I know how stupid some of the things we do as “biohackers” can look to medical professionals.
I get it.
I have spent my career in computer science, and now I watch people use AI to build software in ways that sometimes make me wince. They reinvent things we solved years ago. They miss fundamentals. They discover “new” ideas that already have names, literature, trade-offs, and decades of lessons behind them.
From the perspective of someone who has lived inside a field for years, some of it genuinely looks stupid.
But expertise can make us forget something important:
That is their journey.
They are allowed to explore badly. They are allowed to rediscover fundamentals. They are allowed to make mistakes that look embarrassingly obvious to people further down the road.
Expertise gives you a better map. It does not give you ownership of the territory.
It certainly does not grant moral superiority over the people still learning how to navigate it.
When the consequences are higher
There is one important difference with medicine: the consequences of being wrong can be far more serious than shipping bad code.
Experts absolutely should warn people about risk. They should point out blind spots. They should explain where experimentation becomes reckless. They should be able to say, “People have tried this before. Here is what we learned.”
The best experts do not stand at the gate protecting their status. They stand further up the trail saying:
I have been here before. There is a cliff around that corner. Here is what I wish someone had told me.
That is expertise at its best—not authority over curiosity, but guidance for it.