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Comment by jfengel

Sounds like an excellent analogy: "We've been doing all these mine-detecting drills, but nobody ever gets blown up. We should stop doing mine-detecting drills." It's wise to take advantage of changes, but it's also wise to ensure that you're not taking down Chesterton's Fence[1] without knowing why the fence was put up.

Some processes, norms, and ideologies exist for reasons that aren't obvious. It's often not difficult to find somebody to explain them to you, but you have to be prepared to genuinely listen to the answer. It's easy to be impatient when you see them as getting in your way, and the first explanation you get may not actually be a very good one. (If you don't know why the fence was put up there's a good chance others won't either -- but that doesn't mean that an unsatisfactory explanation implies that there isn't a satisfactory one.)

That does slow you down, and that's hard when you're not the one who gets harmed by violating those norms, processes, and ideologies. But that doesn't mean nobody gets hurt, and such harms have a way of making society around you worse though mechanisms you don't see -- even though they do end up affecting you, too, eventually.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

parent jfengel 5 years ago

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