I should have loved biology • Hacker News Board

Re: I should have loved biology

#51

Post by Kaze404 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #39

"I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names" This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don't explain why the names are needed. Take music theory, it has an insane amount of vocabulary and concepts to assimilate, but if you watch any of the popular music theory videos on YouTube around these days, you get a glimpse of what mastering those terms looks…

This is entirely off topic, but the way you phrased your comment makes me think you have experience learning music theory. If so, could you share some resources that you found helpful? I've always wanted to learn music theory (and put it to practice), but besides hiring a teacher I could never get solid recommendations of where to start.

Re: I should have loved biology

#52

Post by mannykannot » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #8

m463 wrote: post #2

I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…

> The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY. Biology is pretty notorious for most stuff being arbitrary. There is no model. People who say there's a model, they're talking about something else - sometimes, a literal Platonic ideal of biology, that makes for an appealing pop science course, but not knowledge that like, helps you design experiments or better use drugs or whatever. From the article: > It was…

> Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts.

They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance. It is the natural gift of being able to identify the key features of the forest despite the preponderance of obfuscating trunks and branches. It is the gift of seeing some sort of order behind cirucmstances in which almost all the details are accidental.

Math synthesizes complexity; in biology, you have to analyze what's given.

Re: I should have loved biology

#53

Post by flobosg » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

minhaz23 wrote: post #27

Beside the links provided in the article, does anyone have any other articles, books, courses, lectures, youtubers, key people, papers, journals, interesting links/talks/podcasts/quotes they'd like to share to help others on their journy to understand biology better? Thank you!

Molecular Biology of the Cell[1] is a typical recommendation.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Sixth-Bruce-Alberts...

Re: I should have loved biology

#54

Post by StillBored » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

_jahh wrote: post #49

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #41

After 15 years in tech and a life-changing psychedelic trip, I decided to self-learn genetic engineering and share it with the world[1][2] while I look for a meaningful biotech venture to found. What you can do today from your kitchen or home lab is remarkable. For instance, I taught myself PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and recently published my first genetic sequence at GenBank from fungi that I cultured, extracte…

this terrifies me, some crazy makes a gene drive super corn pathogen and civilization crashes.

Enjoy:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93448.The_White_Plague

Re: I should have loved biology

#55

Post by kortilla » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #40

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #39

"I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names" This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don't explain why the names are needed. Take music theory, it has an insane amount of vocabulary and concepts to assimilate, but if you watch any of the popular music theory videos on YouTube around these days, you get a glimpse of what mastering those terms looks…

> what superpowers does mastering those languages unlock? Maybe think of it this way: it isn't unlocking the superpowers, it's an ultrafilter. If you aren't capable of performing precise and contextualized recall of trivia, then your engagement with the subject is going to be limited to diletanttery. When I was a biochemist, there were several critical instances when recall of some minor thing that I had learned year…

House was effective because the writers made him that way. The real top people in fields are not walking encyclopedias. They have extremely good grasps of core principles, key findings, relationships between ideas, etc.

Specific names and other specifics that don’t fundamentally affect things are not things they clutter their minds with.

Re: I should have loved biology

#56

Post by koeng » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

I started out in computers, spent most my career in biotechnology, and right now spend about half and half in each (for the most part, I run a DNA cloning foundry where I clone new sequences. Need lots of software for that).

If there is one takeaway from working in both fields, I think it is that a lot of computer scientists believe their systems are deep - it is nothing compared to biology.

Biotechnology also has a fundamentally different culture than tech, and so there can be some culture shock between the two. This is improving - I think the author would have loved synthetic biology :)

Re: I should have loved biology

#57

Post by acomjean » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #17

Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.

bioinformatics (mixing computation and biology) is a profession that is well paid. I'm have a comp-sci background and I work with computers in academia.

The pay may not be as high as straight engineering but is good enough to cause some grumblings.

Re: I should have loved biology

#58

Post by viraptor » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

redvenom wrote: post #47

m463 wrote: post #2

I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…

I'll tell you something about memorizing phyla, orders, families, genera, and species. If you've never had exposure to any of that, it might seem arbitrary. But now, go out in the woods and try and identify species you see. You can start with birds and mammals because they are the easiest. As you begin to do so, you can keep a record of them in a spreadsheet or notebook. Look up their biological classifications. All…

> As you begin to do so, you can keep a record of them in a spreadsheet or notebook.

This is useful, but probably because you're inverting the order here. You start with the observing and classification and end up using names rather than starting with "learn those names and matches".

Re: I should have loved biology

#59

Post by b34r » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

Given the mutable global state nature of biology, this actually seems like a perfect target to apply machine learning to essentially try trillions of combinations in parallel to uncover ideal states. Once we know the ideal states of cells that eliminate disease and optimize bodily function, we can reverse engineer the precision medicines to “tweak” the chemical balance of cells.

Re: I should have loved biology

#60

Post by awinter-py » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 5:08 AM UTC

this is my favorite blogger

his 'there's a gold rush on and I'm the shovel' article about his decision to leave programming for writing has always stuck with me

and nothing he's written since then has betrayed that voice (especially the post on 'you're using the wrong dictionary')