Pet theory: for most of human history, biology has been an increasingly complex detective story, a notepad of mysteries laying on a table next to an unfathomably massive evidence room stuffed with barely organized facts. This appeals to certain people and not to others. Only recently has it become possible to approach it from more of an engineering perspective, which appeals to a different set of people.
I should have loved biology
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Re: I should have loved biology
#22"Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed. It’s all a big slop of global mutable state". Brings me to wonder, could we ever create anything so marvellous as what biology does so effortlessly.
Because the system survives by optimizing for efficiency and reliability.
Re: I should have loved biology
#23Biology did seem more like a recitation of facts in school to me, but it was very different in university. I think part of it was having a pretty bad teacher, but also the school textbooks are just so much worse than the introductory textbooks for university.
I think some parts are fixable, others are difficult. A part of the problem is that you need to cover some parts in more depth if you want to really make sense of them. Without some basic chemistry and thermodynamics knowledge the entire metabolic pathways seem very arbitrary. This is probably hard to fit into the amount of time you have in school for those subjects.
Re: I should have loved biology
#24Low effort comment, but, wow. This article is a super thorough version of the shower thought that, biology is a lot cooler once you reframe it as the study of naturally occurring self-replicators.
Re: I should have loved biology
#25I think what is described here comes down to the fact that we don't have much (any?) _deep_ understanding of biology. The most concrete aspects of biology are observations. For example, anatomy is very well understood because it's essentially observations of structures within living organisms, as field it has been relatively stable for a long time, hence there are well-established methods for teaching anatomy.
There's a huge gap between the fundamental units of biology (biochemistry) and the resulting emergent behaviour (living things). We don't have a good bottom-up system to predict the emergent behaviour so we're mostly left with observing from the top down and poking/prodding sub-systems, hoping to gain some insight.
When so much of biology is observation without deep insight, it shouldn't be a surprise that biology is difficult to teach, and even more difficult to find beauty in for new students.
Re: I should have loved biology
#26I suspect most biology majors would be plenty interested in these topics. The barrier tends to be the foundational knowledge they have to get through, like statistics and organic chemistry.
I presume the author now has that foundation, so it's unsurprisingly much easier to approach.
Re: I should have loved biology
#27It seems like the larger argument here (which I wholeheartedly agree with) is that the role of skilled teacher (whether it be human, book, YouTube, whatever) simply cannot be understated when it comes to creating that “spark” in a learner to develop and pursue their own passions. What’s interesting to me, and what follows from this, I think, is that we therefore have a lever for creating more passionate people: creat…
Money, power, control.
Defund schools and create horrible working and learning conditions for those who stay. Create a problem and then say you are the only one who knows how to fix it. Prey on peoples’s fear, especially fear for their children. Sow mistrust and bigotry in their communities.
Unfortunately far, far too many in power who actively and intentionally do not have the best interests of students at heart.
“There should be no such thing as ‘good schools’ and ‘bad schools.’ All schools should be great.” shouldn’t be be a controversial opinion, but every time I’ve brought it up people get uncomfortable because parents now how precarious their child’s education can be. They’ve seen what has happened in other schools and they don’t want anything bad to happen to their child’s education. So even if things could be better, they fear change and anything that could rock the boat because they don’t won’t it to get worse. And they aren’t wrong to be afraid: how many times has a politician promised to fix education and it turns out the fix is something like one more layer of standardized testing, or cutting art classes, honors classes, special education services to “focus on the fundamentals” while class sizes balloon and the money from those cut classes and services just goes poof?
Re: I should have loved biology
#28> I wanted to conjure models I could play with in my hand. I wanted a museum where I could walk around inside the epithelium during an immune response. I wanted to put ideas into physical space, like on a pinboard—TLRs go here, with the other innate armament; CD4+ T cells are there, in the adaptive world—but I wanted it to be as searchable, copy-pasteable, shareable, and composable as text.
VR anyone?
Re: I should have loved biology
#29Unfortunately, nowadays there is more censorship in biology than in politics
Re: I should have loved biology
#30I suspect most biology majors would be plenty interested in these topics. The barrier tends to be the foundational knowledge they have to get through, like statistics and organic chemistry. I presume the author now has that foundation, so it's unsurprisingly much easier to approach.
Yeah it doesn’t help that things like HS Chemistry and Chem 101 classes aren’t really Chemistry, it’s all the things to you need to know to get started doing and learning Chemistry.
It would be like if we saved learning how to read and write or learning Arabic numerals and basic number sense until early high school.