Beers: Conventional wisdom means that we have come up with a set of rules which over time we may have forgotten if we ever knew the reason why those rules were adopted in the first place. A Chesterton fence is a practice, a norm, or a habit that makes no sense to you, but that you should nonetheless recognize that it likely served some purpose in the past. There are many pieces of wisdom, the equivalent of stoplights in dessert town, that are focal points that allow us to organize and coordinate the activities of many people at very low transaction cost. Beers: We shouldn't underestimate the importance of those sorts of habits.