If you buy a piece of property and discover a fence on it, you should figure out why it’s there before you tear it down. That’s Chesterton’s version of the precautionary principle. When you change things without knowing all the details, you might cause more trouble than you expected. <\/p>\n
This is one of the recurring political \/ social principles that Pigweed and I often mention on our podcast<\/a>. <\/p>\n We all struggle between two competing needs — the need to explore and investigate and find new things, and the need to protect (or at least not ruin) what we already have. It’s a hard balance to strike, because you can’t know all the consequences. E.g., is it a good idea to wrap all our food in plastic? It’s cheap, and it dramatically reduces food waste, but is there a downside<\/a>? <\/p>\n I was just listening to a story about people digging for lead, not knowing there was a lot of Uranium mixed in with the lead. Of course many of them died. <\/p>\n You can’t possibly see all the ways things can go wrong, but you should at least try. <\/p>\n Mark Shea likes to put it this way (or he used to, anyway), Step 1: “What could it hurt?” Step 2: “How could we have known?” <\/p>\n Along those lines, Are we harming children’s speech development by wearing masks?<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you buy a piece of property and discover a fence on it, you should figure out why it’s there before you tear it down. That’s Chesterton’s version of the precautionary principle. When you change things without knowing all the details, you might cause more trouble than you expected. This is one of the recurring … Continue reading “Chesterton’s fence and face masks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2204"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2208,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}