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Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

euronews.com

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Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#51

Post by la64710 »

pfisherman wrote: post #24

The headline is sensationalized. They did a virtual screen of a large compound library. QSAR / QSPR / Virtual Screening has been around since the late 1950s. The secret sauce here was the large experimental dataset - on the order of 10^5 compounds - they generated to train the model. Maybe the explainability part is kind of novel for a neural network based approach; but not clear that you couldn’t identify substructu…

Exactly , it seems the overall process of sorting and filtering vast amount of data remains the same only that the AI component is an additional tool to the toolchest to accelerate the process.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#52

Post by wolverine876 »

Jensson wrote: post #49
wolverine876 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These claims on HN, about every OP, really lack credibility for me. Either HN commenters are the only smart people in the world or we are misleading each other. At the same time, we are dissuading each other from engaging in a world of intellect, knowledge and innovation. HN is a forum of intellectual curiosity. The near-universal critiques are the opposite of that.

> These claims on HN, about every OP, really lack credibility for me. Do you trust journalists that much? Have you ever read an article about something you are an expert on? You shouldn't trust articles that much. I trust HN discussions much more since there are plenty of people who will weigh in when things are wrong or misrepresented, unlike these articles. Edit: Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, that was what this is call…

You've lept to a conclusion about what I trust and then how that putative trust drives my reasoning. I'm not the imaginary person you are addressing.

> I trust HN discussions much more since there are plenty of people who will weigh in when things are wrong or misrepresented, unlike these articles.

Why are those people, with no responsibility, little expertise, etc., more trustworthy than other people? It seems like the common bias of social media - for some reason, people trust strangers with no credibility, which exposes them to the enormous amount of misinformation and just BS that now floods our world. If the article author or a professor wrote the same thing in a HN comment, it seems like you'd believe it.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#53

Post by 29athrowaway »

hackernewds wrote: post #27
29athrowaway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovered in some random dirt from Maine.

"Discovered" like penicillin? It irks me when it's presented as accidental, when it does go through testing after

Penicillin was also accidental? I don't understand the point.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#54

Post by Jensson »

wolverine876 wrote: post #52
Jensson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These claims on HN, about every OP, really lack credibility for me. Do you trust journalists that much? Have you ever read an article about something you are an expert on? You shouldn't trust articles that much. I trust HN discussions much more since there are plenty of people who will weigh in when things are wrong or misrepresented, unlike these articles. Edit: Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, that was what this is call…

You've lept to a conclusion about what I trust and then how that putative trust drives my reasoning. I'm not the imaginary person you are addressing. > I trust HN discussions much more since there are plenty of people who will weigh in when things are wrong or misrepresented, unlike these articles. Why are those people, with no responsibility, little expertise, etc., more trustworthy than other people? It seems like…

> Why are those people, with no responsibility, little expertise, etc., more trustworthy than other people?

I don't trust them, I trust the discussion in aggregate. The discussion includes people on all sides in a healthy forum. If you are on a subreddit you are in an echo chamber so many voices will be missing, but HN has good representation of experts and people from all sorts of fields so I trust these discussions to unearth better truths than what a typical journalist can.

> If the article author or a professor wrote the same thing in a HN comment, it seems like you'd believe it.

No, if they wrote the article in a comment with that headline it would get comments saying why it is wrong, just like here. The ability for people like you to object is why I trust it more.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#55

Post by wolverine876 »

timr wrote: post #50
wolverine876 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These claims on HN, about every OP, really lack credibility for me. Either HN commenters are the only smart people in the world or we are misleading each other. At the same time, we are dissuading each other from engaging in a world of intellect, knowledge and innovation. HN is a forum of intellectual curiosity. The near-universal critiques are the opposite of that.

Worked in the space of AI QSAR/QSPR. Parent comment is correct in all respects. Science journalism is abysmal and hyperbolic, and that's why you see people tearing into headlines like this. I don't know "euronews.next", but...let's just say that it doesn't inspire a great sense of journalistic integrity? For greater context, in the drug discovery world, "explainability" of QSAR/QSPR has been a longstanding goal. It's…

> Science journalism is abysmal and hyperbolic

Do you see the irony? What better describes social media? Personally, I see plenty of good, valuable, useful science journalism; it's got plenty of flaws, like any human endeavor - including social media comments.

But attacking journalism is normalized, and thus people know they can do it without being questioned and get some social media likes from it. It would be interesting to see the same responses turned on individual social media comments - what flaws could we find? :)

> For greater context, in the drug discovery world, "explainability" of QSAR/QSPR has been a longstanding goal. It's (rightly) not considered sufficient to have "black box" models that make predictions -- it's too expensive and risky to carry drug candidates into the lab based on the output of an algorithm, so subject-matter experts want to know why the algorithms are making the predictions that they make.

Ironically, that's what the OP is about; that was the point of their research.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#56

Post by wolverine876 »

Jensson wrote: post #54
wolverine876 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've lept to a conclusion about what I trust and then how that putative trust drives my reasoning. I'm not the imaginary person you are addressing. > I trust HN discussions much more since there are plenty of people who will weigh in when things are wrong or misrepresented, unlike these articles. Why are those people, with no responsibility, little expertise, etc., more trustworthy than other people? It seems like…

> Why are those people, with no responsibility, little expertise, etc., more trustworthy than other people? I don't trust them, I trust the discussion in aggregate. The discussion includes people on all sides in a healthy forum. If you are on a subreddit you are in an echo chamber so many voices will be missing, but HN has good representation of experts and people from all sorts of fields so I trust these discussions…

Do you see what social media has wrought? How can you trust the herd mentality? Is there a greater source of misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance in the history of humanity? (No.)

Regarding things I already know - or even OPs I've read but which most commenters have not - HN is mostly misinformation.

I participate in HN, obviously - only because I've found nothing better (a complement to it, in a way, and maybe there's no known way to improve).

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#57

Post by Jensson »

wolverine876 wrote: post #56
Jensson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are those people, with no responsibility, little expertise, etc., more trustworthy than other people? I don't trust them, I trust the discussion in aggregate. The discussion includes people on all sides in a healthy forum. If you are on a subreddit you are in an echo chamber so many voices will be missing, but HN has good representation of experts and people from all sorts of fields so I trust these discussions…

Do you see what social media has wrought? How can you trust the herd mentality? Is there a greater source of misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance in the history of humanity? (No.) Regarding things I already know - or even OPs I've read but which most commenters have not - HN is mostly misinformation. I participate in HN, obviously - only because I've found nothing better (a complement to it, in a way, and ma…

I'm not sure what you mean? There are commenters here who are wrong, yes. But the discussion in aggregate usually have some people who are correct. Those people are missing in these articles, these articles are mostly just a person who is wrong about a lot of things. There are some nuggets of truths in them but you can't trust any sensational headlines to be representative of what actually happened.

If you are saying that most discussions here on HN have zero people who are right, then I strongly disagree. It is very rare for there to be no truths in HN discussions. On reddit however it is very common for me to see not a single reasonable post to be found.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#58

Post by schneems »

RiDiracTid wrote: post #32
schneems wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I extremely know nothing about this field. Would a naive approach would to have a coordinated “crop rotation” type tactic where all hospitals switched to a primary antibiotic every C years/months do anything?

Empirically, many bacteria seem to be able to acquire resistance in a way that doesn't significantly impact their fitness, meaning they can basically get new resistances and keep old ones for almost arbitrarily long, so the crop rotation idea would fail massively. https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/35/5/901/2680377

Good to know, thanks for the explanation!

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#59

Post by sfilmeyer »

shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote: post #39
marcusverus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A government which can't regulate effectively can't be trusted with a monopoly. Anyway, how does holding antibiotics in reserve help anything? Why let the bugs evolve resistance to one antibiotic at a time, rather than hitting them them with multiple antibiotics and thus raising the evolutionary hurdle to resistance? Was this strategy designed by the bad guys in a Jacky Chan movie?

Anyway what? You don't win an internet argument by dumping some random quote. If you have some ideas, do share them.

They did share an idea.

> rather than hitting them them with multiple antibiotics and thus raising the evolutionary hurdle to resistance?

It was surrounded by some rudeness and is probably a poor idea (but I'm no expert), but it was an idea.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#60

Post by timr »

wolverine876 wrote: post #55
timr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked in the space of AI QSAR/QSPR. Parent comment is correct in all respects. Science journalism is abysmal and hyperbolic, and that's why you see people tearing into headlines like this. I don't know "euronews.next", but...let's just say that it doesn't inspire a great sense of journalistic integrity? For greater context, in the drug discovery world, "explainability" of QSAR/QSPR has been a longstanding goal. It's…

> Science journalism is abysmal and hyperbolic Do you see the irony? What better describes social media? Personally, I see plenty of good, valuable, useful science journalism; it's got plenty of flaws, like any human endeavor - including social media comments. But attacking journalism is normalized, and thus people know they can do it without being questioned and get some social media likes from it. It would be inter…

> Do you see the irony? What better describes social media?

Social media is not one thing. You've got multiple people in this thread who know the subject, in detail, telling you that the headline is wrong. These aren't youtube video comments.

> Ironically, that's what the OP is about; that was the point of their research.

Yes, I know. That's why I wrote that. The research is about a relatively obscure technical problem. The headline made it sound like a revolutionary breakthrough in antibiotic development.

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