There's also a misleading phenomenon where many of the fields whose "experts" chime in on these questions are called evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics, making you think that these fields are related to biology and enjoy the same methodological standards of rigor as well as the same consensus from biologists. In reality these fields approach the questions from psychology, and that one field is known for having a bunch of practices, biases and motivated reasoning that'd make many a biologist reluctant to touch it with a ten feet pole.
It's very elegant to see the sleight of hand in action: someone makes a claim about sex, arguing it's a biological reality, and when challenged backs up their claim with a psych paper from a field that disguises as one from biologists and pretends that his claim enjoys a widespread consensus among actual scientists (as opposed to just psychologists). Hence, the claim isn't ideologically motivated, it's just science. Beautiful
I think there's a difficulty in that you can't just do biology from your garage, even bioinformatics. The standards have shifted, and most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. You either need to generate original data yourself with costly experiments, collaborate with people who have done so, or explore enormous amounts of data with costly compute. To meet these requirements you need to be affiliated to an institution, i.e. work within the system. (An exception would be Googlers and other such people who already have access to the compute for some reason)
Perhaps the whole thing is ripe for disruption, but so far all I've seen is repeated variations on xkcd #1831.
Right now, with all the COVID type articles being posted, it feels a bit like that. I'm not a trained virologist, and I dont know how many trained virologist there are on HN. But a basic perspective on what is the diagnostic test (I've done plenty of QPCR), what is primer design, what are antibody tests, and basic virology like what does it mean to be an rna virus, how is remdesivir supposed to work, etc tends to be missing, and I think k people with my level of experience can provide that. I've studied enough healthcare management to know the terminology at least and be able to discuss a placebo controlled trial versus not, and there are a lot of people with that level of basic knowledge than can contribute. And I've seen those sorts of explanations that are quite good. I've also noticed some pushback from people with at least a basic level of statistical/epidemiological training to the narrative that the risks of COVID are overblown, with discussions of exponential growth and SIR models. There are a few glimpses buried on what can be a pretty large initial onslaught of nonsense of actual biological knowledge. I dont think you need 50 years experience to provide that, though of course that would make the perspectives that much richer and deeper.
Yea I’m around biotech forums quite a bit and it is just as bad from a technical side. However, people on HN and tech tend to be better at identifying how technology enables things to happens, which is interesting to me.
Yes. Studying biology is like reverse-engineering extremely complex, constantly changing microscopic systems which developed over thousands of years. Molecular biology in particular is prohibitively expensive. It's just not something people can play with the same way we play with computer programming. A fully equipped laboratory is required to perform even the most basic experiments. Even more resources are required in order to produce original work.
This also causes difficulty in reproducing published results. It's easy to verify that the laws of physics hold true. It's not so easy to reproduce an expensive 10 year long double blind clinical trial.
The main thing to learn from this is you can't really talk about this stuff because people don't want certain things to be true. Biologists tended to talk about this stuff openly with me after a few drinks. They dare not speak about it most of the time.
The crux of the matter (and potential controversy) is not about sex differences in plants or C. elegans. Most biologists I've met who study algae or polar bears usually limit their expert opinion on those species. It's really about transposing such knowledge to humans, where we don't have that level of bottom-up insight for a variety of reasons ranging from "humans are complicated", "most of what works in other species doesn't work in humans" (see: 99% of drug trials) to "you can't just open up people's brains to see what they're made of".
Isn't the point of doing animal trials that they are "close enough" for most things to deliver good results? I.e. "if you can't do it in mice, dogs and pigs with your proposed medication, you probably won't be able to do it in humans". They're close enough that xenotransplantation is actively considered. "Humans are so special, everything we learn about anything that isn't human does most likely not apply to humans, so don't you dare even suggest that" just sounds strange to me.
Animal trials precede the first (Phase I) clinical trials in people.
93% of drugs that make it past animal trials and into Phase I clinical trials fail to make it all the way to final approval:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/09/th...
It's also not clear how many drug candiates we're missing out on because animal models give false positives for toxicity in humans. Compounds that are extremely poisonous to experimental animals may be tolerated much better in humans.
Humans survive exposure to TCDD at levels that would be more than 50 times higher than the lethal dose in guinea pigs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodiox...
Acetaminophen is a deadly poison to cats even at modest doses.
It's impractical and unethical to try novel druglike compounds in humans right away, so we may not know how many premature rejections come from animal models until/unless we're able to grow whole human organs for drug testing.
And keep in mind we're talking here about behavioral differences driven by possibly the most complex organ that diverged the most from other animals'.
This is very strange because in technology threads where actual experts chime in, no one acts like that. People share their experiences about using such-and-such stack, sometimes with very strongly worded and passionate opinions but never with the pretense of scolarship or "quest for truth". Imagine how bewildering it'd be if people cited publications from "The Journal of Serverless Stacks" (IF=1.4) in lieu of experience sharing.
I agree that it can be annoying when armchair biologists make hollow arguments. But I also do think that we do share some responsibility to not turn people off completely or make them dig in harder in their positions.
In this case, biology has a bunch of details, many still unknown, and problems look easy until you get into the details.
Also https://xkcd.com/55/ and https://xkcd.com/128/
This is the inevitable confusion of a society that insists that nothing exists outside what we can scientifically observe, who rejects concepts of soul and love and still tries to explain their effects using only what they admit. It's like saying we bleed when we're cut because the skin must be producing that blood, denying the existence of veins or a heart.
In any case, what's specifically irritating is the entrepreneur / startuper / tech bro belief that "we can make an app to solve this", which sometimes also occurs here on HN. No, not every problem can be solved with tech or an app. Even when it can, you Random Startuper are the sidekick of the story, not the main hero who's calling the shots.