"Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a half-penny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it."
I admit that when I was younger I was much more eager to just tear it all down and start anew...but with experience I have come to see things are never quite so easy. Things are the way they are for a reason, and it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things.
"of the two available interpretations of the principle, neither are plausible: weak formulations (which hold that precaution in the face of uncertain harms is permissible) are trivial, while strong formulations (which hold that precaution in the face of uncertain harms is required) are incoherent." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle#The_pr...
People misinterpret Chesterton's fence as an argument against changing things, but it's actually just about what I quoted above. It has no verdict on whether or not something should be changed. It just argues that you should make a strong effort to figure out why it is how it is before attempting to do so.
I'd argue that if you don't at least do the exercise your attempts to change things will probably fail, since whatever you try to do will likely fail to capture something necessary in the old system.
Keep in mind though that it doesn't always work. Sometimes the reason for the fence is forgotten. Sometimes the reason is deeply perverse and there never was a good reason. Sometimes the reason is obsolete.
However, some times the circumstances that gave rise to the fence are gone! You still need to do the work to show that this is true, or at least some best effort. But if after a cursory check there is no compelling reason, retorting "ah but there may still be some use, go search the wisdom of the ancients further" is a terrible response. That is how you calcify debt and become unable to adapt to changing circumstances.
There is a balance between preserving out of an abundance of caution and tearing it all down because it was inconvenient or "new is better."
We already have plenty of innate status quo bias. We don't need to heap more on top without good reason.
Unfortunately, I've seen this play out too many times. There is a trivial fence in the way of solving an expensive problem. Instead of taking action, months, or years pass trying to over- analyze the different ways to take down the fence. Since no one takes any action, the fence falls down on its own, causing severe outages and thousands, or millions of dollars in collateral damage.
That having been said, I also think you're underestimating the degree to which it's easy to verify the value of legacy practices.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Search for the phrase "And then there’s manioc. This is a tuber native to the Americas." Read the extended block quote afterwards and the first few paragraphs after the block quote. If anything, Chesterton's Fence is insufficient--if a certain practice works, it sometimes works for reasons that even the practitioners can't explain.
Furthermore, I can point to numerous examples of catastrophic failure directly caused by insufficient status quo bias, like tearing apart cities because it's the 20th century and we need to build freeways straight through the middle of them, or communism. So it's a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
On the other hand, if you dig into the history of colonization, indigenous cultures had a massive home field advantage, and it was common for Western colonies to utterly fail, either starving to death in the same lands that indigenous people were able to survive in or in some cases, completely defecting from their original culture and joining indigenous populations.
In other words he did something because he thought it was okay to do it, he did it because he didn't like the way it was done, but he did not consider that in this case there might have been a reason why it was done the way it was and not the way he wanted it.
There were many things he could have changed, and improved things, but since he didn't bother finding out why things were they way they were changing things for the better was at best a random outcome.
I've seen so many people jump into a business, want to prove themselves, and start changing things without understanding the context in which that thing was built. (Similarly, though less often, businesses expanding into new products or markets.) "Tell me what will change if you stop doing X" is thus added to "Tell me what will change if you start doing Y".
To be fair, citing Chesterton's Fence just make me sound wise (and/or a little curmudgeonly); the better story for the point I'm making is the hospital bed where someone dies every Thursday morning at 10am ... only for video footage to reveal the cleaner unplugging machinery to plug in their vacuum cleaner every week.
Hard disagree. The difficulty of discovering the reasons for Chesterton's Fence and the impossibility of ever being certain that you have discovered them all means that it actually is a general prescription for caution / against change.
Of course, as always, it comes down to a judgement call. Do you understand the reasons for Chesterton's Fence well enough? Unfortunately, that's exactly the same situation one was in before the Chesterton's Fence metaphor was brought up, so either the metaphor is completely useless (by way of being disclaimed into oblivion) or it is a general prescription for caution / against change.
It’s against wanton and unwise change.
Considering nuance in qualification “disclaimed into oblivion” is needlessly derisive.
From legacy software to political systems, when there's cruft or weird behavior there's almost always some environmental factor that shaped the decision to build it that way, even (especially) if the people who made the decision weren't conscious of why.