The parable of the thermometer

Imagine youre the first guy in your tribe to discover temperature and make a termometer. You can measure temperature of people now. You notice a pattern: most people have a temperature around 37C. But a few have a temperature of 40+C, and they soon die. You discover that being above 40C is a good predictive factor for death this week. You give a name to this condition: hyperthermia.

You also notice that the ice makes things colder. You have to trek all the way to the mountaintop to get it down to your savannah, but its worth checking if it can coll down people and save them.

All people, when ice is applied, cool down to 37C. Some people respond to ice treatment and get better. Others dont, and they die.

Unbeknownst to you: Ice responders are a mix of heatstroke victims and fever people with overactive fever response to infection.

Ice non-responders are a mix of people with proper fever response to infection (they would have lived if you didnt apply ice) and people too heavily infected for immune response to cope (they would have died no matter what)

Depending on the proportions of each of 4 groups, clinical trials will determine ice as a strong or weak hyperthermia treatment.

But the issue is that the condition of "hyperthermia" mixes entropic processes with defensive processes!

Insight: thermometers cant distinguish between entropic hyperthermia and defensive hyperthermia. In aging, single number metrics like epigenetic clocks cant straightforwardly distinguish entropic and defensive changes. Bringing the metric down can save some people and kill others.