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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#271

Post by Rochus »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #263
Rochus wrote: post #155

This is about molecular biology , which is only one of many branches of biology . The biggest books I ever bought were those on molecular biology and biochemistry. Huge and weighing several kilos. Until then I did not know that it was possible to produce such large paperbacks at all. Some of these books are also among the best I have ever seen in terms of design and didactics. This is also necessary because the area…

> My entry into the field was when I did a PhD in molecular biology and biophysics after ten years of professional experience as a computer scientist. That was almost twenty years ago now, and I still have the feeling that I'm only scratching the surface. Wait... I know there are cross-disciplines that let you get into certain programs, but you skipped and entire undergrad's worth of core classes in Biology, Chemistr…

> That really is amazing, and kind of disheartening as a person with a BSc in Cellular/Molecular biology

It was an interdisciplinary PhD and it took me six years to complete, the first two essentially to learn the basics and understand the problem.

> I honestly had a much greater fascination in Microbiology

Microbiology is extremely interesting; I also have a couple of books (Brock etc.).

Re: I should have loved biology

#272

Post by throwaway316943 »

ardy42 wrote: post #239
throwaway316943 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way. Reading, writing, speaking, logic, geometry, mathematics, and programming along with a whirlwind tour of all the good and bad ideas throughout history then pack it up. Instead we have a public babysitting service that pretends to add…

> It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way. That's utopian and a rather unrealistic, incomplete view. Education is also about imparting a fundamental shared body of knowledge as well, and it also has to deal with a very wide diversity of ability and motivation. Your proposal…

It’s not particularly utopian, I’m proposing reducing the number of subjects and the duration of public education which should allow for a larger share of the current educational resources to be spent on each student. This is to enable those resources to be spent preparing the student to solve problems themselves. I limited the list to a minimum of topics necessary to consume, produce, synthesize and communicate ideas and information. Programming is in there because I consider it as necessary as literacy and numeracy since it allows you to reify some of your cognition in the same way that writing notes or performing a calculation does. Civics doesn’t belong in that list because it’s not a fundamental skill, it’s not even taught in many countries. A student who has been taught to read comprehensively, communicate clearly and think critically should have no trouble acquiring that knowledge.

Re: I should have loved biology

#273

Post by sjg007 »

This is a great blog post. Lots of great startup ideas in it. Nice to see it connecting across disciplines and domains. Also a great explication of how technology drives discovery.

Re: I should have loved biology

#274

Post by veddox »

Balgair wrote: post #252
veddox wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. You probably won't understand 10% of what you read. Better: go to your local university library, check out a good medicine/biology textbooks, and read that. Then go read the papers.

Per the article, a deep dive is likely better than a general overview. Also, OP says to repeat until it clicks, which is generally correct. But the real issue still stands: Bio is hyper complex and it takes a long time to get used to the nomenclature and ideas.

> But the real issue still stands: Bio is hyper complex and it takes a long time to get used to the nomenclature and ideas.

That is exactly the point, which I believe the article author either glossed over or didn't fully appreciate.

I have a B.Sc. in general biology and am about to get my M.Sc. in ecology. I do scientific work at a university and read (ecological) research papers every day. Out of curiosity, I just followed joshuamcginnis' advice and did the Google Scholar search.

I failed to understand the first three items that came up.

The basic principles of biology are usually not actually that complicated, at least when you compare them to particle physics or compiler design or stuff like that. But biology is still hugely, hugely complex, because you simply have so many interacting parts - and yes, you only really understand it when you know about an appreciable fraction of those parts.

That is why they spent the first 1.5 years of our degree simply drilling knowledge into us as fast as we could absorb it. Because it's only once you have a broad overview of how everything works, that you can start to grasp (and reason about) how anything works in detail.

Biology is fascinating. There are millions of cool things to learn and yes, most teachers could probably do a much better job of teaching it. But if you really want to understand it, you just have to put in the effort.

Re: I should have loved biology

#275

Post by dekhn »

infinite8s wrote: post #258
dekhn wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is? I mean, that was my PhD, but I don't recall anybody ever using AFM for biology. Huh, apparently now they do.

Yeah lots of single molecule studies (strength of an actin filament, how much force needed to 'unfold' various proteins, etc). And this was 20 years ago when I was in grad school. Haven't kept up with the state of the art today.

interesting. all the people doing that in my day (also 20 years ago) used fluorescent microscopes (Ron Vale) with labelled protein. I can't see how you could unfold a protein using AFM, since it's in vacuum state, although I totally understand how optical tweezers would be fine to do this in solution.

Re: I should have loved biology

#276

Post by nynx »

dekhn wrote: post #275
infinite8s wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah lots of single molecule studies (strength of an actin filament, how much force needed to 'unfold' various proteins, etc). And this was 20 years ago when I was in grad school. Haven't kept up with the state of the art today.

interesting. all the people doing that in my day (also 20 years ago) used fluorescent microscopes (Ron Vale) with labelled protein. I can't see how you could unfold a protein using AFM, since it's in vacuum state, although I totally understand how optical tweezers would be fine to do this in solution.

AFMs work in both air and fluid environments.

Re: I should have loved biology

#277

Post by ardy42 »

throwaway316943 wrote: post #272
ardy42 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way. That's utopian and a rather unrealistic, incomplete view. Education is also about imparting a fundamental shared body of knowledge as well, and it also has to deal with a very wide diversity of ability and motivation. Your proposal…

It’s not particularly utopian, I’m proposing reducing the number of subjects and the duration of public education which should allow for a larger share of the current educational resources to be spent on each student. This is to enable those resources to be spent preparing the student to solve problems themselves. I limited the list to a minimum of topics necessary to consume, produce, synthesize and communicate idea…

> It’s not particularly utopian....A student who has been taught to read comprehensively, communicate clearly and think critically should have no trouble acquiring that knowledge.

That sounds pretty utopian. Firstly, I don't think you can reasonably assume any mass educational program will reliably produce students like that, so any program that assumes that will likely fail a large proportion of its students in pretty significant ways. Secondly, your exclusive focus what you define to be "fundamental skills" and exclusion of anything that you deem "not fundamental" seems more of a personal bias than a well-founded educational program. There certainly exist bright and highly-motivated students (perhaps you were one of them) who would build on that foundation and complete their education like you assume they would, but I'd judge they're a minority. Thirdly, there's a social aspect to education that your focus on skills misses. Things like civics need to be part of the curriculum, because even if a student would have no trouble learning the subject independently, there's no guarantee they would actually choose to do so. However, the American system of government (unlike some other systems) can't function without widespread civic knowledge and engagement.

Re: I should have loved biology

#279

Post by dmd »

kls wrote: post #182
MauranKilom wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not the same education system, but there are many things I no longer do explicitly that are nevertheless important for understanding the concept. Off the top of my head, for just mathematics: - Long division - Calculate limits - Curve sketching These aren't things I do by hand any more. But if I hadn't learned how to do them, I wouldn't be able to apply them to more advanced problems. From my extremely limit…

I would say the times tables is a good example, once you know the mechanics of multiplying 2 numbers you don't need to redundantly memorize the exact values of tables of numbers. The mechanics and how to solve for it are the important pieces to learn. Further I think it actually does more harm as it hinders the child's ability to look at numbers as placeholders and variables when they get into higher level maths. Spe…

The times table seems like a perfect example to me of a GREAT thing to memorize. It's only 36 facts (2 through 9 times each other, knowing that ab==ba), and from then on you don't have to do repeated addition.

Re: I should have loved biology

#280

Post by axiom92 »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #65
axiom92 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>life-changing psychedelic trip Fascinating stuff. Any chance you could expand on this?

I suffer from pretty bad depression and have been battling with it for a while using all available treatments. Someone recommended I try psilocybin mushrooms. I learned how to grow them, grew them and then had my wife help facilitate a safe well-intentioned trip using 7g of dried mushrooms. Happy to answer any questions about it. It was a profound experience. It isn't a cure but it's certainly a tool in my toolbox th…

Thanks!
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