Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
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I've seen Chesterton's quote used or misused in ways that assume that an extant fence must have some use that is both ① still existent, and ② beneficial; and that it can only be cleared away if that use is overbalanced by some greater purpose.
But some fences were created to serve interests that no longer exist: Hadrian's Wall, for one. The fact that someone centuries ago built a fence to keep the northern barbarians out of Roman Britain does not mean that it presently serves that purpose. Someone who observed Hadrian's Wall without knowledge of the Roman Empire, and thus the wall's original purpose, might correctly conclude that it serves no current military purpose to England.
For that matter, some fences exist to serve invidious purposes. To say "I don't see the use of this" is often a euphemism for "I see the harm this does, and it does not appear to achieve any counterbalancing benefit. Indeed, its purpose appears to have always been to cause harm, and so it should be cleared away expeditiously."
Right, this is indeed a misuse. The intended meaning is obviously that you ought to figure out the original reason for the fence and whether it is still valid before making changes. It's a balance between reckless slash-and-burn and lost purposes. This is basic hygiene in, say, software development, where old undocumented code is everywhere.