RichardKennaway 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.
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.