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“Error is the engine of evolution.”
Stewart Brand
The drugs were killing people.
In April 1989 the safety board stopped the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial.
For years, cardiologists prescribed encainide and flecainide to suppress abnormal heartbeats after an attack. The logic seemed airtight: if irregular rhythms trigger sudden death, suppressing the beat should save lives.
The study tested that assumption across more than 1,700 patients.
When the safety board compared the double-blind columns, 56 patients on the active drugs died, compared to 22 on the placebo.
Halting the trial stopped a lethal practice that was quietly killing thousands of people each year.
The stakes in medicine are life and death, but the same rule applies to any system. Testing an assumption exposes you to temporary downside to discover what actually works.
I face a low-stakes version of this tradeoff on the Trends.vc email join page.
The page converts above 20%. Pushing for a higher conversion rate means running split tests.
When a baseline is already high, most new variants perform worse.
Each test routes visitors to an unproven design. Some variants shed subscribers before we restore the original baseline.
The short-term numbers look worse.
Short-term downside risk is the price of testing. Running an experiment means accepting temporary dips to discover what actually works.
When an offer or routine is already working well, your natural instinct is to leave it alone. Testing carries immediate downside risk. Why touch something that works?
In 1973 a biologist named Leigh Van Valen looked at extinction rates across the fossil record. Within any group of organisms, the probability of extinction stays roughly constant regardless of how long a species has already survived. Age buys no safety.
His explanation was simple: competing species keep evolving, so improving only keeps you level.
Major journals rejected the paper.
So Van Valen founded a journal called Evolutionary Theory and made his manuscript the first paper it published.
He named the principle after the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.
The Red Queen forces Alice to sprint in place: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Standing still guarantees that entropy and competing operators will overtake you.
Most experiments pay nothing. Most attempts drag your metrics down before you find what works.
Each attempt at better opens a door to worse. You pay the short-term drop to find the rare change that compounds.
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What working routine will you test to make it better?
