Chesterton’s Fence


There's a moment in the CWT episode with Ezra Klein, where Klein talks about his perspective of Silicon Valley. He explains that the Silicon Valley model is about coming up with 20 ideas knowing only two of them will work. Klein doesn't favor this approach (always), opting for a better understanding of the problem before generating solutions (I lean this way too). In explaining his thoughts, Klein mentions Chesteron's Fence without further explanation. I had no idea what Chesterton's Fence was, so I followed the link to learn more. 

Chesterton's Fence is a parable by G.K. Chesterton about a guy who wants to remove a gate from a field. Someone tells them that they should get to know the history of the gate before deciding to remove it. It's considerably wise, yet unsurprising from a mind like Chesterton's. The point? Don't modify something until you know its ins and its outs. 

It's worth noting that Klein references the parable in the context of problem-solving for society. I assume that means government structures and other pillars that hold up everyday life. Not necessarily the next great digital product. I take that to indicate that the Silicon Valley approach works, but not for every problem. Likewise, Klein concedes, one can overthink a problem until their blue in the face (my words).

I like Chesterton's parable. I also enjoy Klein's juxtaposition of the two approaches to problem-solving. My preference is Klein's preference to get to know a problem all around first. However, not every challenge offers space for that kind of discovery, nor does every project need that type of attention. I want to learn to temper my tendency toward over understanding with more generative approaches like the Silicon Valley model (at least in the name of experimentation).

Here’s the portion of the interview that I am referencing:

KLEIN: The tech conversations that I’m part of, when you go to these dinners and so on — it’s interesting. It’s like an intellectual culture that is very venture capitalist in its approach. So, it’s like, “Here are 20 ideas. They’re all very interesting. Nineteen of them are probably quite wrong, not even a little wrong, like very wrong. But that last one might be great, really important, and if you could just figure out which one it is . . .”

Now, that works really well when the question is money, and it works less well when the question is, you’re trying to rebuild society in the image of your own ideas.

I have heard you on Eric Weinstein’s podcast recently, and the word you used for Eric was generative, and I think that’s actually a good word for what is prized out there. There’s a kind of generative thinking. Like, here’s a bunch of ideas, and they’re all kind of cool, kind of interesting, and they all may be very ungrounded in the bureaucratic or emotional or human or social realities of the thing they’re talking about.

They’re very smart people, puzzling about how a system works from the outside. On the one hand, that sometimes lets you cut away a lot of the BS and see what is going on, but oftentimes, it just makes you miss why the system works the way it does. It makes you miss the Chesterton’s fence dimensions of a system. I have been struck by the way I instinctually recoil from that way of thinking, even as I find a lot of what it comes up with interesting.

I think that the thing it has probably changed the most is, I have a little bit more appreciation, even than I did before, for the work that people do when they’re actually doing the hard work to understand bureaucratic and human and social complexity because that is something that, when you’re trying to build things, it will scale, or build ideas that really sound great when you say them at a party or something, you tend to underrate.

Again, I want to note that you really can go too far in the other direction and get trapped in the realities of how things exist now, and so be unable to imagine how they could exist in another dimension, or another reality, or in a future that you have built by creating Uber, or whatever it might be. But what is great as a way of thinking about ideas for new businesses, or even great as a way of thinking about investments, is not always great as a way of doing big-picture political and social analysis.

Source: “Ezra Klein.” Conversations with Tyler, conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/ezra-klein-2/.