I should have loved biology too • Hacker News Board

Re: I should have loved biology too

#21

Post by sdenton4 » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #12

I am sure the author is a fine person, but this is an incredibly self-entitled piece. A number of biologists managed to make it through these classes just fine, and are paid much less for pursuing their passion (and making the breakthroughs the author enjoys reading about while on vacation). A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology inte…

The author did fine in another field, but might have picked biology instead if they had gotten the switch flipped earlier in life. That some people get through bad classes isn't a proof that those classes are good; you get those few who would survive no matter what, and those whose brain-wiring is conducive to the way the bad classes are structured. This has a tendency to reduce diversity of thought over time, and contributes to academic ossification.

Secondly, fields really do need cross-discipline collaboration. Finding passionate CS people is fantastic because they bring a different skill set. I have often found that when we get diverse experts together, we can have everyone do the "easy part" and get results which would be otherwise unobtainable.

Yes, some people have 'engineers disease' and fail to appreciate the depth of knowledge and skills of folks who have spent their life in another domain... But the author doesn't seem to be one of these. Many of their favorite stories appreciate the combination of insight and hard work in the history of the field.

It does, indeed, suck that people working in biology get paid less than computer engineers. Blame capitalism...

Re: I should have loved biology too

#22

Post by ramraj07 » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #17

If you want to be fascinated with biology just go to nature, or a park and stay there for a while. After a while you ll start to wonder about the birds, the plants the snails, the cats. Biology is descriptive science , nothing wrong with it

I don't know if just going to nature is sufficient to get fascinated with biology. In my opinion it takes a fundamental reset in how you think about anything you see. Humans while smart have obviously had to learn to "ignore" thinking about how things work. You don't think too hard about how anything works really. I mean at a cursory level sure, but by vastly different interpretations of the word "cursory", you can change your thirst to know how things you see work at more and more fundamental levels.

You don't need to go into nature to get this curiosity except for the possibility that it makes you more meditative. You can look at your arm and think what the hell happens in there at a molecular level to make you move the muscles. Or when someone says nerves conduct electricity what the hell does that mean?

I revisit this feynman video of him explaining (or not) magnets every few months and I think it's relevant to this question. https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?si=CkWYfiGoGCgAANwP

When I think like that I'm just curious why OP and others blame teachers or whoever else for not inducting the curiosity in them. Like it's someone else's job to make you curious? In my opinion you're either born that way or you're not. Some airport store book isn't gonna make you the next whatever scientist you adulate.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#23

Post by dekhn » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

I invested a great deal of effort over 30+ years to learn biology, which I started to love in high school when a teacher introduced us to molecular biology. Over time I've come to appreciate that biology is a huge field and people who master one area often know little to nothing about many others.

To be proficient in biology you need to have "Extra" skills: extra ability to work with ambiguity,ability to memorize enormous amounts of descriptive information, and highly abstract representations. Digital biology often loses many aspects of biological reality, and then fails to make useful predictions.

Over the years, I've come to realize I know less and less about biology- that I greatly underestimated the complexity and subtlety of biological processes, and have come to admit that my own intelligence is too limited to work on some problems that I originally thought would be "easy engineering problems".

A great example of the rabbit hole that is modern biology is summed up here: what is the nature of junk DNA? To what extents are digital readouts like ENCODE representative of true biology, rather than just measuring noise? What is the nature of gene and protein evolution?

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)... (note that while I disagree strongly with Eddy in many ways, I've come to recognize that I simply don't understand the modern view of evolution outside the perspective of molecular biology (IE, what geneticists like Eddy think).

Also, recently, Demis Hassabis postulated that if he is successful, we will come up with silver bullet cures in 10 years time simply using machine learning. It's amazing how many computer scientists (I call him that rather than a biologist, although he has worked into neuro) make this conclusion.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#24

Post by PicassoCTs » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #2

A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old…

Those curiculums developed by sould-dead gremiums in consensus on the minimum knowledge you goto have are a blight on western civilization. Instead of giving students the ability to discover a topic, or built something they are interested in themselves and then give them a understanding and fascination with the discoverers who have gone before them. Instead they kill the subject..

I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#25

Post by praptak » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

A complex three dimensional organism self-assembling from a single cell is 100% magic, especially given how resilient it is to disruption. You can kill one of the two cells produced by the first division and still get a fully formed organism (that's one of the actual early experiments in morphogenesis theory).

Re: I should have loved biology too

#26

Post by asnyder » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

searine wrote: post #16

pixl97 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things like Math and engineering are all rigid and rules based Depends where in math, in things like particle physics things get all wibbly wobbly is my cat dead or alive. In things like engineering quite often what you're dealing with is probability based, but you just stack the deck so far in your favor the probability is 1. As they say, building a bridge that doesn't fall down is easy. Building a bridge that bar…

Not saying those fields don't have uncertainty, but I've never seen an physicist pray to Newton that gravity works this time when the ball drops. I have seen molecular biologists (jokingly) shake the voodoo "molecular biology maracas" over the PCR machine to try and replicate their result.

Every scientist does that at some point. I've easily crossed my fingers and hoped numerous times that code I'd written would work, especially on the first time. Even more rewarding in the superstition when the project is hard, and you're a bit daffy at the end.

It's a human thing.

Surely Feynman made jested comments before running experiments. I'm sure some digging in his wonderful books and letters will find many examples.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#27

Post by moffkalast » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

hfgjbcgjbvg wrote: post #11

kleiba wrote: post #2

A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old…

Imagine if they taught the history of English to kids before they could read

Since most people throughout history couldn't read, I guess it would be relatable?

Re: I should have loved biology too

#28

Post by ramraj07 » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #21

throwaway5752 wrote: post #12

I am sure the author is a fine person, but this is an incredibly self-entitled piece. A number of biologists managed to make it through these classes just fine, and are paid much less for pursuing their passion (and making the breakthroughs the author enjoys reading about while on vacation). A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology inte…

The author did fine in another field, but might have picked biology instead if they had gotten the switch flipped earlier in life. That some people get through bad classes isn't a proof that those classes are good; you get those few who would survive no matter what, and those whose brain-wiring is conducive to the way the bad classes are structured. This has a tendency to reduce diversity of thought over time, and co…

As a biologist with a tech background (but actual biotechnology majors) - please we have enough tech bros who think they're biology's saviors. They'll just come in fascinated by some technological problem, call it the only blocker to solving aids and cancer and take away a billion dollars in funding over decades and show nothing of actual consequence. Like the entire protein folding field. It's a tool. Not the solution. Even today there was this hyperbolic piece on NBC about how this Harvard scientist working on microscopy image processing is being deported and now we are not going to cure cancer.

I feel bad for them, but I can assure you, as someone who did the research in the exact same field, they're curing nothing and are more likely to make cures slower by sucking away funding from more pertinent projects.

Also relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1831/

Re: I should have loved biology too

#29

Post by slicktux » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #2

A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old…

I think the whole teaching the history of computers is a big failure at an attempt to Segway into computer organization and architecture. Nonetheless, I get what is happening. If it’s a pure Computer programming class then the goal maybe to have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic) and what is a punch card (mnemonics and abstractions of those mnemonics to what is now just a computer programming language).

Re: I should have loved biology too

#30

Post by baq » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 6:20 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #23

I invested a great deal of effort over 30+ years to learn biology, which I started to love in high school when a teacher introduced us to molecular biology. Over time I've come to appreciate that biology is a huge field and people who master one area often know little to nothing about many others. To be proficient in biology you need to have "Extra" skills: extra ability to work with ambiguity,ability to memorize eno…

Why would biology be so hard? It’s only a billion years of evolution, after all. We’re dealing with billions of things all the time. /s