Zachary Jacobi

When you make continuous, incremental improvements to something, one of two things can happen. You can improve it a lot, or you can fall into superstition. I'm not talking about black cats or broken mirrors, but rather humans becoming addicted to whichever steps were last seen to work, instead of whichever steps produce their goal. I've seen superstition develop first hand. It happened in one of the places you might least expect it – in a biochemistry lab. In the summer of 2015, I found myself trying to understand which mutants of a certain protein were more stable than the wildtype. Because science is perpetually underfunded, the computer that drove the equipment we were using was ancient and frequently crashed. Each crash wiped out an hour or two of painstaking, hurried labour and meant we had less time to use the instrument to collect actual data. We really wanted to avoid crashes! Therefore, over the course of that summer, we came up with about 12 different things to do before each experiment (in sequence) to prevent them from happening. We were sure that 10 out of the 12 things were probably useless, we just didn't know which ten. There may have been no good reason that opening the instrument, closing, it, then opening it again to load our sample would prevent computer crashes, but as far as we could tell when we did that, the machine crashed far less. It was the same for the other eleven. More self-aware than I, the graduate student I worked with joked to me: "this is how superstitions get started" and I laughed along. Until I read two articles in The New Yorker. In The Score (How Childbirth Went Industrial), Dr. Atul Gawande talks about the influence of the Apgar score on childbirth. Through a process of continuous competition and optimization, doctors have found out ways to increase the Apgar scores of infants in their first five minutes of life – and how to deal with difficult births in ways that maximize their Apgar scores. The result of this has been a