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I’m a biologist, but for one reason or another, most of my friends ended up as engineers and programmers. As a result, I get exposed to biomedical reasoning that looks solid on its surface, but would end up causing more harm than good if taken seriously as a biohacker intervention program. Here’s one fallacy I see very often.
Let’s say you’re a local handyman. One day, you notice some shards of glass and puddles of water around your house. Something in your house broke! This is inconvenient, and you’re worried about the mold, so you decide to make sure that whatever happened doesn’t happen again.
You diagnose the origin of the breakage (the broken bulb in your ceiling), and make a replacement, from much stronger glass, that won’t easily break.
A week later, your house is gone. Turns out, the device you “repaired” was a sprinkler. Sprinklers are designed so that the heat from the fire breaks the sprinkler’s glass bulb. Broken bulb allows the water to leak out and quench the fire. By making the sprinkler glass unbreakable, you doomed your house to die in a fire.
Repairman’s paradox is a situation where making a part of the system more resilient ends up destroying the system quicker. In the spirit of the Sequences, you could say that “repairing a sprinkler during a fire” is a repairman’s fallacy.
Okay, the sprinkler example had to be kind of contrived, because these kinds of paradoxes occur very rarely in everyday repair of inanimate objects. Our devices weren’t produced by natural selection, they were designed by engineers. Rational design principles make sure that our our devices are modular, fully documented, and have few degrees of freedom, which makes their repair straightforward and intuitive. Plus, we expect devices to be repaired by skilled people with full knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. Our repairman would rightfully be ridiculed for not knowing what sprinklers are for.
However, in biology, there’s a huge conceptual gap between discovering a mechanism and discovering what the mechanism is for. It’s not so easy to draw a distinction between “damage” and “damage prevention” when organisms have to repair themselves (regenerate) all the time, and nobody has a full model of what all the mechanisms do, across all the nested levels of complexity. Repairing the gene often kills the cell, and killing the cell often saves the organism.
I see repairman’s paradox tripping up people coming to biology from other STEM fields like engineering, physics, and computer science. They see something that pattern-matches to “damage” and go full steam with initiatives to “repair” the “damage”, without being concerned about the context of what’s going on more broadly.
In biology, what first looks like damage often ends up being adaptive for the organism. And not adaptive in a “group selection” kind of way, where it helps the organism’s kin, but adaptive in a straightforward, fitness-increasing kind of way, where the organism with this “damage” has better fitness, health, and lifespan.
So this pattern of adaptive degradation ends up pretty much everywhere in biology, if you know what to look for. Some examples:
You’re probably fixing a sprinkler if: