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James Watson has died
21–30 of 303 posts
Re: James Watson has died
#22[flagged]
I'm well aware of Watson's views that got him cancelled.
I know that Grok is meant to be the "uncensored, unbiased" version of LLMs. But the training data still reflects human bias, and there is definitely some irony in using an LLM for "objectivity." I do wonder what HN thinks about this though. Whether you can prompt an LLM to reflect more balanced takes that humans could do in controversial topics (assuming the LLM is "rooted" without a biased system prompt.)
Re: James Watson has died
#23[flagged]
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
FWIW watson was incredibly racist against scots-irish americans, repeatedly calling them dumb in his lectures. that doesn't necessarily excuse his casual racism, but i would assume he meant to imply that people can overcome their genetic ingroups' statistical predilections
Re: James Watson has died
#24[flagged]
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
That's a quote from the NYT obituary.
Re: James Watson has died
#25What's with the "is dead at"? I'm not a native speaker but it seems a bit disrespectful.
It's a way of communicating his age; it's standard phrasing for American english. No disrespect is implied or intended. There are generally no holds barred when it comes to dunking on people that are truly disliked, and when newspapers want to disrespect someone, they will leave no room for doubt (there are some awfully hilarious examples of such obituaries throughout American history.)
"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"
It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.
Re: James Watson has died
#26[flagged]
>Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks. this is a preposterously reductive and dishonest account of what happened.
Re: James Watson has died
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
That's a quote from the NYT obituary.
It's also incomplete and incorrect. It was Gosling's photo, he did the work for Franklin. And she had already shared the results in a department seminar before Wilkins showed it to W&C. And she was credited for this in the W&C paper in Nature.
Re: James Watson has died
#28[deleted]
Re: James Watson has died
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
That's a quote from the NYT obituary.
Your own editorialized summary is the problem:
> Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
Watson and Crick were already working on a double helix model. The crystallographic data helped them fit the puzzle pieces and confirm the model. You're discounting all of the work they put into it.
Having a diffraction picture of DNA helps, but you still have to put all of the residues in the correct places, understand the 5' to 3' alignment, work out how replication might work...
This is what the diffraction pattern gets you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File:60251254_...
Now solve for the atoms and bonds.
You're making them out to be thieves.
If you were working on a theoretical model of an unknown molecule using primitive tools and somebody had data that could confirm your ideas and fix the kinks, wouldn't you want to see it so you could finish your work?
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins were all talking to one another about their work. Franklin had dismissed Watson and Crick's previous molecular model as it was incorrect at the time. Franklin wasn't working on a molecular model of her own.
Watson and Crick were able to synthesize information from several labs and experimental sources, including Franklin's experimental data, and apply it to the problem they were directly working on in order to deduce the correct model.
Right place, right time, right problem, right context.
That Franklin died before she could win a Nobel Prize is tragic, but she wasn't the lone discoverer of DNA's structure.
Re: James Watson has died
#30What's with the "is dead at"? I'm not a native speaker but it seems a bit disrespectful.
This is normal english.