the sense of “everyone but me is in on the joke, there is a Thing that I don’t understand myself but is the most important Thing, and I must approximate or imitate or cargo-cult the Thing, and anybody who doesn’t is bad.”

I generally try to apply Chesterton's fence when dealing with inherited code.

there’s a difference between proper epistemic humility and just plain cargo-culting

The sensation of total unknowability

Chesterson’s Fence investigation

The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.