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Stuart_Armstrong comments on [Stub] The problem with Chesterton's Fence - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
Chesterton's Fence is not about precedents or maintaining prosperity. Essentially, it's about doing something without having a clue.
? I think the definition I use of Chesterton Fences may have expanded somewhat, until it's almost equivalent with Burkean conservatism, or a general argument against "we think that changing something traditional in society will bring benefits, so let's change it".
De gustibus, of course, but I prefer limited and hard definitions to ones that fuzzily expand until they're "almost equivalent" to a large and vague concept...
I see your point, but I don't think the original Chesterton's fence is a stable concept. Knowing why the person-who-built-the-fence, built the fence, is different from knowing why the fence was built (and allowed to stand). But, as you say, de gustibus (an expression I will steal from now on).
Your argument seems like saying, "Look, everyone said that the Y2K bug would cause terrible problems, but nothing happened."
Nothing happened, exactly because everybody was predicting terrible problems and so they fixed the bugs in advance. If people had been following your idea, they wouldn't have bothered to predict any problems or to fix the bugs, and it could easily have therefore caused terrible problems.
It's more like saying "look, everyone said pricing sulfur dioxide would cause great problems, but nothing really bad happened, because people and the market adapted naturally to the change".
So the Y2K bug is not an argument for "do nothing if you're heavily involved with computers", but it is an argument for "do nothing if you have no connection with the computer industry (including funding, etc...) because it seems to have a decent track record of sorting out its own problems".
I agree that "taking down this fence is going to cause society to collapse" is almost always false, at least when there is any real danger of the fence being taken down.
The same thing likely applies to statements like "programming an AGI without a tremendous amount of care about its exact goals is going to destroy the world."
I'd argue we have rather more experience of taking down fences which people cling to, than of programming AGI goals...
For the Chesterton's Fence objection to properly have applied to the NHS, it would have had to have been the case that no one could explain the historical lack of NHS. Yet I think it's pretty easily explained by governments' values over time: first kleptocratic, then libertarianish, and only becoming utilitarian roughly around the time of the NHS, to simplify heavily.
The more advance versions of the fence apply even if the reasons for the fence are unknown or bad (or badly explained).
I'm not sure I've encountered these more advanced versions. is there a link?
See for instance https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/mistakes-3-breaking-chestertons-fence-in-the-presence-of-bull/
Indeed. Your examples seem to be simply changes. Not every change is a fence, and for that matter, not every taking down of a fence is done because no-one thought for five minutes about why it was there. All of those examples were intensively discussed at the time. Those opposed spoke at length about why it was there and why it should stay there, and those for spoke at length about why it should be taken down. In particular, extending the franchise, in the UK, was a process whose major part extended across nearly a century, step by step from the 1832 Reform Act to women getting equal voting rights in 1928.