Comment by ethanwillis
9 hours ago
I'm sure people will take this the wrong way, but a lot of the people who are on HN and who orbit technology circles in SF are really just not actually intellectually curious people.
They might like to think they are, they might try to pretend they are, but when pushed they're simply not.
Look at all of the groupthink that is perpetuated nonstop while they also proclaim they're creating, investing in, etc. so many unique ideas. Yet year after year it's the same thing in a different color.
What they actually are is interested in money and prestige. So give it a little time and they'll learn enough about biology to try and get some validation from their peers with comments. If money actually pours into bio that is.
I'd go even further: what happens in biology is antithetical to the way software people think.
The HN/YC crowd generally has software brain: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba..., "when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code". Biology doesn't work like that most of the time, it's squishy and weird and unpredictable, and the models we have of biology (including genomics!) are faulty at best, misleading at worst. I've supervised PhD-students and it takes some time for people's brains to be comfortable with that squishiness, that random behaviour, that 'putting A into the system only rarely produces B and we don't really know why but we do it anyway' view of the world. Software engineers struggle, even abhor that kind of world, which is why you rarely see them being interested in it; and if they work in it, outcomes are sometimes amazing and Nobel Prize worthy, more often nonsense that silently disappears.
Biologists have a superiority complex about the “complexity” and “singular difficulty” of their field born out of a need for justification for the vast deficiencies of their field’s progress compared to others. Its an elaborate coping mechanism where the people in other fields which make envyable progress (eg software, cs etc)- sighted enough to have recognized and avoided the decrepitude of biological sciences- are in fact the ignorant ones who “struggle” , “incapable of grasping” the way that biologists think. Its an inversion designed to obscure the harsh truth that these outsiders in fact see quite clearly the way that biologists think and it is the reason they have so diligently avoided their field.
The deficiencies of biology's progress as a field? The decrepitudes of biological sciences? Do we live in the same timeline?
You're simply wrong. I say this as a computer scientist who ended up studying and working in bioinformatics for a period of time.
The reason I don't now? It's that people don't understand biology enough to understand the currently untapped potential and definitely not the advances that have happened. So they allocate money to yet another todo app, food delivery app, crypto wallet, or yet another finetune of a model to talk like a caveman.
> Biology doesn't work like that most of the time, it's squishy and weird and unpredictable, and the models we have of biology (including genomics!) are faulty at best, misleading at worst.
interesting. i came to tech from a molecular biology background and my impression was the opposite. biology is predictable most of the time, but sometimes random and squishy. the trick is that we’re trying to learn why things work predictably and what causes the variations, and that why/how unknown is what is most uncomfortable for people outside of the disciplines.
i’m not fully disagreeing with you because it sounds like you have experiences that inform your perspective. i find it interesting because my own experiences bring me in from the inverse perspective.
No biologist stays an essentialist for long, that is for sure.
The world of uncertainty and the idea that we might not be able to understand everything or control it as much as we'd like.
It seems to me a lot of the modern "tech-bro culture" is trying to control the future and reduce uncertainty: Stop death, merge with the robotic super intelligence, colonize Mars to escape Earth inevitable decay, etc.
I'm still waiting for the startups claiming to reduce entropy or solve the false vacuum decay