appeal to tradition

We’ve always done it this way. That is a description, not a reason.

Wrong: “This is how we’ve always run the release.”

Right: “What breaks if we change it?”

Longevity isn’t evidence. Plenty of bad practices are extremely old.

The fallacy treats duration as proof. But a practice can persist because it works, or because nobody’s questioned it, and the age of the thing doesn’t distinguish between those.

The legitimate version: longstanding practice is real evidence that something hasn’t catastrophically failed yet, and that’s worth something. Chesterton’s fence applies—find out why it’s there before removing it. Finding out is the part people skip in both directions.

Now go ask why the fence is there.