without applying
| Chesterton's Fence (we should just do ... to solve this
| problem).
|
| Like so many logical constructs, it really just seems to exist
| so we can apply it when we are frustrated, not in our day to
| day decision making.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I expect it's a frequent side-effect of working on large
| systems with many interdependencies.
| evancoop wrote:
| The less-discussed issue is the high rate of turnover with
| respect to corporate roles. There are significant incentives that
| push new leaders to "remove the fences" rather than spend the
| time (money) and energy (capital) to determine why the fence was
| there in the first place.
|
| Often, new leaders replace old frustrations, and concluding that
| the previous regime had some wisdom of its own is received like a
| lead balloon.
|
| Chesterton was right, but probably did not consider corporate
| politics :-)
| blowski wrote:
| Sometimes this is definitely the case - by removing the fence
| you have an immediate impact, so you get promoted, and somebody
| else deals with all the consequences.
|
| But that doesn't mean we should always establish why the fence
| is there. Sometimes, the opportunity cost of working out the
| reason outweighs additional certainty. I guess good leadership
| is repeatedly making the right call over when to do one or the
| other, and putting in place appropriate mitigations in case
| you're wrong.
| shandor wrote:
| > repeatedly making the right call over when to do one or the
| other, and putting in place appropriate mitigations in case
| you're wrong
|
| I think succeeding in this part already requires quite a bit
| of the understanding that Chesterton's Fence is actually
| calling for.
|
| If you're (in good faith) able to make an informed opinion
| between choosing taking the risk and gathering yet more
| additional information, you're already in a much stronger
| position than what's usually considered as the failure mode
| of not taking the Fence into account at all.
| blowski wrote:
| That makes sense. I guess I like the nuance of the Cynefin
| framework for this.
| vintermann wrote:
| What was the guy who put up the fence thinking? Maybe he was
| thinking of someone else who put up a fence, who also thought:
| "What was the guy who put up the fence thinking? Maybe he was
| thinking of someone else who put up a fence, who also thought:
| ..."
| femto wrote:
| I'd argue that incremental change strikes the balance between
| tearing something down and being paralysed by potential
| consequences. Also, you can only learn so much by passive
| observation. Eventually you have to apply a small stimulus
| (incremental change) and observe the response. If the response is
| bad reverse the increment.
|
| Caveat is that if you reach a local maxima a more drastic change
| may be required, but the journey to the local maxima has probably
| taught you enough about the system that you can safely make the
| bigger jump.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence doesn't tell us _not to change things_ or
| even prescribe some level of _incrementalism_ it just asks us
| to make a good-faith effort to _know_ why the thing we want to
| change is the way it is before we change it.
|
| To follow the metaphor, maybe the reason the fence is there is
| because the county water supply is behind the fence and they
| put it there to stop cows and livestock from fouling the water.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Another lesson from the story is that you might not be able
| to figure out the reason for the fence currently, but in
| springtime when the creek overflows, it might become obvious.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| See the problems of historical warnings, markers, and
| legends, for example.
|
| Japanese seaside communities frequently have markers
| showing the height or inland range of previous tsunamis.
| Proscriptions against specific materials, sites, foods, or
| practices may be based on previous lessons for which
| available archival mechanisms were insufficient to detail
| though lore and monuments might serve as warning.
|
| Jared Diamond observes that in New Guinea, natives refuse
| to sleep beneath certain types of tree, despite what seems
| a small risk of limb-fall. The occasional recreational
| camper might get away with spending a few nights out of a
| lifetime under such a tree or camping on low ground. Small
| risks repeated sufficiently many times become large, and
| those living such a lifestyle take precautions.
|
| Similarly: many safety regulations, standards, and
| precautions are written in blood. Oderised gas is the
| scented memorial to the 300 souls of the New London School.
|
| Long-term, latent, non-manifest risks are a chief form of
| technical debt.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| If there's one "prescriptive" thing I find useful about the
| allegory that applies to software, it's thinking about how to
| write good documentation.
|
| A lot of engineers would write something like "this fence is
| made of silver oak planks cut to a length of 3 feet and
| fastened together aluminum wire" and while that may be useful
| if you have to fix the fence, for the people in the allegory
| it would be much more helpful to have a sign that says "this
| fence is here to keep cows from fouling the water in the lake
| behind it because 5 houses nearby use it for drinking water".
| If either the 5 houses or the cows are no longer there, it
| makes the whole system much less resistant to change.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence, or
| the reason is completely lost. So knowing why it's there is
| impossible, and if you condition taking down the fence on
| that, you are effectively prohibiting taking the fence down.
|
| That's why every time somebody argues against it. It's
| because at some point you have to abandon that rule, and all
| the interesting discussion is about when to abandon it, not
| on how to follow it.
| Levitz wrote:
| It is also very easy to fall into the trap of assuming you
| know why it was put there, only because you found out one
| reason.
|
| Being aware of this, it is easy to assume that, no matter
| how many reasons you can think of as to why something was
| done, there might very well be other reasons you don't
| know, at that point, it seems to me, the options are either
| accepting the risk or never changing anything.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > So knowing why it's there is impossible, and if you
| condition taking down the fence on that
|
| The condition is to make an effort, not to necessarily
| succeed. If you try and can't make sense of it, you have
| the green light to proceed with caution.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| Yes, it can happen that we can't figure out why the fence
| is there. I think we must pragmatically amend the dictate
| of Chesterton to be something like: make a reasonable
| effort to know why the fence is there.
|
| Then we would still notice the difference between two kinds
| of reformer: those who don't know (and don't care) why an
| institution is the way it is and those who are reasonably
| curious about what the institution was for, how it worked,
| and so on, even as they recognize a need for reform.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Right, which is why like the comment you're replying to
| said, you make a good faith effort (i.e. not just as a
| formality), and then dismantle that fence if reasons why
| are lost in the mists of time and bureaucracy.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Think about what "good-faith effort" means.
|
| This is another thing the Fence metaphor helps us
| understand when we think about it a little bit more.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >Often enough there is just no reason at all for the fence
|
| The article makes the point that people do not build fences
| for no reason. It costs time, effort and resources, not to
| mention it's a lot of work and people are lazy. There's
| always a reason for the fence.
|
| >or the reason is completely lost.
|
| This may be true. A fence in the middle of a wood may have
| been put there 90 years ago because of old property
| demarcations, or an effort to keep the dread bearded
| grindlesnatch from attacking the village. The property is
| now owned by one person, and climate change killed the
| bearded grindlesnatch, so the fence isn't needed anymore.
| But the point is to find out why it was there before you
| tear it down, and if you can't find the reason, you should
| be extra careful about yanking it down. Perhaps now the
| fence harbors a mini ecosystem of berry bushes that has
| increased the potential environment for wild game.
|
| Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the Chesterton's
| Fence analogy, because they think change is an unalloyed
| good. There are a lot of social mores or codes that seem
| unnecessary, outdated or even bad, but they don't want to
| look at the reasoning behind them. Second order effects are
| easy to dismiss as speculation, so they usually are
| dismissed; but any change, radical or otherwise, will have
| second order effects, so careful thought must go into them.
| msla wrote:
| > There's always a reason for the fence.
|
| Yes: To get the rocks out of the dirt so we can farm
| there.
|
| https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=18-P13-
| 000...
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-
| wall...
|
| Now, of course, New England with its rocky soil is no
| longer an agricultural powerhouse, so maintaining a stone
| wall in the middle of re-forested land is rather
| pointless from the perspective of anything other than an
| antiquarian interest. The whole world has changed and the
| walls weren't primarily intended as boundaries anyway.
| slowhand09 wrote:
| Pointless unless it now marks lots, or pastures for
| animals. You've never see a fence or wall to delimit the
| upper pasture from the lower pasture? Or to mark the area
| where you leave trees to grow rather than weed them as
| samplings, thus forming a woodlot for future generations.
| Stone fences in days gone by were probably very desirable
| say as cover when fighting the British during the
| revolution. Original reasons may be obsolete, but it
| doesn't make future reasons invalid.
| jquery wrote:
| > Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the
| Chesterton's Fence analogy
|
| Is this true? Who is leading the charge to distrust
| longstanding institutions such as universities... or the
| CDC? Who is trying to hold nature in balance? Even the
| right to terminate a pregnancy can be seen as a
| Chesterson's fence that is looking to be torn down.
|
| The former leader of the "conservative" party was
| infamous for steamrolling norms.
|
| I'm not a progressive personally, but I think this is an
| unfair description of them. Too broad a brush.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| In another thread about JWT there's a discussion about
| how the Soviets tried to copy the design of the space
| shuttle because "the Americans must have had some reason
| we can't see yet for that design". Turns out the design
| was largely motivated by a secret military operation only
| relevant to the Americans (which never materialized
| either apparently).
|
| > The article makes the point that people do not build
| fences for no reason
|
| Sure. That doesn't mean that the reasons are good or
| accessible to you to make that decision. Now when the
| reason is obviously apparent and widely known, that's a
| totally different thing with the caveat being that
| conditions change and you may not have realized that in a
| complex system.
| dekhn wrote:
| The shuttle carried out multiple classified military
| missions, although fewer than planned. It had
| capabilities unique to its design. The difference is that
| the Soviets didn't have the economic base to support such
| an inefficient design.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| And yet the Russians, in this case, would have been
| better served ignoring the Chesterton fence.
|
| It's a neat analogy but it has limited utility as a
| general rule for either side.
| dekhn wrote:
| yes, I have a lot of respect for soyuz.
| strawhatguy wrote:
| Chesterton's fence is about attempting understanding. If
| the Russians were blindly copying the space shuttle
| design, how is that attempting understanding?
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence does not say you should build a fence
| 100 feet from your house because your neighbor has a
| fence 100 feet from their house.
| bnralt wrote:
| > The article makes the point that people do not build
| fences for no reason.
|
| Naturally everything that ends up happening has a cause
| and happens for _some_ reason; that's nearly a tautology.
| But I think the is that there are many things that don't
| happen for any _good_ reason, many often for bad reasons.
| And it's also common to find that the reasons for these
| things aren't discernible. Someone made a mistake decades
| ago, and now no one wants to correct it because there
| must have been a reason for it, but we can't figure out
| what it was.
|
| Years ago I was the member of a local governing board,
| and there were many people there who thought that because
| we were part of a bureaucracy, we should act more
| bureaucratic. The more work we did, the more we required
| of other people, the longer the meetings, the more
| trainings for systems we'd never use, the better.
|
| I remember one particular situation where another agency
| was asking our input about an application in our
| jurisdiction, and the chair told me to tell the applicant
| about all the extra paperwork they would need to file
| with our board. I contacted the agency the application
| was actually filed with, and they told me they already
| handled that, and they were only notifying us in the off-
| chance there were any special considerations in our
| district the agency needed to be notified of. As far as I
| could tell, the dozens of boards who oversaw other
| jurisdictions didn't have our additional requirement
| either. When I told our chair that the agency wasn't
| asking us for the additional paperwork, he replied "but
| that's how we've always handled this." At some point
| years before somebody on the board wanted to add
| additional paperwork (and it's questionable whether they
| actually had the authority to do this), and the rest of
| the board just mindlessly followed along for years.
| chernevik wrote:
| The point is, you can't evaluate whether a reason is good
| or bad (or more likely, out of date) until you know what
| it was.
| mnsc wrote:
| Why did you need to make this political? It's just a
| matter of minutes before someone points out that
| conservatives love the Chesterton's Fence analogy because
| most fences are built to keep _those people_ out. And
| then we're off to the races.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I'm suspicious of seductively clever writers like
| Chesterton. You'll find this quote on his wikipedia page:
|
| > "The whole modern world has divided itself into
| Conservatives and Progressives. The business of
| Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of
| the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being
| corrected."
|
| Having read some of his Christian apologetic essays, I
| suspected the fence argument was fundamentally motivated
| by religion, and again from the wiki page, it originated
| in from his book "The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic".
|
| EDIT: GP said "Progressives tend to be very dismissive of
| the Chesterton's Fence analogy, because they think change
| is an unalloyed good." to which parent complained "Why
| did you need to make this political?". I found
| Chesterton's own words both relevant and sufficient
| warrant to broaden the discussion along the lines of the
| GP.
| bena wrote:
| First, I see that quote as mocking both sides, it seems
| more like Chesterton was trying to be an enlightened
| centrist. To boil it down, his quote is basically
| "Progressives make new mistakes, conservatives keep
| repeating old mistakes".
|
| And I always felt Chesterton's fence to be advice to be
| deliberate in your actions. Spending the time and effort
| to find out why the fence exists, doesn't mean it won't
| get torn down. It just means that we won't be taking it
| down spontaneously.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I read "Man Who was Thursday" and some of his other
| works... He always struck me as more of a "contrarian"
| than anything else. If he lived in a time when
| Christianity/Church was gaining popularity I think he
| would have declared himself a devout atheist. Reminds me
| of the "true neutral" alignment from the old Dungeons and
| Dragons rulebooks.
| anthonygd wrote:
| You're right. A conservative is a contrarian. They fight
| change.
|
| Chesterton's fence is a rational argument in favor of
| being conservative.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I don't completely agree. A contrarian, by definition, is
| responsive to the political context they are in. In
| Chesterton's time, there was a wave of anarchism finding
| purchase in academic and philosophical circles: hence he
| appeared as a conservative.
|
| A "conservative" from Chesterton's time doesn't
| necessarily map cleanly onto the modern notion of the
| same name... Supposing the allegorical "fence" to be
| something like clean air or water regulation, one could
| argue that it's modern "conservatives" more often than
| not arguing to disturb things without considering second-
| order effects.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >because most fences are built to keep _those people_
| out.
|
| A fine example of how the warning of Chesterton's Fence
| is ignored by inferring the worst possible motive without
| evidence or reason, and using that unsupported aspersion
| as a reason to rip something up.
| slowhand09 wrote:
| And there you go pulling the quote out of its context,
| changing its meaning completely. You ignored Chesterton's
| intentionally to make a point, or MISSED the point by not
| reading it thoroughly, or something I may have missed.
| But I'm attempting to understand before changing
| anything.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Wasn't the point of Chesterton coming up with this
| metaphor political? His whole point was that conservatism
| was, in his view, wise.
| jpitz wrote:
| I thought that his point was "there's no substitute for
| understanding why" ?
| jyounker wrote:
| > Progressives tend to be very dismissive of the
| Chesterton's Fence analogy, because they think change is
| an unalloyed good.
|
| That's a bit of a strawman. One could just as easily
| argue that reactionaries in the USA don't want to admit
| why many fences were built.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > The article makes the point that people do not build
| fences for no reason. It costs time, effort and
| resources, not to mention it's a lot of work and people
| are lazy. There's always a reason for the fence.
|
| Since this is HN, I think a lot of us have experience
| with software. If you do, then I find it incredible that
| you have never discovered some complicated code that
| serves no real purpose, or at least no good one, and was
| presumably written to amuse the author more than anything
| else.
| a4isms wrote:
| Joel Spolsky, just about 22 years ago:
|
| _Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it's just
| a simple function to display a window, but it has grown
| little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well,
| I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes
| that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the
| thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer.
| Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory
| conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when
| the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the
| disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it
| makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95._
|
| _Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage
| before they were found. The programmer might have spent a
| couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing
| it. If it's like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line
| of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but
| a lot of work and time went into those two characters._
|
| _When you throw away code and start from scratch, you
| are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected
| bug fixes. Years of programming work._
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
| should-...
|
| Yes, it may be the case that we no longer support
| Internet Explorer, and none of our customers even know
| that Windows 95 ever existed, much less run it. And our
| users look at a floopy disk and exclaim "Cool, a
| 3D-printed save icon!"
|
| So yes, lots of code serves "no good purpose" today, even
| if it was a good purpose when it was written. HARD AGREE.
|
| Presumably written to amuse the author? Hard disagree
| from my n=1 experience, even if that experience with
| commercial software development dates back to the early
| 1980s. I think those cases are outliers that exist, but
| shouldn't drive our decision-making. The key word is
| "presumably." Presuming that code we find doesn't seem to
| serve a purpose was written for the self-gratification of
| the author is, in my experience, a very bad way to manage
| risk.
|
| I'm prepared to assume that code which doesn't seem to
| serve a purpose may no longer serve a purpose, but while
| it may never have served a purpose, I'll try my best to
| find out what that purpose was before throwing it away.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| But the whole point of Chesterton's Fence is that you
| don't immediately _assume_ it has no purpose, you put a
| bit of effort into double checking. If you checked and
| you 're confident it's useless and you can explain why to
| a reviewer, then sure, remove it.
|
| _Edit to add:_ thinking about it, I don 't think I've
| _ever_ found code in a legacy codebase that had literally
| no purpose. The closest might be code that was once used
| but now isn 't referenced anywhere.
| Thiez wrote:
| I see code without purpose all the time. I have some
| colleagues who seem to believe that they should assign
| `null` to class fields when disposing an object. And no,
| the object will not be recycled, and never was.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chucksmash wrote:
| > or at least no good one
|
| Understanding whether the purpose was good implies
| understanding the purpose. Even with very bad code you
| can at least see what the author was going for. Most code
| I've seen and felt was bad could be described as "Author
| needed to do X but wasn't aware of Y." I can't remember a
| time where I had to deal with code where I couldn't
| figure out what X was.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >If you do, then I find it incredible that you have never
| discovered some complicated code that serves no real
| purpose
|
| Hell, I've written some of that. Very complicated,
| usually awful code, but it did at one point have a
| purpose.
|
| If somebody wrote something complicated, just for
| amusement, then that is its purpose. That's a fence that
| can be rebuilt or thrown away, but you'd better be sure
| that nothing else references it or otherwise depends on
| it doing its quirky baroque thing.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > The article makes the point that people do not build
| fences for no reason.
|
| I think it's more than _sometimes reasons go away_ and
| _sometimes people do unreasonable things_. I don't think
| anyone thinks that people literally build fences
| completely randomly.
| miniatureape wrote:
| I think the point of the fence is to move the impulse from
| yourself (If I can't see the reason there must not be one)
| to the greater context (Someone had a reason for this at
| some point, let me see if I can try to understand).
|
| Related to Chesterton's fence is Levi's Onion:
|
| https://www.joeydevilla.com/2001/12/03/4419/
|
| Which is sort of a Chesterton's fence situation where
| someone took those required steps.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Thank you! I collect these kind of metaphors and I didn't
| have Levi's Onion. I just added it to my list. I had a
| similar one called "chicken chopping" that I heard from
| an Australian once, but I like this one better.
| mistermann wrote:
| If you posted your collection on Pastebin I'd be forever
| in your debt!
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I had to fill some of these in, but here you go:
| https://pastebin.com/ukGdAWbW
| dsclough wrote:
| I have my own collection of these and would also like to
| see a pastebin of yours!
| dccoolgai wrote:
| https://pastebin.com/ukGdAWbW Share yours, please!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There are also _often_ (though not always) alternatives to
| incremental change.
|
| These include pilot projects, modelling, stratified or
| distributed deployments (different regulations in different
| districts, rolling out changes to subsets of a userbase, etc.).
|
| There are times when an _entire_ system needs to be modified
| _as a whole_. Those are not _all_ instances however.
| boringg wrote:
| I'd counter argue that the need to make executive quick
| consequential decisions actually does a lot of damage. I
| understand that is what we value and how we consider our
| executives to be high functioning strong leaders but I don't
| believe that gets to the best long term outcomes for the
| organization.
|
| Obviously paralysis is a different matter - but taking time and
| consideration to get to the appropriate decision actually is
| highly productive in the long run - though if you are an
| executive it might not signal that you are going to be around
| for a long time due to organization thinking you aren't up to
| task.
|
| N.B - taking the time to access a decision is always a trade-
| off.
| carlmr wrote:
| >Eventually you have to apply a small stimulus (incremental
| change) and observe the response.
|
| In any sufficiently complex system this is probably true. Often
| there's a reason for some thing being there, and that reason is
| often enough a workaround for an issue in an external library.
| Then the library gets updated, but the workaround remains.
|
| I've observed this often enough. I try to add a comment
| whenever I do this linking to the issue on the external repo if
| possible, so that later on you can check if it's still needed.
|
| But this is not fool proof and not everyone will leave
| breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs might also be eaten in the
| meantime by some merges and refactorings.
|
| In the end you're often left with a useless workaround, the
| person that made it is not in the company anymore, and there's
| nothing to observe for why it's necessary.
|
| If you don't want your system to eventually collapse under its
| own weight, sometimes you have to go for a risky refactoring.
| Doing it incrementally mitigates the risk.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Agreed; under uncertainly, you should shrink the size of your
| bet.
|
| For example, I think open borders might be good for the world
| (maybe outside of pandemics, say), with less than 100%
| confidence. However, debating completely open borders is sort
| of pointless. The actual lever we have is how much legal
| immigration we allow (and possibly how much enforcement we do
| against illegal immigration). So in practice, the road to open
| borders would be steady increases in the number of visas we
| grant (unless things start to go badly), not just tearing down
| the "fence" all at once.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There is also a different point here:
|
| Even with 100% knowledge1 that Open Borders is the right
| policy, implementing it overnight can be a disaster, since
| institutions, culture, public opinion etc need time to adjust
| to the new reality.
|
| 1 For the sake of argument. Let's not debate immigration
| policy.
| [deleted]
| sohdas wrote:
| There are situations where the defenders of the fence are
| willfully obscuring / misrepresenting its purpose or may not even
| know it themselves, when I think this argument reaches its
| limits.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The point is to expend effort, where possible, in gaining
| understanding.
|
| Recognising the possiblity of misrepresentation is yet another
| higher-order level of awareness.
| political12345 wrote:
| I can summarise this article in 1 sentence:
|
| Before destroying/removing/deleting something, make sure you
| spend sufficient time to understand why it was created in the
| first place and if you can't, then leave it intact.
|
| No need to spread 1 piece of butter on a whole bakery worth of
| bread
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If I'm reading your revision correctly, you're suggesting
| leaving the feature in place _if you cannot spend the time_ to
| understand its justification, rather than _if you cannot find a
| justification_. Your wording could be read either way.
|
| The first interpretation is generally more defensible, _but
| still not an absolute_. There may be circumstances in which
| _time does not exist and other exigencies prevail_. As an
| example, if you come across a fence in the course of, say,
| responding to / evacuating from a natural disaster, you might
| consider _briefly_ if there 's some specific danger that the
| fence guards against (say, a cliff or other hazard), _but
| determine that the greater benefit is in removal_ for the
| purpose of effecting rescue or escape.
|
| First-responders don't agonise over why car doors were created
| when deploying Jaws of Life, earthquake responders don't survey
| plans of buildings to determine why walls exist before
| demolishing or removing them to access victims.
|
| In less pressing circumstances, such as making incremental
| updates or changes to some system, performing some inquiry into
| purpose, intent, or function _is_ strongly advisable, and
| Chesterton 's Law is a check against naive and uninformed
| alteration without such considerations.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Chesterton's fence is lazy.
|
| Here's a better approach:
|
| - admit that deprecation work is hard. Damn hard.
|
| - but know that is important. Damn important.
|
| - read the chapter on deprecation (15) in the book Software
| Engineering at Google [1]
|
| - come to appreciate that if deprecation is a hard problem for
| Google, then it is hard for you
|
| - sit down, take a breath, make a plan, then roll up your sleeves
| and do it. Smash that fence.
|
| - if needed, watch Shia LeBoeuf's motivational on youtube
|
| - just do it
|
| [1] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
| psychoslave wrote:
| On the other hand, if you don't know, and no one else around
| know, removing the chester might be a good option to quickly know
| why it was there rather opting for long inner speculations.
|
| Yes, maybe the fence is there for a good reason, in which case
| the people that installed it made a poor documentation job. So
| who know what else they poorly implemented?
| this_steve_j wrote:
| I love the corollary developing here called Chesterton's cage.
| It's an extension of the fence, but on four sides around you (or
| something of value).
| reedf1 wrote:
| You could easily call this thought experiment Chesterton's Cage.
| At least that is more honest about the philosophical
| implications. It's like Plato's allegory of the cave, except the
| argument is that you should never leave the cave because you
| don't (and can't) know what's outside.
| huetius wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about Chesterton, but I'm not sure this
| is fair. I think the point is that change is not a good in
| itself; it's only good insofar as the new state it brings into
| being is good. It places contemplation of the good above
| praxis.
| huetius wrote:
| Seeing some of the responses in this thread, I think I might
| want to withdraw, or at least modify this comment. I am going
| to leave it as is because others have upvoted it, as is.
|
| People are trying to interpret the analogy outside of the
| theological context in which Chesterton wrote, and therefore
| either reduce it to the kind of relativistic conservatism
| that GP rightly decries, or else deny what Chesterton
| actually wrote.
|
| Chesterton's point is that change can be good or destructive.
| Since evil is not a positively existing thing, but merely a
| lack of goodness, a lower goodness mistaken for a higher
| goodness, or vice versa, if I am to act upon something in
| order to bring it to its full goodness, I have to understand
| the goodness already in it, otherwise I act in a way that is
| destructive. In short, I can only be trusted to change a
| thing if I am able to _love_ it.
| rglullis wrote:
| You _can_ know what 's outside and you _can_ leave your
| surroundings. The point is that you should understand _first_
| why things are in the way they are before implementing any
| change.
| reedf1 wrote:
| But the point of my comparison to Plato's allegory of the
| cave is that there are situations where you can't know. If we
| applied Chesterton's fence to situations at the limit of our
| understanding, say physics, would we be compelled to shutdown
| CERN?
| crazy1van wrote:
| > If we applied Chesterton's fence to situations at the
| limit of our understanding, say physics, would we be
| compelled to shutdown CERN?
|
| You're applying Chestertons fence backwards. Instead, it
| would inform you to _not_ shutdown CERN until you tried to
| understand its purpose.
| rglullis wrote:
| What are you on about?
|
| CERN is an instrument to help us learn more about physics.
| Bringing it down would not help us make any change, and it
| would only hinder us from learning more about the truth of
| nature. You need a better example than that.
| reedf1 wrote:
| My point is the bounds of reality and knowledge are their
| own sort of fence. This isn't a stretch, because this is
| literally the philosophical point of the argument.
|
| What if a high energy particle collision causes a
| miniature blackhole that destroys all life on earth? What
| if sailing across the uncharted sea makes God angry? What
| if knocking down the walls of my cage lets the monsters
| in? What if the act of investigating the fence destroys
| the fence?
| bobthechef wrote:
| Such "laws" or rules of thumb should always be
| interpreted in light of reason. There's nothing
| reasonable about paralyzing yourself by entertaining
| random risks or possibilities for which there is no
| justification. That's as silly as the idea that science
| is about doubt as a matter of method. It isn't. You don't
| go around arbitrarily doubting things for no reason
| because you have somehow convinced yourself that such
| willful doubting produces knowledge. It doesn't. It
| produces an incurable skepticism that destroys science.
| Doubt is the _effect_ of having learned something
| credible that conflicts with a prior belief. That doubt
| might prompt us to verify these conflicting bits of
| information in order to establish some kind of certainty.
|
| Chesterton's Fence is a criticism of reformers,
| revolutionaries, and burn-it-all-down types who want to
| make changes without making an effort to understand why
| the thing they want to tear down is there in the first
| place, what purpose it is serving, and the consequences
| of doing so.
|
| Responsible jurisprudence does this all the time. When
| judges are presented with a case that puts a law into
| question, they look at the origins of the law and make an
| effort to determine the costs of eliminating that law
| because the good of a lot of people may rely on that law
| being in place. This doesn't mean they don't change the
| law if some people would suffer as a result. It just
| means they are aware of why the law exists and what
| purpose it serves as well as the relative costs and
| benefits of doing so (principle of double effect).
| Naturally, as you have said, we do not have perfect
| knowledge, so obviously we can merely do the best we can.
| A person is not obligated to do the impossible.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > What if sailing across the uncharted sea makes God
| angry?
|
| most of these examples are not structured as a
| Chesterton's fence type problem.
|
| If there is a prohibition against sailing across the seas
| in the town's bylaws and you do not know why it is there,
| then you would have Chesterton's fence. You would then do
| investigation until you found an old letter from the
| mayor about his indigestion and a bad dream that told him
| that sailing across the seas made God angry.
|
| Then as making God angry is understood as not a
| reasonable prohibition and the mayor's indigestion not
| sufficient cause for anything (especially as that mayor
| died years ago) it would be concluded that you could then
| sail.
|
| The next day God will of course smite you and everyone in
| the town, but thems the breaks.
|
| on edit: fix typo, fix grammar
| rglullis wrote:
| > This isn't a stretch, because this is literally the
| philosophical point of the argument.
|
| This is reductio ad absurdium. There is a whole lot of
| contexts and dimensions where the concept of Chesterton's
| Fence can be applied before trying to dismiss it.
|
| If you want a better example, you could ask "why so many
| religions teach to not eat pork?"[0]. Then we could look
| at historical contexts (i.e, understanding why it was put
| up in the first place), realize that most of those don't
| really apply to the modern world and "tear it down" if
| you want to enjoy delicious pulled pork sandwich.
|
| > What if sailing across the uncharted sea makes God
| angry?
|
| That is not a satisfactory answer to "why can't we
| explore the seas?", and any rational person would/should
| _continue to investigate_.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sew4rctKghY
| namelessoracle wrote:
| Its good to note that sometimes "it makes God angry" is
| not a TERRIBLE answer. Maybe X or Y act does on average
| create worse results for a person/group/society that
| aren't immediately apparent or obvious, but people
| managed to figure out via correlation or even
| evolutionary pressure (the groups that refused to eat
| pork lived longer and had more kids). Recognizing that X
| or Y on average causes a worse outcome for reasons you
| dont understand isnt a terrible thing.
|
| Using the "sail the uncharted sea makes god angry"
| example.
|
| Maybe that particular parts of the ocean has sea monsters
| (dangerous animals), and lots of whirlpools, and lots of
| poisonous fish that kill you if you eat them, and
| pirates.
|
| People short hand that to "going there makes God angry"
| because they know people don't come back and when they do
| come back its in worse condition. But its never quite the
| same root cause. (hence why they blame god, and not the
| pirates for example) So there is no easy one answer
| unless theres concrete efforts to add together the
| stories of the guy who got attacked by pirates, the guy
| who had a run in with a giant squid, the guy who got
| poisoned, and the guy who almost drowned in a whirlpool.
|
| You'd be pretty foolish to ignore the "god will get
| angry" warning, if you go there. You might have heard one
| or even two of the dangers, but not all of them that push
| the risk profile so high. Thats where Chestertons fence
| becomes useful and says you should be the person that
| gets all the stories together and realizes the real
| dangers and not dismiss the "god will get angry" warning
| off hand.
| rglullis wrote:
| Even if we agree that it is not a _terrible_ answer, we
| seem to agree that it is an _insufficient_ one. Notice
| that I didn 't say that the reaction to hear such an
| answer would be to ignore and take down the fence, but to
| keep investigating for the underlying truth.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| Yes, but plenty of people would treat
| religious/ideological justifications as the reason and
| stop their investigation there.
|
| "Make god angry" is parsed as "because these people had a
| religious belief i believe is false", and they assume
| they understand the Fence in question and mow it down.
| rglullis wrote:
| If the issue is that someone in a position of power
| _wants_ to make the change and all they are given is
| "religious/ideological justifications", then I'd say that
| an incomplete answer is indeed bad.
|
| It's easier to dismiss 20 different people saying the
| exact same, meaningless "God will be angry" answer than
| to dismiss 20 different tales of "someone two/three/six
| generations ago got attacked/drowned/never was seen again
| after going to the ocean".
| Longwelwind wrote:
| I don't think that's the way Chesterton's fence is supposed
| to be used.
|
| The kind of situations where it could be applied is when an
| individual wants to change a system, i.e., when an
| developer wants to rewrite a codebase that "is way too
| complex for what it is", when a employee see a process that
| doesn't seem to make any sense, when a reformist wants to
| change the rules of society, ...
|
| It's basically an invitation to consider why the system was
| put this way, before envisioning how to change it. Instead
| of designing a new system based on the flaws of the current
| system, find out why it was designed this way, so you can
| design a system that solves both the flaws of the current
| system, and the flaws of the previous system, for which the
| current system was put in place.
| inwit wrote:
| ADRs FTW
| brodouevencode wrote:
| This actually made me laugh
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Advanced dining reservations?
| less_less wrote:
| I'm not sure what Frost's _Mending Wall_ was supposed to add to
| this. In that poem, in the author's view the wall is entirely
| pointless, since it doesn't actually block anything. But his
| neighbor insists on repairing it because "good fences make good
| neighbors".
|
| Its juxtaposition with Chesterton's essay is kind of weird,
| because Frost doesn't even know what the wall is for, and
| apparently neither does the neighbor.
| mtzet wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence is a valid point, but I dislike how the
| article celebrates it. Doing the archeology required to figure
| out why things are the way they are is oftentimes much more
| expensive than building it was in the first place. This leads to
| terrible situations where it's cheaper to simply build an
| expressway over the fence rather than tear it down.
|
| This is the stuff technical debt is made of.
|
| Sometimes it's the right decision to risk second-order
| regressions in order to make forward progress. This of course
| depends on the circumstances and the costs of regressions.
| satyrnein wrote:
| _This is the stuff technical debt is made of._
|
| True, but also ignoring Chesterton's Fence is what catastrophic
| rewrites are made of.
|
| If you know why the fence is there and have confidence the
| reasons no longer apply, you can be bold. If you're not sure
| because the archeology is expensive, you should take baby steps
| if possible. (Which I think you get at with the cost of
| regressions.)
|
| For my team, that's often flipping a feature flag where we
| don't expect any difference, and watching the output for a
| while to verify. First sign of surprise, we can quickly flip
| back. We get surprised more than we would like.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Its a process obviously. Sure it is painful to spelunk the
| first time. But it gets easier over time. And it definitely
| gets easier if you are able to remove things over time and
| eliminate all that unneeded code/architecture noise.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| With technical debt you know why something was done a certain
| way. It was a deliberate shortcut, done for a reason, to be
| fixed later (paying off the debt).
| [deleted]
| bmhin wrote:
| Yeah, it's important but not some grand law one should obey. I
| think every technical person has a time in their early life where
| they come across something that was genuinely wrong or illogical
| or just bad (in some cut and dry way). That imprints on them and
| from then on it is burned into our minds when we see something
| that seems off to immediately think "that is stupid". That is
| always my first (perhaps subconscious at times) thought I know
| and suspect it's fairly endemic.
|
| All I take this nice parable to mean is that maybe you make your
| second, less instinctive thought be "why is that here?". That's
| it. Consider it then carry on. No law mandating a thorough
| investigation. No restriction on change without complete
| understanding. No need for deterministic certainty. Just a simple
| consideration that you should entertain. Or perhaps more
| accurately, a consideration you shouldn't disregard.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Chesterton never working in an Enterprise, here are the most
| common reasons for a fence. 1. developer, who's long gone, only
| supported road with fence, not road 2. budget needed to be spent
| and fence was the right price 3. friend of a friend builds fences
| and needed some work
| vivegi wrote:
| In a perfect world where you are able to find out the reasons why
| the fence exists, it is fine to evaluate if the reasons still
| hold true to keep the fence. In many real instances, we may not
| be able to find out the original reasons with any reasonable
| level of certainty.
|
| Under those circumstances, it is best to figure out options in
| front of us, make a decision and move forward. Doing nothing is
| also an option, but one cannot be stuck in endless analysis-
| paralysis and fail to decide.
| winstonewert wrote:
| Does anybody actually think we shouldn't change anything if we
| can't figure out what the original reason after a good faith
| effort? That just seems like a straw man that simply isn't what
| Chesteron's fence is about.
| vivegi wrote:
| It does happen quite often, especially when groups (n>1) are
| involved in decision making and the parties don't all agree
| on the causes or have divergent views or have competing
| vested interests. eg: UN decision making or Climate change
| action planning etc.,
|
| When this occurs, they dig in firmly in their positions and
| either argue for keeping the fence as-is (maintain status
| quo) or taking it down (action bias).
| winstonewert wrote:
| Except that's a totally different scenario, where the
| different parties have different interests and thus don't
| agree on whether to keep the fence, not one where we don't
| know why the fence exists.
| slowhand09 wrote:
| I may be reading your point incorrectly, but you mention no
| reason FOR a change, except change. I think that is fine on
| your own property, but wasteful when it comes to property
| that is public or common. If the change has an associated
| cost, on public or common property, change is usually passed
| to those public or common owners, often when they don't want
| it.
|
| Bureaucrats famously build things just to associate
| themselves with "getting things done".
| winstonewert wrote:
| I don't understand what your point is. Sure, people of
| abuse shared property, tragedy of the commons and all. What
| does that have to do with the fence?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This is one of the reasons that keeping code in a repository
| (especially a git repo) with good discipline on tying changes
| to issue descriptions is so key. It won't guarantee you'll find
| all relevant consequences of a change, but it really gives you
| a leg-up on the alternative of parsing out the results of a
| change by examining the code entrails.
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads:
|
| _Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking_ -
| 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 - Nov 2016 (26
| comments)
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| Still the most important lesson for the average person to bake
| into their thinking.
|
| Maybe not so much the HN crowd...but then again maybe especially
| them
| tsewlliw wrote:
| A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire
|
| Just as a general rule in conversation, invoking so-and-so's law
| or this fence isn't a productive tactic. Instead, ask the
| question that wisdom suggests you ask, and for this bothersome
| fence in particular, keep in mind that you are weighing an
| unidentified consequence against a proposed benefit, and at least
| endeavor to expend some of your own effort on suggesting what the
| value of the fence might be or how one might go about finding it.
| You may find some of that effort has been undertaken and that
| failure has not been shared.
| ska wrote:
| > invoking so-and-so's law or this fence isn't a productive
| tactic.
|
| Not true. If we both are familiar with the concept, saying
| "Consider Chesterson's fence" conveys a lot of information. If
| we aren't, chasing down the reference will almost always result
| in a much more articulate version of the concept than whatever
| you or I would come up with on the fly.
| csours wrote:
| When I was younger, I thought I could examine a situation until I
| understood it. Now I feel like one must experience a situation to
| understand it.
|
| Chesterton's Fence is a good principle; so is "Go and See" -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genchi_Genbutsu
|
| Wisdom is deciding how much of each to do.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| This article made me think of the many virtues of the (analog)
| landline telephone system, built up over a century of universal
| usage. All due nostalgia aside, its well-known problems and
| solutions have been replaced by an arguably (physically) less
| resilient and markedly more wasteful alternative.
|
| I have yet to see a detailed balance sheet on that choice (which
| includes externalities) from the 'someone who made that
| decision'. No doubt 'profits' are up, depending on who defines
| 'profit', and who it advantaged. Sometimes things start out
| seeming like a great idea (universal automobile ownership).
| Sometimes haste (like universal nuclear energy, all political
| motivations aside) makes waste.
| cmsefton wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484
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