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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#191

Post by kashyapc »

Speaking of biology ... I'm about 60% through the 720-page tome, 'Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst' by Robert Sapolsky. "Electrifying" indeed, as a blurb at the back of the book puts it. The narrative structure is quite compelling, where Sapolsky starts by examining a behavior in the present and gradually zooms out, all the way back to evolutionary factors from millennia ago. The book also provides helpful primers on neuroscience, endocrinology (important to understand the impact of hormones), and proteins. Take a good three months to read it; really.

So far my only quibble is that Sapolsky cites the infamous "priming" study from 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', which the author, Daniel Kahneman, himself has retracted it elsewhere. This is forgivable, as the retraction from Kahneman (Feb 2017) and the release of 'Behave' (May 2017) were too close. Though I'll keep an eye for other transgressions.

Regardless of my quibbling, 'Behave' has so far been an exhilarating read; it covers an insane amount of ground, all while not losing sight of its goal—a better understanding of human nature.

Don't let the page count discourage you—you'll quickly warm up to Sapolsky's loquacious writing style, peppered with tasteful humor and a deep love for science. And don't skip the footnotes; plenty of interesting bits in there. (Get the hardcover edition if you can, it's much less unwieldy during back-and-forth flipping, among other benefits.)

Re: I should have loved biology

#192

Post by bregma »

john_minsk wrote: post #184
jeromenerf wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love biology yet I could not have described more opposite interests. I have zero interests in producing gmo in my kitchen, but I am definitely hooked on plants interaction and selection in open fields. Biology is pretty broad a field. Science of the living.

Not to start a holy war, but what is the difference at the end of the day? Isn't one just faster?

There was an instructive novel written by Mary Shelley on that very topic. Recommended reading.

Re: I should have loved biology

#193

Post by benhurmarcel »

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.

In the end it's not something particular to biology. It's particular to software engineering in the US. Compare to any other technical field and you'll find that the outlier are US software engineers.

Re: I should have loved biology

#194

Post by valesco »

watwut wrote: post #169
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cant understand why things happen if you don't know when they happen (the other way around works just fine, which is why quizzes on tv love to ask random dates). You need to know when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in relation to when other events happened to help you understand why he did what he did. If you think he conquered Gaul after becoming dictator your entire narrative changes. It sucks, but you really do ne…

I think that this is wrong. It is easier to remember sequence of events in logical order then arbitrary dates. You really dont need to remember exact date of when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in order to understand his motivations. You need context in enough details in order to understand motivations. > It sucks, but you really do need to know a lot of whens to help you contextualize the why. I always managed to memori…

When you know the date of an event, you can locate others events that are not in a direct relationship with it. You can then situate the evolution of distant lines of events without needing to memorize too many dependency graphs.

Re: I should have loved biology

#195

Post by shock »

hnmm23 wrote: post #117
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to scholar.google.com, search "autoimmune disease treatment", filter by last five years, use sci-hub to read the paper. Repeat until you learn enough to find your next step forward.

i mean i want to learn about everything before that too, like history, links, diagnoses - to be sure, as well as testing/tracking metrics and the likes, also reading is the easy part, but what about understanding? when im running into medical terms/and other things im not familiar with or equipped to understand, where do you go? bc i find myself ending down different rabbit holes and my productivty diminishes and my…

http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Re: I should have loved biology

#196

Post by nkrisc »

john_minsk wrote: post #184
jeromenerf wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love biology yet I could not have described more opposite interests. I have zero interests in producing gmo in my kitchen, but I am definitely hooked on plants interaction and selection in open fields. Biology is pretty broad a field. Science of the living.

Not to start a holy war, but what is the difference at the end of the day? Isn't one just faster?

One occurs naturally and thus happens all around us without human interaction. So there's value in understanding how things work without any input from humans.

One is more like studying a natural process while the other is the mechanics of that process.

Re: I should have loved biology

#197

Post by fakedang »

Eridrus wrote: post #14
eindiran wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a few problems that result in this sad state of affairs, and unfortunately they are not constrained to biology (eg 'why isn't mathematics taught with wonder?'). 1. Teachers are required to do evaluations, and the way we have settled on doing evaluations is giving students giant, shitty tests. In order to pass these tests, lots of rote memorization is required. 2. Five years of being forced to teach-…

I'm somewhat skeptical of this explanation since I went to a private secondary school in Australia where these pressures did not apply, and had the exact same experience with Biology where what we were taught was to memorize taxonomies that made me abandon the subject as early as possible.

Incidentally, for me it wasn't the taxonomies, but rather a teacher who was overly critical of me. He kept insulting my drawings, and since it was India, your parents too join in the "fun". For high school, I switched my stream to computer science almost immediately. It was only in my final years in engineering school (chemical engineering) where I began to get into Machine learning applications for biological processes under a really enthusiastic and encouraging professor (who ended up being a coauthor on a number of papers), that I really began to rekindle an interest in biology.

Funnily, earlier this year, my now-fiancee prepared for and wrote the MCAT, and since I sat along with her during her prep, I decided to give it a shot too, in spite of my relative lack of prep and a full time job on the sidelines. Managed to score a neat 514. Turns out, having a good teacher matters a lot.

Re: I should have loved biology

#198

Post by Perizors »

john_minsk wrote: post #184
jeromenerf wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love biology yet I could not have described more opposite interests. I have zero interests in producing gmo in my kitchen, but I am definitely hooked on plants interaction and selection in open fields. Biology is pretty broad a field. Science of the living.

Not to start a holy war, but what is the difference at the end of the day? Isn't one just faster?

I'd say that one is studying a plant and its interaction with the environment/other organisms whether the other is more interested in the inner works of a fungi. It is a matter os perspective, one is doing ecology and the other one is more weighted to genetics.

Re: I should have loved biology

#199

Post by FrankyHollywood »

Same can be said for almost any high-school class. In physics and mathematics you learn mostly tricks to get at an answer for a question, where the sole purpose of the question is entertaining students.

Only in my 20s I read biography's from people like Feynman (1) and Erdös (2). Great reads! Really make you exited about math or physics. I wonder if high-school teachers even know these persons. And if they do, why not talk about them?

(1) Surely you're joking mr Feynman

(2) The man who loved only numbers

Re: I should have loved biology

#200

Post by fakedang »

watwut wrote: post #189
brundolf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how nearly every STEM class I've ever taken has been (and really, things like history too). I retained a passing interest in math despite my classes. I was lucky to develop a foundational interest in programming before classes had the chance to ruin it. It's simply par for the course of our education system, at least in the United States. I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they we…

> I wonder how many talented scientists never got started because they were turned off by their first exposure to a subject. On the positive side, we dont need more scientists. There are too many people trying to be scientists leading to pretty shitty working conditions for PhDs and post docs.

On the negative side, there are too many scientists and professors who should not have been.
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