[Stub] The problem with Chesterton's Fence

Nobody worked hard on making sure people could remove fences without understanding them ..., so this principle is not protected.

This seems false to me. I agree with Stuart's opening suggestion that democracy, free markets, and the Enlightenment more generally are in part designed to make it easy to dismantle historical patterns (e.g. religion, guilds, aristocracy, traditions; one can see this discussion explicitly in e.g. Adam Smith, Locke, Toqueville, Bacon). Bostrom's "status quo bias" also comes to mind.

somebody had gone through great efforts to put a fence somewhere ... In your example, "the common practice of taking down Chesterton fences", this is not the case.

You mean that no one has gone through great efforts to remove the existing Chesterton fences? Seems false.

Every time I read about Chesterton's fence, it seems like the implication is:

Because someone worked hard on something, or because a practice/custom took a long time to develop, it has a greater chance of being correct, useful, or beneficial [than someone's replacement who looks and says "This doesn't make sense"]

I think that's a terrible statement.

But if I'm not mistaken the original argument around Chesterton's fence is that somebody had gone through great efforts to put a fence somewhere, and presumably would not have wasted that time if it would be useless anyway.

The idea has been extended to cases where no-one can articulate a good reason for the fence ( https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/mistakes-3-breaking-chestertons-fence-in-the-presence-of-bull/ ), which is a more powerful argument.

Very informally, by the amount of times that new innovations or changes are objected to on roughly Chesterton fence reasons, and they turn out to be ok after all. It seems that our modern societies have a certain flexibility built in that allows them to route around certain problems and take advantages of certain opportunities, in ways that pure "Chesterton fence" thinking doesn't allow.

However, this is very far from a rigorous, quantified argument (though the original argument wasn't either).

That was the same thing that struck me. What's the data for this claim?

Yes. I suspect that Chesteron's fence arguments are stronger in traditional cultures. Markets and democracies seem to have much greater self-correcting abilities, so the argument seems to be weaker (as long as you're not touching the key parts of the systems).

And similarly, here's a quotation from economist George Stigler: “every durable social institution or practice is efficient.” ("Efficient" has a specific meaning in context. Don't over-extend it to "good" or similar ideas.)

In my experience, that's not what usually happens.

Where are you getting "that's what usually happens"?

Appealing to Chesterton's Fence is moving away from an object level argument. Thus, the general implication of the Chesterton's Fence argument is that there is not an efficient alternative solution to the problem.

Founding the NHS, bringing in clear air and water acts, regulating minimum standards for child workers (and then all workers), extending the franchise. All these were done in defiance of precedent and with strong accusations of destroying prosperity.

The creation of the NHS is a good example. Nothing had been done like that before, and most of the predictions (both positive and negative) at the time, were very wrong (for instance, it was predicted that it would reduce medical costs overall!). This strongly implies that nobody really had any idea what was going to happen. And yet it basically worked out; and, in fact, most healthcare systems in developed countries (apart from the USA) seem to average out around the same broad categories of performance and cost, even if they seem to vary considerably in theory, This is evidence that our current systems push both revolutionary innovations and incremental ones, in the vague direction of decent performance,

On another side, many technological innovations completely destroy Chesterton fences existing in society. The whole idea of centralising and sharing knowledge across all different types of communities is something that there were a lot of fences to block; yet it seems to have kinda worked.

But the proper argument would require much more examples, and much defining of what a Chesterton Fence is.

This basically boils down to the root of the impulse to remove a chesterton's fence, doesn't it?

Not really. A lot of fences seem to have been taken down for bad or at least objectionable reasons, and to have turned out either fine or not to bad.

I'd point to a different distinction - effective fences tend to have more defenders than bad ones (on average). So by taking down a fence that's easy to take down, you're more likely to improve the situation. And what fences get taken down the most often? The easy ones.

So my "argument" can say that it's ok to take down a fence, but that this might not apply to major/important ones that have remained untouched to date.