Chesterton’s Fence is the principle that one should not remove a fence until they understand why it was put there in the first place.

On the contrary, Admiral Grace Hopper’s maxim states “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’”.

if you do any sort of cost/benefit analysis of whether to make a change, the status quo always has a built in advantage: there’s no additional costs to adopting the status quo.

I find the strongest arguments in favor of making a change, and the strongest arguments in favor of keeping things as they are, and then I weigh those and make a decision.

the reason we should care about Chesterton’s Fence is that part of finding the best arguments for the status quo are finding the arguments that produced it.