Chesterton's Fence

A reformer finds a fence across a road with no obvious purpose and says, clear it away. The wiser reformer says: go and find out why it is there, and when you can tell me, I may let you remove it. The resource being traded is information. The fence is cheap to remove and expensive to understand, so the temptation is always to remove it first and understand later, usually in the form of whatever the fence was holding back.

The model earns its keep in inherited systems: a codebase, a bureaucracy, a house. Every odd rule was once a fix. Some fixes are for problems that have gone away, and those fences can go. The point is not to keep every fence; it is to ask the question first, because the asking is cheap and the not-asking occasionally is not.

The failure mode is the opposite one: treating every fence as sacred because nobody can remember. Chesterton put a time limit on it. Find out, then decide. A fence nobody can explain after an honest search is just a fence.

— G. K. Chesterton, 1929