is there a name for when you stop preventing a problem thinking it's solved and it comes back?
I'll give some examples:
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defunding the prevention of food born illnesses leads to them becoming an issue in 2026
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understaffing IT departments because "we don't have issues" then issues magically appear when support is taken away (surprised Pikachu face)
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a magic witch preforms a yearly protection circle around your house, but you don't want to pay any more because the gremlin infestation is gone, but they come back after the protection circle dissipates
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they put armed guards on merchant ships to prevent somali piracy, but then the pirates slowed down so the companies got complicit and now somali pirates are becoming an issue again
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i (in my infinite stupidity) don't take my medicine because I feel fine, then after a few days I turn into a disaster pile of suicidal ideation and take my medicine to fix it
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screw worms or something idk
but like the problem is in a loop where it just repeats forever because people don't realize what's preventing the issue
40 replies
hubris
Chesterton's fence
From a parable by G.K. Chesterton, suggesting that one should not remove a fence until one learns why it was erected in the first place.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
Fixed link
That’s a different link
Your link is broken, and that's the source anyway so I thought I'd just link directly
The url I posted doesn’t have any listed citations?
Seems like your client messed up the original link somehow. It works fine for me.
Ah true, might be a client problem
"Complacency" is a related idea but a bit more general.
Complacency gets close, though I think it's more for things where you don't act when you should, and what OP described could almost count as sabotage - the difference between not increasing the range of an alert system (complacency) and taking it down, in both cases because "we haven't had an alert in X time"
In 2013 Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a famous analogy about the US Supreme Court gutting the voting rights act. She said it's like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." That comes pretty close to your sentiment, OP.
In software development this is called a regression, and it is why we have regression tests. If you don't run or check the regression tests, the problems they're testing for can (and do) come back.
Like God said to Bender in Futurama "When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all". I propose calling this Bender's Paradox.
AKA the Sysadmin’s Creed
Vaccines and herd immunity
The best existing phrase I have is, "Dropping your guard."
It doesn't necessarily imply anything about why you dropped your guard, and only slightly implies that the bad thing happened while your guard was down.
We could coin a new phrase here by brainstorming. I'll start:
Fumbled the shield
Historical Recurrence
The gremlins always return. That's why the magic witch offers an annual subscription plan, to protect your investment from up to two types of folklore creatures, ranging from classical antiquity to the early modern period.
My house was haunted by ghosts so bought the annual subscription and they went away. I canceled the subscription and my house got repossessed!
In most of your examples I think the word is kakistocracy.
Chesterton's Fence is the first thing that comes to mind
FAFO
Chesterton's fence is mentioned several times here and it's a good heuristic to avoid the issue. The issue is called the Preparedness Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
There should be a word.
My father-in-law was not feeling well recently so we took him to the doctor. He presented with very high blood pressure and we were all asking him what happened to the blood pressure medicine he was taking for a decade. He replied, "I stopped taking it because last time they checked my blood pressure it was fine."
This absolutely needs a word.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the results of the USA's (first, in case this ends up needing extra specificity later) civil war are a couple other examples.
The concept you are describing is stopping preventative maintenance and discovering the consequences of said. I just don't have a word for it.
The thing with the witch sounds more like mafiosi protection money.
She sells you the circle, and if you don't pay, she casts summon goblins on your house
unwisdom
yes - recrudesence.
Amnesia
I don't know a specific word, but I always think of it as "closing the umbrella because you're not getting wet"
Rebound?
Like if you have migraine headache, take a preventative but when you miss it the headache comes back worse, that's a rebound headache.
Fucking around and finding out
To a certain extent you are describing normalcy bias but with an added bit of object impermanence.
I recommend this podcast episode on the subject: https://timharford.com/2022/08/cautionary-tales-south-pole-race-3/
Capitalism
survivorship bias preceding confirmation bias? i think this what you were looking for. for example, survivorship happens first because, antibiotics work on bacterial infection, the infection dies down and backed by science, and personal accounts, then cofirmation bias sets, you are getting better, so you stop the antibiotics prematurely because you cant be still "infected". the infection comes roaring back, now immune to antibiotics, person blames the doctor/Rx or hospital for giving them useless meds. you can apply the same to all the other 4 situations.
i think 1 is different, theres an intentional motivation to do it, the food companies have to pay alot more to sanatize thier food, if they eliminate it, then they dont have to spend so much time doing it. 2)is also intentional, the company cuts corner, they are aware of breaches(baking it into thier profits)
3,4,5 all fits with surviorship bias preceding confirmation bias.
Life.
In honor of his excellency “winning” the Iran war so many times, I propose we call it “pulling a Trump.”