Once again, here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.
politicians and leaders worldwide don’t like to be associated with toilets, even state-of-the-art toilets. This sanitation stigma distorts international and national development agendas.
chairman of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation
The quote was brought to my attention by a student in my Economics of Future Technology course who is writing on sanitation in the developing world.
Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
(..)
Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government.
-- Screwtape, from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" by C. S. Lewis.
Hayek was right. Capitalists in a mixed-economy seem to be in something analogous to a prisoner's dilemma. It would benefit any individual capitalist to seek monopoly privileges for their own firm, but it hurts all of them if any significant number of them do so.
Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you're in trouble. When you're making a film you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip. It takes more discipline than you might imagine, to think, even for thirty seconds, in the noisy, confusing, high-pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds' thought can often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks good at first glance. With respect to films, chess is more useful in preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas. Ideas come spontaneously and the discipline required to evaluate and put them to use tends to be the real work.
-Stanley Kubrick
It has been said that the past is a foreign country. Well, it is certainly inhabited by foreigners, people whose mindset was shaped by circumstances we shy from remembering. The mother of three children who gave birth eight times. The father of four children, the last of whom cost him his wife. Our minds are largely free of such horrors, and not inured to that kind of suffering. That is the progress of technology. That is what is improving the human race.
It is a long, long ladder, and sometimes we slip, but we've never actually fallen. That is our progress.
The past is in some respects worse than a third world country. In the United States around 1900, the life expectancy ranged from around 50 climbing steadily to reach around 60 around 1930 (curiously the Great Depression didn't cause a slump in life expectancy, although the rate of growth did slow). Source with related data(pdf). But, if one looks at current life expectancy in many countries in the developing world, most countries exceed the US-1900 numbers. Similar comparisons can be made for literacy and many other metrics of success. The middling developing countries today are better in many ways than most of the US was in 1900.
Also, third world countries can buy the used stuff we don't want anymore. The past can't do that.
You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology.
NYT article titled "Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?"
The next line of the article after the above quote is "But none of this happened."
If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.
Ariex
I was once, years and years ago, falsely accused by someone of egregious dishonesty, and after I put forward evidence that the accusation was false, was told, "Let's just agree to disagree." At which, of course, I exploded; I would not be agreeing to disagree about whether I had been completely dishonest, thank you very much. And every time someone uses the phrase I am tempted to say, "We don't need to agree to disagree because we already are disagreeing." I think what gets me is that it's such an unbelievably low standard that almost anything would be more intellectually robust; why not agree to something more ambitiously intellectual, like swapping book recommendations, or having a temporary cooling-off period, or going to a third party for arbitration or advice, or anything else, really?
I thought that "agree to disagree" had become a fixed expression meaning something like "stop discussing this for now even though we don't agree, because we have more productive things to do/talk about".
Molten variables hiss and roar. On my mind-forge, I hammer them into the greatsword Epistemology. Many are my foes this night.
--Nate Silver Parody Twitter Account @fivethirtynate, on the night of the presidential election
...Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. ... [M]ost of the bizarre and depressing research findings [about cognitive biases] make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find the truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.
I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments, but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law. Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any /individual/'s ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to 'decide' whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn't very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron.
In the sam
In December of each year, the New York Times film critics, like film critics everywhere, write Deep Think pieces about what patterns in the movies released in the current year tell us about Trends in the Big Issues. The annual answer ought to be: Virtually nothing, because what gets released in a single year is a close to a random sample of projects that had been in the works for years and happened to come to fruition now. But that never stops the critics from pontificating on 2012: The Meaning of It All.
--Steve Sailer, here
"It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on." - Amos Tversky
One in four Americans has an opinion about an imaginary debt plan
A new poll from Public Policy Polling found that an impressive 39 percent of Americans have an opinion about the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan.
Before you start celebrating the new, sweeping reach of the 2010 commission’s work, consider this: Twenty-five percent of Americans also took a stance on the Panetta-Burns plan.
What’s that? You’re not familiar with Panetta-Burns? That’s probably because its “a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo” that PPP dreamed up to test how many Americans would profess to have an opinion about a policy that did not exist. They found one in four voters to do just that.
Panetta-Burns’ nonexistent policy proposals were supported by 8 percent and opposed by 17 percent of the voters surveyed. Simpson-Bowles’ real policy proposals had stronger favorables, with 23 percent support and 16 percent opposition.
Devil's advocate time:
They don't know nothing about it. They know two things.
Here are some reasons to oppose the plan, based on the above knowledge:
We don't need a debt reduction plan, just keep doing what we're doing and it will sort itself out.
I like another existing plan, and this is not that one, so I oppose it.
I've heard of Panetta and (s)he's a complete douchebag. Anything they've come up with is clearly junk.
I haven't even heard of either of them, so what the heck would they know about debt reduction?
They're from different parties, there's no way they could have come up with something sensible.
I've heard 10 different plans described, and surely this is one of them. I can't remember which one this is, but I hated all of them so I must oppose this too.
And of course you can make a very similar set of reasons to support it. Not trying to rationalise people's stupidity or make excuses for them as such, just present the opposing argument in all its glory. Ok maybe making excuses for them is exactly what I'm doing. But honestly, how many of your political opinions, as a percentage, including all those that you don't know you have until asked, are really much better than the reasons above?
This might be a distinction without a difference. The trick was to get people to think they knew about some topic X well enough to profess an opinion on it, even though in fact they didn't know the first thing about X. Making sure that X doesn't exist is just a cheap way to implement this trick.
Long quote to make a simple point, but relevant. (Context: this is from a Star Wars novel, so it's fiction.)
...A death hollow is a low point where the heavier-than-air toxic gases that roll downslope from the volcanoes can pool.
The corpse of a hundred-kilo tusker lay just within its rim, its snout only a meter below the clear air that could have saved it. Other corpses littered the ground around it: rot crows and jacunas and other small scavengers I didn't recognize, lured to their deaths by the jungle's false promise of an easy meal.
I said something along these lines to Nick. He laughed and called me a Balawai fool.
"There's no false promise," he'd said. "There's no promise at all. The jungle doesn't promise. It exists. That's all. What killed those little ruskakks wasn't a trap. It was just the way things are."
Nick says that to talk of the jungle as a person-to give it the metaphoric aspect of a creature, any creature-that's a Balawai thing. That's part of what gets them killed out here.
It's a metaphor that shades the way you think: talk of the jungle as a creature, and you start treating it like a creature. You start thinking you can outsmart the jungle, or tr
...A person is said to exhibit rational irrationality when it is instrumentally rational for him to be epistemically irrational. An instrumentally rational person chooses the best strategies to achieve his goals. An epistemically irrational person ignores and evades evidence against his beliefs, holds his beliefs without evidence or with only weak evidence, has contradictions in his thinking, employs logical fallacies in belief formation, and exhibits characteristic epistemic vices such as closed-mindedness. Epistemically irrational political beliefs can reinforce one’s self-image; boost one’s self-esteem; make one feel noble, smart, superior, safe, or comfortable; and can help achieve conformity with the group and thus facilitate social acceptance. Thus, epistemic irrationality can be instrumentally rational.
If I falsely believe the road I am crossing is free of cars, I might die. So I have a strong incentive to form beliefs about the road in a rational way. However, if I falsely believe that import quotas are good for the economy, this has no directly harmful effects. (On the contrary, the belief can have significant instrumental value. It might make me feel patriotic; serve my xen
Well,
it is exactly what the quote said:
The cost to the typical voter of voting in epistemically irrational ways is nearly zero. The cost of overcoming bias and epistemic irrationality is high. The psychological benefit of this irrationality is significant. Thus, voters demand a high amount of epistemic irrationality.
In the case of LW, voting irrationally has almost zero costs. You don't get penalized for voting wrongly(Incidentally I suggested trying to implement some measure of this kind and guess what... I was downvoted). The penalties are more indirect, like diminishing the amount of epistemically correct contributions.
So why would you assume that LW would be less prone to have this sort of problem?
The evidence suggests that the problem should actually be worse on LW, see1, 2.
When you have run the length of various practices and none of those practices remain in your mind, that very lack of mind itself is the heart of "all things." When you have exhaustively learned the various practices and techniques and made great effort in disciplined training, there will be action in your arms, legs, and body but none in your mind; you will have distanced yourself from training, but will not be in opposition to it, and you will have freedom in whatever techniques you perform. You yourself will be unaware of where your mind is, and neither demons nor heresies will be able to find it.
— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
"Right and wrong do exist. Just because you don't know what the right answer is — maybe there's even no way you could know what the right answer is — doesn't make your answer right or even okay. It's much simpler than that. It's just plain wrong."
--Dr. House
It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if the cat is not there.
— Confucius, allegedly (quoted in The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed)
Edit: The rationality relevance might need some explanation. The way I've seen this aphorism used is this: it's sometimes hard to distinguish between a task that's achievable but very difficult (and that it therefore might make sense to spend time/effort on), and a task that is impossible (and thus is a complete waste of time/effort).
If you spend some time searching for the cat in the dark room, you might not find it. Is that because finding it is difficult (after all, this is what you might quite plausibly expect, if you assume that the cat is there), or because the cat is not there and you're wasting your time?
It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking; and it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
Do not read written works and think, "This is the Way." Written works are like the gate to approach the Way. Thus, there are people who remain ignorant of the Way regardless of how much they have learned and how many Chinese characters they know. Though they face the pages and read as skillfully as though they were annotating the ancients, they are ignorant of the truth and so do not make the Way their own.
— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to approach the Way without studying. Still, one cannot say that a man embodies the Way simply because he has studied and speaks well. There are also people who are naturally in harmony with the Way and who have never studied at all.
— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
"...they have all these experts' predictions about the year 2000 and I kid you not they are fucking psychotic. Just not even close, like oh we'll be growing cars in vats and having nuclear wars with China and then black rainbows will drain the earth of its oxygen and kill everyone except our moon colonists. Experts. I mean people cannot predict shit. We think we can and we fucking can't."
"Well, how about this — that man, unlike animals, is a creature who experiences an insurmountable need for knowledge? I've read that somewhere."
"So have I," said Valentine. "But the trouble is that man, or in any case the common man, easily overcomes this need for knowledge of his. It seems to me that he doesn't have such a need at all. There's a need to understand, but knowledge is not required for that. The God hypothesis, for instance, gives one an unparalleled ability to understand absolutely everything, while discovering absolutely nothing... Give a person a highly simplified model of the world and interpret any event on the basis of this simplified model. Such an approach required no knowledge. A few memorized formulas plus some so-called intuition, so-called practical acumen, and so-called common sense."
Roadside Picnic, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
But are we asking too much when we declare that our drugs need to work through single defined targets? Beyond that, are we even asking too much when we declare that we need to understand the details of how they work at all? Many of you will have had such thoughts (and they've been expressed around here as well), but they can tend to sound heretical, especially that second one. But that gets to the real issue, the uncomfortable, foot-shuffling, rather-think-about-something-else question: are we trying to understand things, or are we trying to find drugs?
Derek Lowe, In the Pipeline
...I don't have any previous experience with this sort of thing, but judging from what I hear and read, I'm supposed to be asking why all this is happening, and why it's happening to me. Honestly, those questions are about the farthest thing from my mind.
Partly, that’s because they aren't hard questions. Why does our world have gravity? Why does the sun rise in the East? There are technical answers, but the metaphysical answer is simple: that’s how reality works. So too here. Only in the richest parts of the rich world of the twenty-first century could anyone entertain the thought that we should expect long, pain-free lives. Suffering and premature death (an odd phrase: what does it mean to call death "premature"?) are constant presences in the lives of most of the peoples of the Earth, and were routine parts of life for generations of our predecessors in this country—as they still are today, for those with their eyes open. Stage 4 cancers happen to middle-aged men and women, seemingly out of the blue, because that's how reality works.
As for why this is happening to me in particular, the implicit point of the question is an argument: I deserve better than this. There are tw
We're Nature's conscience. One day, we'll finally make it listen and realise what a monster it's been all along.
...The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.
Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observation of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient.
Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
Police should always direct their
"Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that - where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed." - Marvin Minsky
After all, if someone says “you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself” the sky is still blue and you should not believe the sky is green because that person was a dick.
-- Ozy Frantz
"There are lives at stake, Sherlock! Actual human lives - just, just so I know, do you care about that at all?"
"Will caring about them help save them?"
"No."
"Then I'll continue not to make that mistake."
-- Sherlock (BBC series), season 1, episode 3 "The Great Game"
Yes, I know that if you correct for differences in caring due to distance/scope insensitivity/etc. it does help save them, and that caring doesn't preclude skepticism about which actions are helpful, and that in this particular case Sherlock should have refused to respond to blackmail and there'd have been fewer deaths. But it works as a retort to "can't say no" spending. Don't give to some counterproductive charity because you care about starving kids in Africa, give to the Against Malaria Foundation because it makes fewer kids dead.
Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since we all we had to do was to carry them on rationally.
--John Maynard Keynes on Bertrand Russell
"Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.
You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head."
--Charles Munger http://ycombinator.com/munger.html
Reading the context (it's said in response to an evangelical trying to use Lewis' Trilemma) just makes it plain badass.
But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worthwhile as a whole. It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in the case of the vast number of trades and crafts on which the existence of the modern city depends.
I like doing math that involves measuring the lengths of numbers written out on the page—which is really just a way of loosely estimating log_10 x. It works, but it feels so wrong.
Terminology, afterall was nothing. So long as we can reach the idea itself.
-- Algernon Blackwood, The Damned
The exposure of truth sometimes results in tragedy. However, no matter how tragic the truth may be, it would be an even greater tragedy to avert one's eyes from it.
If you are hiding in a basement from the Nazis, this isn't true. If you are going to be tortured for the whereabouts of people hiding from the Nazis, you should also avert your eyes and avoid finding out where they are hiding. The fact that instrumental and epistemic rationality are sometimes at odds is another tragic truth.
Just remember, most people most of the time are not about to learn the location of a refugee just before being tortured by Nazis.
The fact that instrumental and epistemic rationality are sometimes at odds is another tragic truth.
Which we should not avert our eyes from.
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."
Alan Turing, Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage edition 1992), p. 513
The "mountain-sea" spirit means that it is bad to repeat the same thing several times when fighting the enemy. There may be no help but to do something twice, but do not try it a third time. If you once make an attack and fail, there is little chance of success if you use the same approach again.
Myiamoto Musashi, Book of the Five Rings.
Stripped to its essentials, every decision in life amounts to choosing which lottery ticket to buy. . . . Most organisms don't buy lottery tickets, but they all choose between gambles every time their bodies can move in more than one way. They should be willing to 'pay' for information---in tissue, energy, and time---if the cost is lower than the expected payoff in food, safety, mating opportunities, and other resources, all ultimately valuated in the expected number of surviving offspring. In multicellular animals the information is gathered and translated into profitable decisions by the nervous system.
Perhaps there is nothing in Nature more pleasing than the study of the human mind, even in its imperfections or depravities; for, although it may be more pleasing to a good mind to contemplate and investigate the application of its powers to good purposes, yet as depravity is an operation of the same mind, it becomes at least equally necessary to investigate, that we may be able to prevent it.
-John Hunter
We don't expect kittens to fight wildcats and win - we merely expect them to try.
--Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
I'm not talking about the mindkilling politics of Starship Troopers today. The quote's about doing the impossible. A while back Kyre posted a link to Minus #37, and without context, it hit me like a knife in the guts. I didn't know that she was a godlike reality-bender. To me she was just a kid who stepped up to take a swing, she was Tiffany Aching.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go...
That's been posted before, and appears to have made it far enough into the LW vernacular to be used without explanation although not without scare quotes. You do give more context for it, though.
"They're running on the same neural architecture that I am and I'm a person."
Florence Ambrose (Fictional Biological AI, referring to machine AIs)
"Now," said the voice of lock and window-bar,
"You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality.""Things have," I said, "a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book.""Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,"
Said the sad hallways, "you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.""This cannot be the world," I said. "Nor will it,
Till the heart's crayon spangle and fulfill it."
-- Richard Wilbur, At Moorditch
Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory.
It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO. Rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.
-- Imre Lakatos, ‘‘Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,’’
It would be a coincidence if the link that can be most easily strengthened turned out to be the weakest link.
--Seth Roberts, Online Teaching vs. What?, which also makes the point that the best books on a subject are rarely if ever textbooks
Before he could put into practice something he had heard, the only thing Tzu-lu feared was that he should be told something further.
Confucius, Analects V.14
One of my strongest stylistic prejudices in science is that many of the facts Nature confronts us with are so implausible given the simplicities of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, that the mere demonstration of a reasonable mechanism leaves no doubt of the correct explanation.
To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.
Just because someone isn't into finding out The Secrets Of The Universe like me doesn't necessarily mean I can't be friends with them.
-Buttercup Dew (@NationalistPony)
"Proof is for mathematics and alcohol."
-- Common response to requests for proof of scientific results
Pardon my sanity in a world insane.
-- Emily Dickinson
...How to differentiate a zombie who acts like a human from a “real” human with inner life? Fuck you!
...If we are the bad guys, all we have to do is change our behaviour. But in fact nature is not a good Mother Nature, it’s a crazy bitch.
@zizek_ebooks, a Twitter account remixing quotes from Slavoj Zizek's texts.
On Earth we need more who work more and criticize less, who build more and destroy less, who promise less and resolve more, who say better today than tomorrow.
Ernesto Che Guevara (ironically enough)
I think we've got too much focus here on criticizing bad stuff, deconstructing lies, weighing and doubting between options, and dreaming of uncertain futures. As opposed to working hard, building stuff, making decisions, and starting on it right now..
@Akrasia, @WhyOurKindCan'tCooperate, @HalfARationalist @ApologistVSRevolutionary @SelfImprovementVSShinyDistr...
Man plans, and God laughs/
Like the ant and the grasshopper./
(But the real version. Where the ant let the grasshopper die)
-Today's A Softer World. Not the first time that it's had transhumanist sentiments.
Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace! Hail the Son of Righteousness! Light and life to all He brings, Ris'n with healing in His wings. Mild He lays His glory by, Born that man no more may die; Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth.
--Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (traditionally, the third verse -- starts at 2:52 in the linked video)
An unusual choice, to be sure. But notwithstanding the obvious religious content, I actually find this piece of the hymn to be a beautiful expression of genuine transhumanist sentiment. We've previousl...
Biscuit: The only loss you experience, is the loss you feel. As of today, I have no leg, and yet I've lost nothing. You have let the loss of your body part shape you into something weak and insane.
...
Duv: Your philosophy! Your source of strength! It's a joke! Close your eyes to the pain all you want, the results are still there! I'm still flightless and you're crawling!
Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious.
Chesterton's Fence, G.K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic
It's not terribly useful in its original form -- as the title of the book suggests, it's used heavily to support a rather primitive appeal to tradition (and through that, an appeal to consequences of a belief). The underlying knowledge, however, is useful: complex structures, especially designed ones but even randomly developed ones, often reflect complex environmental stimuli. Sometimes these stimuli are not useful; indeed, the nature of complex environmental stimuli means that they often change significantly over time. But as much use as there can be in reinventing the wheel to better grok how a wheel works, there are just as equally advantages and uses in using researching backwards from end results.
That's been posted before, and appears to have made it far enough into the LW vernacular to be used without explanation although not without scare quotes. You do give more context for it, though.