Spot on. The immune system is a classifier. So it makes sense autoimmunity, in general, is a classification problem (triggered by infections or commensal dysbio

Spot on. The immune system is a classifier. So it makes sense autoimmunity, in general, is a classification problem (triggered by infections or commensal dysbiosis). Occam's razor favors this simpler hypothesis, and there's some convincing evidence out there in top journals. See introduction in this recent preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1 and other references in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21917884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21917884. To elaborate a bit further on the first paper, our own commensal bacteria mimic important proteins to avoid being recognized as invaders by the immune system. The immune system has probably evolved to use this commensal mimicry to update its beliefs after an infection sort of how an online classifier does and re-establish equilibrium. Dybiosis, disrupting your commensals, can throw this system out of balance and trigger autoimmunity. This can also happen because of an infection.