We run a microschool and our single most important realization is this. We need to allow for meaning before mechanics. Schooling has a gravitational pull that inverts this because of our obsession with Measurement.
We learn, and we can learn relentlessly, when things matter. We are meaning makers. But when well-intentioned curriculum remove the process of making meaning and give you the final product, it just takes away reasons for learning. And no matter how we dress it up, this ends up staying shallow because it is only the surface level learning that is visible and measurable and held to account.
Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics > Measurement
This is the natural order we should try to preserve despite all the systemic pulls to measure as a poor proxy for asking "are we doing our job well"
I am from Brazil and highschool was hell because of college entrance exams. Everything we did was geared towards optimizing delivery time for exam knowledge/practice. We didn't even have PE after first year.
I was very lucky to be able to be engaged in that sort of environment, but at least 50% of my class was not.
It is unfortunate but it has a weird side-effect, the system really promotes ambitious people and endurance. Most of my "top-tier" uni class was middle class, the rich kids couldn't/wouldn't keep up. But that 50% of my high-school class really get the shaft in that system, but the ones that survived it were highly regarded in the job market by the degree alone.
Similarly in India. The college entrance exams (the biggest ones being JEE and NEET for engineers and doctors respectively) are the only thing you live and breathe from around the time you are 14 - 15 years old. Completely hollows you out.
OP here. IITian who went through that, absolutely loathed RG culture and how everything around exists to put blinders on you and focus on meaningless exams even after. Escaped to neuroscience right after. Our microschool exists because I would dearly love for that to be abolished. I think AI upending job markets and scoring processes might have an unintended good effect with regards to this.
We already do, collectively! That's culture. And I think it is okay to demonstrate what we value because that's how we pass on interests. But this works when we also allow for the agency and autonomy to explore and pick. Culture exposes me to many different genres of art. I don't have to like all of them.
The dangers are in trying to start with a defined, standardized curriculum and then manufacture meaning (fractions are a fantastic example)
This is exactly where agency and autonomy matter. If school is all about carefully titrating monitoring learning on allowed paths, then we basically create bubbles where so much meaning is already disallowed. And yes, in these situations we will try to manufacture meaning.
Adults manufacturing meaning is an interesting endeavour and I am not sure how and where it works. But it does, the military, cults, radical ideologies. Still processing what we learn from that!
this is all meaningless AI nonsense. maybe you can recommend reading dostoevsky before learning the alphabet for 4 year olds. or you can realize there's a balance and meaning first is not the right strategy either. good luck with your blog.
It's more of a dance than a balance because the way we learn is going from the whole to the parts and back. Meaning first does not mean asking/getting them to grasp something complex. It is about showing and creating a world where the thing in question matters and has value. Teaching alphabet first without being able to show why (not explain) is absolutely wrong. The way we bringing meaning is by reading to them, creating a place where reading clearly has evident value because we derive value, fun, joy. There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics). How we introduce phonics with meaning is not a question that's asked because schooling philsophies often implicitly mirror the latest neuroscience trend (behaviorism, spare the rod spoil the child, cognitivism, it's not meaning it is the cogntive skills)
Also, there's really little value in criticism without having anything constructive to offer. How would you arrive at a balance?
> There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics).
I thought that the reason the US had a literacy crisis is because Phonics was specifically removed from the schools and replaced by ineffective methods
Phonics wasn't introduced for the longest time, and that makes it worse. But systematic phonics too can be bad when the focus is on narrow skills. Why in the world should I care about these artificial sounds (phonemes) is the question the mind naturally asks. And that needs to be addressed without just jump from drill to drill dressed up in fun. Interstingly this early focus on mechanics in both literacy and math can lead to a "hidden curriculum" where the most meaningful lesson is that the world has things I simply do not understand and I need to follow this ritual. And that leads to learned helplessness and so on.
I'll ignore the first paragraph because it's clearly someone just staring at a wall trying to be insightful without regard for any actual conversation
For your last line I have two points
1. Your point about micro schooling is meaningless. Education is a scaling problem . Yeah of course if you could surround every kid with 3 smart kids and 1 teacher, education is easy!
2. I don't have to pretend to have a solution to arrive at a balance. I think it is a hard problem. You are the one who seems to have the solution, so propose it here (but you can't, you just want to sound insightful)
scaling is definitely a hard challenge and made harder because we want to standardize whatever the product is. Does anyone know? But it isn't just us. There's a hundred year history of alternative education showing essentially this. Self-directed learning (Sudbury, Summerhill) work (even if small) because of this.
I understand the impulse to paint me as "wanting to sound insightful" but I am too old for that, and upvotes here are definitely not meaningful enough for me to care about that :)
This article is ostensibly about biology but it's really about pedagogy—how traditional education squeezes out the sense of discovery and turns many subjects into rote memorization exercises.
This reminds me of the pedagogical philosophy of Seymour Papert, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's "genetic epistemology" argues that knowledge and understanding is created by interacting with environments, which traditional educational approaches fail to provide.
Papert combined Piaget's ideas with the emergence of computing to argue that children should be taught subjects in a hands-on, exploratory way - and not just for teaching computing! The idea is that by programming in simplified languages, children can discover ideas in subjects like mathematics and grammar - deriving them as they try to solve problems instead of having them dictated to them.
Suppose that biology was taught in a game-like environment where students were designing cells or organisms in some way. Maybe the game could be structured so that each organelle could be "discovered" by the student as they designed the cell to survive in some environment. Perhaps that'd make the purpose of each cell component more grounded and memorable.
Papert's book Mindstorms covers all this in detail, and I highly recommend reading it. I feel like it's especially important today given fears of how AI will affect childhood education. At best, I hope that computing can be a boon to education instead of a detriment if it's woven into pedagogy thoughtfully.
Skin in the game. Being "smart" isn't an immutable property of a noun. It's a verb. It's something you do, something you practice, constantly.
Even in fields like Math where ostensibly we have universal truths accessible to all, we still must learn how to derive proofs. Without doing math, one cannot understand math.
Learning IS experiential. It requires concentration and effort. Those who seek to make learning "easier" by removing effort are embarrassingly misguided about human cognition.
Education serves two purposes: Understanding and developing skills for employment. Unfortunately, there usually isn't enough time to teach both for all subjects. The latter usually takes priority.
I saw this happen twice in my university life. I took the honors version of CHEM101. 80% of it was more about exploring and discovery, and 20% was more traditional problems, calculations, etc.
For people like me who were not chemistry majors, this was great. For the chemistry majors - they really struggled when they got into CHEM102.
The same happened with Quantum Mechanics I. The professor didn't want to teach all the bra-ket notation, and more or less skipped much of the linear algebra aspects of QM - focusing on a purely calculus approach. He then retired. The professor who taught QM II saw what the professor did, and said "WTF?!" He spent most of the semester reteaching QM I.
As a result, those like me who went on to grad school had to retake QM II at the new university to make up for all that wasn't taught to me.
Completely off topic, but I really don't understand the demographic of physics educators that are resistant to Dirac notation in a first QM course. It isn't really that hard to explain or understand, it's extraordinarily convenient, and it's essential for engaging with most quantum adjacent literature. I understand that it conceals the distinction between vector space and dual space a bit but it's really not that hard to get through. I may be biased because I learned the notation in week 2 of intro quantum, so I am curious if anyone with the opposite experience disagrees.
I think he just felt the students wouldn't be able to handle the linear algebra aspects of QM. Strange notion, given that all the students were seniors, and had all taken a linear algebra course from the math department.
Probably wanted less formalism overall.
Like when I took an E&M course in the EE department, and the professor insisted on teaching only the integral forms and not the differential forms of the Maxwell's equations (i.e. no divergence, curl, etc in the whole course).
It's a open-source clone of Spore that aims to be more scientifically accurate. Right now you can play as microbes and very simple multicellular organisms.
Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response.
The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America.
The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.
Re: immigrants. I have several relatives who totally upended their lives in foreign countries to become grad students in the US. If nothing else, they are very excited to get to spend 5 years in the US. Believe me, they would not be even the slightest bit offended by that post. I think that type of offense on behalf of others is mostly a US citizen thing.:-)
Thank you for your kind words. It's mostly because this particular American thinking is driven by a sense of belonging to an in-group and need to feel that they are good people (versus actually doing good and staking something of value, which I respect completely regardless if I agree with someone's politics or religion or whatever). I push back on them because (a) most of time, ad-hominen attacks mean they have already lost the argument and (b) for people who are too timid to speak against the toxic group-think. Life is too short to live and placate this type of mentality held by people who don't really like you or mostly don't really believe in it themselves, just go along to get along.
I think it says more how you read things and where we are coming from - I meant int'l students earn my respect for being cleared eyed and pursue both their economic and academic interest. For the feminists professors, I'm actually shading the sciences by saying that a lot of times, the so-called tangible and much well-funded science departments produce just as little tangible value as the intangible humanities. But don't get me wrong, I also understand your comment - hope you get social capital up so one day you can stake it in the future to help an immigrant or a feminist stranger for real.
Your post sounds like it is made by a disgruntled misanthrope. I lead teams of biologists and data scientists and both are part of a vast team, each of us playing our bit part, myself included. If your desire is to be the center of attention, you are in the wrong field.
My post may come off disgruntled (point taken). But my point is to completely dispel any romantic notion for someone who is young and want to make the switch into life science research, if they learn all of these ugly things and still want to do it - then they made the right decision and I've done my job. Kindness imho is not being polite and then taking advantage of people's passion/enthusiasm later (nobody so far has disputed the -EV nature of the field itself just my tone) - it is doing right by people from the jump, not serving the institution or my interest in it. And I'm not sayin you're wrong either or that you are not dedicated (by default I presume everybody is in the research), just sharing my perspective, hope you have a good one.
As long as we acknowledge that is your perspective, and in my opinion based on 30+ years of experience, is one that is typical. Most people on the data side, enjoy their work and are well paid, perhaps not near FAANG standards, but they do enjoy their work and life.
I have no doubt you had a bad experience. There are a LOT of egotistical professors and grad studentss who don’t value others. Have you given industry a fair go yet though? You may find a job there more to your liking. The people are generally less arrogant than those in academia, and we view ourselves, rightfully so, as cogs in a big machine.
Did you see the announcement from Moderna today? That was the result of decades of us grunts chipping away the problem.
Wild comment - first of all, the author's point is that biology should be taught better, not that it's an amazing career on the ground as it is today.
Second of all, I like how you called out the degeneracy of gambling, I can't think of any bigger contrast between the author's goals and actual application of talent. Bravo on your W-2G, society is proud.
I suspect that the money taxpayers used to spend on humanities professors in women's studies is a pittance compared to the money they're now wasting because grab-em-by-the-***** regime never took one of those classes. Ignoring half of your population comes at the price of social unrest, which it turns out is very expensive.
My original point is to make a point that biology or academia in general is very romantic to outsiders - but it's not a very +EV play unless (1) you are already very independently wealth, or (2) you are really really into the subject and know what you're signing up for (the long odds, hours and politics). 99% of the people will take this as a pessimistic view and stop there but 1% will actually pursue option (2).
RE: your political point, I submit to you many institutions are very left-leaning and "Woke-1" was defeated by its emphasis on shaming tactics and identity politics - which ironically brought upon the identity politics of the right and the current "regimen's" backlash on defunding DEI initiatives, which hurts ironically the sciences most due to its outsized reliance from NIH/NSF/DARPA etc. And I welcome actually "Woke-2.0" where DSA is actually focused on kitchen table issues such as grocery and health insurance cost; and anticipate that our political pendulum will swing to the left at the next cycle.
Appreciate your comment and opinion, I can't say I agree but I really do respect the honesty and where you are coming from!
I'm not sure who is the next DSA candidate versus the Democratic establishment or Republican candidate (e.g., Francesca Hong v. Dave Crowley, or Abu Sayed v. Mike Rogers). But I encourage you to go to the "machine" (Polymarket, Kalshi) to take position and express your opinion!
Given that people use that info to decide how to spend their money on influencing political outcomes, aren't we better off if it's as inaccurate as possible?
Lol you literally clipped my quote (citing the exact candidates) - so thank you for being you! Just a pro-tip, politics is not changing the minds of ideologues, addressing directly to the middle and silent majority and letting them observe your political opponents make their own mistakes. Thank you again for the engagement in my top comment thread.
"STEM major actively dismissive of other disciplines" has been a candidate category and major red flag everywhere I've worked. Especially the places full of STEM majors.
Yes for me, it's mutually beneficial and gives me a quick way to polarize, filter out people I don't want waste time associating with (and vice versa too - people who are institutionalist, professional managerial class (PMCs); thank you for making my point!)
Just nitpicking but I'd like to point out "professional-managerial class" means the class consisting of both people who are college educated professionals (i.e. most people on Hacker News reading this) _lumped together_ with people whose career is management, not just career management alone. Putting down the PMC is putting down ourselves.
One of the things that struck me the most, watching keynote presentations from the absolute best-of-the-best in my field (infectious diseases) was how often those presentations, which were often reflections on the path of ones career, involved a liberal arts education.
Donald Michie, a trained classicist specialising on old Greek, was drafted
to Bletchley Park and became a codebreaker (and Alan Turing's chess partner "because we were both not very good at it compared to the others" [personal comm.]). After WW II., he became a professor of veterenary sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and eventually he founded the department of artificial intelligence there. He is the editor of the first book series on machine learning (1950s).
In his lifetime, Michie published impactful papers in genetics, biology, statistics and computer science -- and classical philology.
A liberal arts education and a science education are not mutually exclusive,
but complementary.
hilarious. i also made a pivot to life sciences from a hard math field and my experience was the exact same.
i make more money trading options and have way more fun! in a way - it is "real" science in a way whereas the modern Life Science Industrial Complex is anything but that.
Thanks labrat! I appreciate your comment - when you made a living "shaving" p-values, shrinking fat tails and crafting a narrative in the life science industrial complex, maybe it's easy to make the switch to exposing bad risk/reward payoffs in the manic and /r/wallstreetbets-driven options and binary options casinos??? Best of luck to you!
"... and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer""
It's always been this way and I'm pleased to hear it hasn't changed
The unexpected conclusion here seems to be that biology taught you enough statistics to leave biology financially behind. That is interesting, although six profitable years of gambling may also encourage a rather romantic view of gambling
I did always love biology, not because of my teachers, but because of my own wonder of it ("I sort of get how an engine works, but how do humans work?"). And I became a biologist, and thinking about the things this author describes indeed still blows my mind. I get the high level of a lot of things now, but every time I need to do a deep dive, I feel like "how the hell can this even work". But it works, and it works incredibly well. I still think it's the nicest field to be in (even though I love computers and Linux and FOSS as well).
Agreed, I loved my biology courses and lab work and had always had a similar sense of wonder about it all. It's interesting, I'm not sure that came from any teacher in particular and I bet there are plenty of people who just never feel it no matter how you teach the subject. That said, those are beautiful illustrations referenced in the article and they have a ton of teaching value, and I think a lot of core concepts that went over my head would have been way more accessible using tools like that.
Every generation needs to rediscovery the old chestnuts. That's why I think old but good textbooks should stay available and new text books should cute them. That is how knowledge is retained over generations.
Some dislike new text books that rehash the same old material. I think it is necessary to do it even if there is nothing new to add other than new artwork and a contemporary typeface.
Physics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too.
The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read.
Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy.
One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it.
Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.
Compared to some other books on the same topic, A Brief History of Time is a poor book. It just happened to be the first popular book on the topic.
Fully agree with labs (not just science but engineering as well). 2 years into my grad program, I visited my undergrad campus and a professor asked for feedback on the education I received. I told him that all the labs need to be revamped. As taught, they were a waste of time. Virtually every lab I did went like this: "Design a circuit (e.g. amplifier) with the following characteristics. Then build it and confirm via measurements."
The challenging part was the design, which was all theoretical. It was then trivial to wire it up.
I recall one time I was given a project to build some circuit. I built it, but when the professor evaluated it, he saw the output was very fuzzy. He wanted to know if it was due to my circuit or whether the input was fuzzy. He did a bunch of interesting things on the oscilloscope to determine that it was indeed the input. Now that's the sort of stuff they should have taught us!
As for motivation for subjects like physics/other sciences. It's a challenge. As I said in a different comment, there often just isn't enough time to teach both. I think professors expect students to have some level of intrinsic motivation already. For something like physics, you really cannot reduce the math involved - most undergrad physics curricula have too little math as it is!
> One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur.
Well, a lot of places would penalize you if your data is incorrect, so most of the focus ends up on execution rather than the why. If you were angling for a high GPA for whatever reason, you cannot afford to experiment too much during lab work. It's another case entirely of course if you are conducting research.
I would say this is fine for lab work as part of a course. The majority of people have never worked in a laboratory environment before, beside what their school could offer. Precision balances, calipers/micrometers, electronic measuring equipment, fume hoods, etc. Especially chem and bio where you start working with more dangerous reagents and very specialized instruments. Were you able to follow instructions to get the experiment to work? Did you correctly apply what you know about experimental error to get sensible results? Were you able to actually get those steps done in the few hours a week you had? Did you write it up legibly and keep good notes?
"Labs" are not research projects. Those come later and are usually also heavily guided. As a mentor you do not want to set a stupid-hard undergraduate project that might not work, unless you really discuss it with the student. It's demoralizing and the majority of the student population only needs to show that they did some original thinking, tried out some hypothises and wrote up the results in a coherent way. Good schools offer extra-curricular/summer programs to push motivated students that are considering research careers.
> the focus ends up on execution rather than the why
Exactly right. School teaches you that the point of running an experiment is to try and get the same result as the teacher, while performing a ritual with steps called "hypothesis" and "method".
Most of my courses were very "Point A" to "Point B". You're given a set of formulae, then a problem, then you use some combinations of those formulae to solve the problem. Most labs were the same way: you're given an exact script to follow without any explanation of the experiment design. It felt like both were optimized for easy instruction / grading and not for learning new skills or concepts.
Only two of the courses I took were substantially different. One was an upper division lab that actually was more open-ended, where we were given a goal and some equipment and had to figure out how to use the equipment to meet the goal. Another was a more conceptual course where we explored how to approach broad problems to come up with rough estimates for a wide variety of questions. Both were much more engaging, but I saw many students good at the typical course type struggle with how open ended these courses were.
I should have studied a 'real' topic instead of computing, and then tackle issues therein (ie, in my chosen topic) using programming as a TOOL to help me realise things, and experiment.
All my career is about computing, for computing sake, now I find myself in trouble in this AI-driven world as I don't have a base to stand on, with interesting problems, and a lot of programming is just being 'generated' in a black-box.
And no, I'm not talking about becoming a major software ARCHITECT, solving deep infrastructure problems and whatnot. I'm thinking on day-to-day issues.
Whatever, just a minor rant - if it helps future generations realising that and change course, my job is done.
I realized after getting a degree in engineering from CMU that I should've loved biology so I went back to school after working as a software engineer for a year and studied neurobiology. And since then, I've suggested that people early in their career should take a break and go back to school and study something totally different.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig suggests something very similar. He makes the point that students should go and work a job before picking what to study because they'll see where the value comes from (he of course puts it in much better words)
I've heard this advice a lot with respect to graduate school/PhD work. And indeed, the students that came from industry jobs tended to be much more impressive; some of that was probably from the "real-world" experience, and some probably from a self-selection effect where folks who came in from a presumably well paying job had to have really wanted it and were therefore more motivated.
That might be difficult given the job market now compared to Pirsig's time. Of course you could get menial job but that won't tell you much about the real job you want, just about what work is like in general.
I had a similar experience with nature. My dad was the outdoors type, a conservation officer who loved hunting & fishing; I wanted nothing more than to be inside reading an encyclopedia. I have always liked science, but biology was just one subject among many.
When I became an adult, I gravitated to computers because there is so much to learn about them. My focus has been infrastructure, but I've picked up software development, assembly, kernel hacking, data science, and a dozen other things along the way (mostly at amateur levels, but I'm always happy to learn).
I have have other interests (economics, homebrewing, astronomy, sociology, making music), but in each of those cases I learned what I wanted to after a few years & moved away. When covid hit, I picked up natural history through iNaturalist -- and that has so far been very very different, much more the same kind of endless opportunity for discovery that computers felt like.
There is so much weirdness in biology. Parasitic wasps with genes that came from viruses that suppress caterpillar immune systems, male spiders that have appendages (pedipalps) that look like boxing gloves, the many kinds of bumble bees around me, introduced species, nests, microorganisms -- it's insane. It's higher up the stack than the stuff the author is describing, but no less wonderfully complex and fascinating.
The quote from Lewis Thomas really hit home for me: "People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that" [cell|insect|weird relationship|phenology|behaviour]. Kudos to the author for putting this all into words so well, and for adding a dozen books to my must-read list.
Yes, the article is about awe and the fact that there isn't enough of it because we get fed into our brains what happens "matter of fact" by the education syste, without taking time to wonder and be surprised.
>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology]
You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!
I remember so well, being in boarding school in the 11th grade and really learning about evolution(might be late haha). It gave me my first ever existential crisis. I really resonate with this article because the awe of biology was so understated in school. It felt like the driest subject ever.
The cell is a factory. You can have deep dive with the book Molecular Biology of the Cell, although it's used in university. It's the SICP of biology. The latter was published in 1985 the former in 1983. I read it in 1995 and it's amazing how much was known then. I haven't followed a cellular/genetic path to experience the evolution.
We don't pin those comments to the top because it would nudge the conversation in too meta a direction. It's better that they hover partway down the page.
What I do is ctrl+F 'ycombinator' on the thread before posting one, though of course that doesn't avoid race conditions.
I absolutely experienced this in college. I signed up as a computer science student, as one does. I took all of the freshmen classes across broad topics, and the first biology class was basically just like the article describes. Words and memorization and microbiology and boring stuff. Who cares, let's get back to the dorm room to play CounterStrike on the school LAN.
But then I took the second required biology course. And rather than be about memorizing the krebs cycle, it was macrobiology. Ecology, evolution, and everything I hadn't realized I wanted to learn about the world around me. I instantly fell in love and 99'd the class. I changed my major to Biology, went pretty heavy into biology and chemistry, and didn't take more than a few Java classes in Comp Sci. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology.
I'm still a software developer, mind you, but I wouldn't trade the Biology degree for anything. Learning statistics, experimental design and experimentation, and just having the opportunity to deep dive into the physical world from the biggest to the smallest details, it was life-changing.
I still ended up learning data models, algorithms, and probably would be a better engineer if I had dug in deep on comp sci, but I like to think the biology degree helped me be a better developer for different reasons.
I like this blog and its a romantic view of Biology, and I agree with the sentiments. However I would say its a narrow view of large issue: Lack of Rigor and Depth in School. Biology doesn't get enough into the nuts and bolts, and instead focuses on regurgitation of facts, with not enough experimentation. Mathematics doesn't have enough of a focus on rigor, proofs and building models from first principles, just a formulaic approach of decomposing equations and fitting them into patterns to solve. History is a list of facts, with a little bit of essays connecting ideas, where you might say how the Leviathan affected Enlightenment thinking but you don't actually read the Leviathan, and learn how Napoleonic warfare changed things, but don't read primary evidence.
Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.
I did (and do albeit somewhat in a neglected way) love biology. As much as I admired pure science (maths / physics) there is a certain romantic-ness to the real world application of chemistry and the emergence of it I suppose at the most scientific PoV, but really just that it's so complex and we appreciate the emergence of it.
I wrote biology-online.org shortly after education and it's achieved a few thousand years worth of page views. wikipedia tends to cover all those informational queries nowadays and I've been programming for 20 years since.
It's so easy to forget that much of our inspiration comes from biology (and ecology of course) and its emergent behaviour. When I hear hype about anything I think about how it's taken 4 billion years for anyone to say it and you simply can't forget we're standing on the shoulders of giants.
I loved math, chemistry, and physics, but I hated biology for some similar reasons to the author.
In chemistry or physics I felt like I was actively problem solving, learning about systems and how to manipulate them. By contrast in my biology class I felt like all I did was memorize different names of things.
In college chemistry I enjoyed lab work and I've always loved the outdoors and the natural world, so maybe bio would have been a good fit for me in some ways... but I never took another biology related course after the first one turned me completely off the subject.
In contrast, I loved biology and felt its applications call to me, and it took me like five years after struggling through calculus to go "Oh, that's what that's for."
I liked the connection of the central dogma of biology (DBA to RNA to Proteins) with Lisp programs.
I connected that to streaming flow-based programs though, as opposed to cell-to-cell signaling which shares many characteristics with, Erlang style, fire-and-forget message passing:
>It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach
I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?
It's definitely signaling for the majority of people still talking about it today. Though, that's not saying much that you didn't already know about the groups you mentioned.
Being that it's more of a Gen Xer pop-sci book, it's not to "prove smarts", but to share a vibe. It belongs on someone's shelf next to their copies of The Naked Lunch and Aja. Maybe even a signed copy of A New Kind of Science?
I'm not trying to be dismissive. It's just true. Nobody is even ashamed of it, nor should be. It's an interesting and still relevant perspective, but because there's no resolution to this line of thinking, many find it underwhelming. There's no "aha" moment to be found in any of this. Just lots of introspection.
You gotta take the good with the bad though. The tall grass is an easy place to hide.
The author prefers people read his newer book I am a strange loop since it more directly represents his views. He’s apparently frustrated that nobody gets the point of GEB (which is to discuss consciousness).
If you like the mathematical aspects of computer science and computability theory, cranking out proofs using lambda calculus and Turing machines fascinates you, and you think Lisp is an elegant language, you may like it. For the average developer, it's unlikely to be interesting.
I read it shortly after it came out when I was in high school and it was sort of a mind blow - perhaps just because in the early 80s we didn't really get exposed to so many interesting ideas.
Back then I got most of my books used from Half Price Books (prior to being able to do a quick internet search for a review) so bought both this and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of… mostly off the title and cover blurbs and once I was able to grok both was happy to have made it through and kind of underwhelmed probably due to the hype building my expectations too high.
I wasn't a huge fan, to be honest. some good ideas, but overall the book felt self-indulgent. "metamagical themas" is a far better book if you want to read one thing by hofstadter, and "le ton beau de marot" if you want a deep dive into something.
It is unique; you've certainly never read anything else quite like it. Hofstadter is a deep and careful thinker who loves language and wordplay. He writes in order to communicate something he has spent a long time thinking about, not merely for the sake of cranking out a book. I've read a number of his other books, and some of his ways of thinking have stuck with me for years and shaped the way I see the world.
This resonated strongly. I hated biology as a kid but have been blown away at the wonder of it all as I've started to study it as an adult. I wish more of the magnificence and wonder of it all was conveyed vs the rote memorization that is so commonly taught.
As an ex-microbiologist, the thing I can't stand is how smelly life is. Be in the same room as gangrenous flesh and your intestinal fortitude will be severely tested.
Other than that, I don't mind it, but I still prefer silicon.
On the other hand, Da Vinci became Da Vinci without those tools either and whether he became the genius if he would have offloaded his thinking to AI from small on, is up for debate I guess.
Is anybody in here both engineer and biologist? How far away are we from the complexity of the human body? Pretty far I guess. Although we're producing features at molecular size now with lithography.
I choose engineering because I felt I could pay the bills with that. But we have so much to learn from biology that could be applied in engineering perhaps?
I'm sympathetic to this; but hard for me to really think this is actionable. Odds are quite high that someone did push for these perspectives a few times, but someone didn't have the vantage point to appreciate them at the time.
That can be a really hard thing for people to realize. We will ask, "why didn't someone use this really compelling framing to get me hooked on something?!" And then move to something like "how come nobody has ever said just walking an hour a day will get you in pretty good physical shape?" Thing is, plenty of people say stuff like that.
And don't mistake this as blaming the listener! The point is messages can often come when you flat out aren't prepared for them.
So, what do we do? We spend time on the rote muscle memory of facts. In the hopes that that will prepare you for the next time a message comes and you are then ready for it.
Ideally, you rinse and repeat this. Constantly. All too often, the cycle gets subverted, though, and you forget to reopen yourself to the messages that came before.
One of the motivating reasons I majored in Biology my sophomore year was that the Vatican was took centuries in accepting the heliocentric theory, and I thought if they got evolution wrong too, then there might be more work to do.
But then I realized that a lot of biologists are religious, and it didn't have to be an antagonistic competition.
Like 7 years ago I read the most amazing book on biology..it described that inside cells literal skyscrapers of protein-based structures and machinery took individual ATP molecules and stripped them of an outer electron thus creating what I believe is called a "proton gradient".
This imbalance of electrical charge across a membrane is LITERALLY what creates life. Everything that living things do to recreate themselves is powered by this machinery and, as I remember this book telling me, the idea that a cell could suddenly pop into existence with all this truly incredible and unbelievable complex machinery is exactly like the idea of taking all the parts of a 747 and throwing them into a large box and then opening the box and a fully functional 747 is there waiting to take off.
The use of proton gradients gives an insight not only into how life got going in the first place, but also, perhaps, its deepest mindfuck point: the evolution of complex eukaryotic (nucleated) cells, which arose just once in 4 billion years of evolution.
There are no signs at all of some sort of gradual path to eukaryotic cells as evolution would lend us to think. Just the sudden appearance of this self-replicating nucleic cell which allows ALL multi-cellular life to exist.
I was utterly shocked that it took me 53 years to learn this most amazing of all facts I've every learned, and to be honest it makes the whole Black Hole fascination seem pedantic and almost trivial.
Of course I hate myself for not remembering either the name of this book or it's incredible author, so yes I know I suck.
Isn't biology the applied reverse-engineering of a billion years of DNA evolution, where the laziest solution that works wins, is all written in assembly, with tremendous amounts of dead code and hardly any refactorings?
I've already seen the horrors that lurk inside of poorly-written 90s video games. Hard pass.
Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did).
I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology.
Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems.
What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people.
But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization.
But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies.
The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure.
But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.
It is the same for all subjects. Classes don't talk about how and why things came about, which is half the fun. It is all a pile of facts to be memorized to pass some test, not for its own sake. I think it is best to learn on your own, and use class for consolidation.
Avery's experiment is memorable not because "DNA carries heredity" is an important fact but because protein looked like the plausible answer and a relatively simple experiment overturned it...
We say often that the purpose of an undergraduate degree, whether taken in a specific domain or in the liberal arts, is not to teach any subject in depth, but rather to give a broad overview of the subject.
This is sometimes explained (excused?) as ingraining into the learner a kind of index of the state of a field and the methods of its practice, a thing that can be relied upon as a kind of highway map of knowledge, an intuition to direct the learner from then on onto the right arterial roads, from which their own research can then guide them to the actual street and building, per se.
But I would argue that the true function of an undergraduate degree, in surveying the subfields of a field, is to simply expose the learner to those fields, and hopefully bait them into an appreciation for one of them: to find the learner a specific cragged surface along the frontier of human knowledge that captivates them not only to explore it, but to solidify the foundations of their understanding of the field as a whole so that they feel better equipped to explore it.
(Certainly, while not everyone who graduates with an undergraduate degree can say they found such a thing, then at least everyone who continues within academia to become a researcher on the frontier of knowledge, will likely say they found their love of the subject they would eventually research some time during their undergraduate studies.)
I bring this up because it feels like early (elementary and secondary) education should be designed around the same goal, to the same degree if not moreso: to expose the learner to the many amazing things there are to be passionate about within every field of learning.
As a business would say, “you must convince your customer that they have a problem, before you attempt to sell them the solution.”
In other words, you must convince the learner that there is a promised land of continual wonderment on the other side of the huge inferential gap that separates them from those knowledgeable in a field, before they will ever be intrinsically motivated to cross that gap, and thus to accept your offer of tools and exercises to bridge that gap.
The funny thing is that everyone except the teachers and staff of primary/secondary schools, seem to know intuitively that this is the right order to approach education in. No science communicator on YouTube tries to lecture in the dry way schoolteachers do. No historian at a museum presents their subject to a tour group without a compelling framing narrative. No space center tries to teach you orbital mechanics before first convincing you how damn cool it is to ride in a rocket or do a space-walk, or how wonderfully alien the surface of another planet is. Aquariums hook you with the fleeting flashes of color of live fish you’ve never seen before first, never pushing the information about them on you, simply expecting your own building curiosity get the better of you as you decide to start reading the placards beside the most-interesting exhibits.
We have a special field, Early Chidlhood Education, that tries to guide educators into best attunement with the expectations and capabilities infants and young children bring to the table.
But we have no similar field of Late Childhood Education. We just have “education” (which is almost more the cargo-cult reverse-engineering of traditions inherited from aristocratic finishing schools, than it is a coherent theory of how to produce well-educated adults) and then, very separately, the loose assemblage of knowledge of our public educators, academic-topic communicators, edutainment media writers, etc. (which has, as far as I know, never been put together to be studied as an academic subject, let alone taught as a discipline.)
We can see fictional schoolteachers (your Mrs. Frizzles, your John Keatings) and on-camera educational personas (your Bill Nyes and Carl Sagans) doing a perfect [if implausibly-well-resourced] rendition of what an educator trained in such a field would be like, if it existed—yet we don’t expect real schoolteachers to engage with students on anything like that wavelength. We don’t expect real textbooks to present the world to children the way such a field would encourage. We don’t expect governments to evaluate late-childhood educational quality by the metrics the researchers in such a field would propose.
And while part of this is surely because we expect public education to serve certain public goods — one of those being to produce adults who are employable in the average entry-level job, jobs that in turn require certain skills and knowledge (and so to force children to absorb those skills and that knowledge whether they feel any interest in it or not) — that’s no excuse for making the process of ingraining that knowledge downright adversarial. Not when it would be both faster, cheaper, and less laborious to both the teachers and students (at least when measured by some long-term Total Cost of Education), to have the kids actually be enthusiastically cooperative in their own education.
But the downright-weird thing to me, is that even private schools don’t generally approach education this way. And nor do most homeschooling parents. They’re all either traditionalists of the “finishing school” bent who think the best possible education is each individual having a set of learned tutors there to force knowledge down their throat in a personalized way; or they’re believers in kids’ “drive to learn” (and so tend to provide no structure whatsoever, leaving kids to be “self-driven” — i.e. to either flail or hyperfocus on the few things they already know are cool, receiving little exposure to things outside their bubble, and so missing out on entire subjects because the existence of those things just never occurred to them.)
Is the problem just a lack of imagination? “This is how I learned, so this is what learning is”?
Or is it that approaching education this way would require that schoolteachers actually be both passionate and knowledgeable about something; and that each school retain enough such teachers that together they can share with their students a passion for every subject the school hopes to expose the kids to? And maybe the wrong “type” of people go into education (maybe people passionate about the process of education itself, or about giving kids opportunities, or something), so it’s actually challenging to build a school where every teacher is carrying the spark of some particular academic passion they wish to share with the students?
(Personally, I hypothesize that you could get by just fine with people holding a Masters or PhD in a subject of interest and no “education in education” at all, just common sense and empathy enough to not expect children to perform intellectual miracles. And hiring for that doesn’t seem to be too hard; there are vast swathes of “over-degreed” under-employed people, currently stuck doing something utterly divorced from their passion, who’d love to instead be communicating their love of a subject to the next generation. As long as the school can promise that that won’t translate to torturing unwilling students with rote memorization, and then giving them tests they know the kids will fail, because they never studied, because they had zero interest.)
It was my worst subject (until Power and Statics in college). It was about memorizing dates and big generalizations about events.
Now I'm active in a historical recreation society. I have learned to translate 3 ancient languages (and Latin, with great difficulty). I can intricately describe minutiae about what a late-1390s Englishman would know, and do on a daily basis. I can rant about "his" political opinions on France, the two popes, the various ruling families, Italians and Italian literature...
I have organized and attended classes on: Chinese rice winemaking, primitive latitude tools, fiber and cloth production, religious daily artifacts, recipe redaction, ...
We run a microschool and our single most important realization is this. We need to allow for meaning before mechanics. Schooling has a gravitational pull that inverts this because of our obsession with Measurement.
We learn, and we can learn relentlessly, when things matter. We are meaning makers. But when well-intentioned curriculum remove the process of making meaning and give you the final product, it just takes away reasons for learning. And no matter how we dress it up, this ends up staying shallow because it is only the surface level learning that is visible and measurable and held to account.
Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics > Measurement
This is the natural order we should try to preserve despite all the systemic pulls to measure as a poor proxy for asking "are we doing our job well"
Wrote about it here: https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...
I'm a former middle school teacher and I think school needs to drop tests and grades entirely.
There is no safe amount of measurement and assessment in school. By design what you measure becomes what gets optimized.
You might like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school_movement
I am from Brazil and highschool was hell because of college entrance exams. Everything we did was geared towards optimizing delivery time for exam knowledge/practice. We didn't even have PE after first year.
I was very lucky to be able to be engaged in that sort of environment, but at least 50% of my class was not.
It is unfortunate but it has a weird side-effect, the system really promotes ambitious people and endurance. Most of my "top-tier" uni class was middle class, the rich kids couldn't/wouldn't keep up. But that 50% of my high-school class really get the shaft in that system, but the ones that survived it were highly regarded in the job market by the degree alone.
Similarly in India. The college entrance exams (the biggest ones being JEE and NEET for engineers and doctors respectively) are the only thing you live and breathe from around the time you are 14 - 15 years old. Completely hollows you out.
OP here. IITian who went through that, absolutely loathed RG culture and how everything around exists to put blinders on you and focus on meaningless exams even after. Escaped to neuroscience right after. Our microschool exists because I would dearly love for that to be abolished. I think AI upending job markets and scoring processes might have an unintended good effect with regards to this.
Fellow IITian here OP. Would do anything to get those years back. Happy to know you found a better place to be :)
Yeah and this is how you end up with 6% of the country being concurseiros.
I guess studying to learn to pass exams is actually the correct objective, in Brazil, rather than gaining knowledge.
It is unfortunate, but if it weren't like that it would be pure nepotism everywhere. Hopefully we can move to better systems as corruption reduces.
Didn't already Feynman criticize this?
How you prevent meaning from becoming another thing adults manufacture for students
We already do, collectively! That's culture. And I think it is okay to demonstrate what we value because that's how we pass on interests. But this works when we also allow for the agency and autonomy to explore and pick. Culture exposes me to many different genres of art. I don't have to like all of them. The dangers are in trying to start with a defined, standardized curriculum and then manufacture meaning (fractions are a fantastic example) This is exactly where agency and autonomy matter. If school is all about carefully titrating monitoring learning on allowed paths, then we basically create bubbles where so much meaning is already disallowed. And yes, in these situations we will try to manufacture meaning. Adults manufacturing meaning is an interesting endeavour and I am not sure how and where it works. But it does, the military, cults, radical ideologies. Still processing what we learn from that!
this is all meaningless AI nonsense. maybe you can recommend reading dostoevsky before learning the alphabet for 4 year olds. or you can realize there's a balance and meaning first is not the right strategy either. good luck with your blog.
It's more of a dance than a balance because the way we learn is going from the whole to the parts and back. Meaning first does not mean asking/getting them to grasp something complex. It is about showing and creating a world where the thing in question matters and has value. Teaching alphabet first without being able to show why (not explain) is absolutely wrong. The way we bringing meaning is by reading to them, creating a place where reading clearly has evident value because we derive value, fun, joy. There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics). How we introduce phonics with meaning is not a question that's asked because schooling philsophies often implicitly mirror the latest neuroscience trend (behaviorism, spare the rod spoil the child, cognitivism, it's not meaning it is the cogntive skills)
Also, there's really little value in criticism without having anything constructive to offer. How would you arrive at a balance?
> There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics).
I thought that the reason the US had a literacy crisis is because Phonics was specifically removed from the schools and replaced by ineffective methods
Phonics wasn't introduced for the longest time, and that makes it worse. But systematic phonics too can be bad when the focus is on narrow skills. Why in the world should I care about these artificial sounds (phonemes) is the question the mind naturally asks. And that needs to be addressed without just jump from drill to drill dressed up in fun. Interstingly this early focus on mechanics in both literacy and math can lead to a "hidden curriculum" where the most meaningful lesson is that the world has things I simply do not understand and I need to follow this ritual. And that leads to learned helplessness and so on.
I'll ignore the first paragraph because it's clearly someone just staring at a wall trying to be insightful without regard for any actual conversation
For your last line I have two points
1. Your point about micro schooling is meaningless. Education is a scaling problem . Yeah of course if you could surround every kid with 3 smart kids and 1 teacher, education is easy!
2. I don't have to pretend to have a solution to arrive at a balance. I think it is a hard problem. You are the one who seems to have the solution, so propose it here (but you can't, you just want to sound insightful)
scaling is definitely a hard challenge and made harder because we want to standardize whatever the product is. Does anyone know? But it isn't just us. There's a hundred year history of alternative education showing essentially this. Self-directed learning (Sudbury, Summerhill) work (even if small) because of this.
I understand the impulse to paint me as "wanting to sound insightful" but I am too old for that, and upvotes here are definitely not meaningful enough for me to care about that :)
This article is ostensibly about biology but it's really about pedagogy—how traditional education squeezes out the sense of discovery and turns many subjects into rote memorization exercises.
This reminds me of the pedagogical philosophy of Seymour Papert, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's "genetic epistemology" argues that knowledge and understanding is created by interacting with environments, which traditional educational approaches fail to provide.
Papert combined Piaget's ideas with the emergence of computing to argue that children should be taught subjects in a hands-on, exploratory way - and not just for teaching computing! The idea is that by programming in simplified languages, children can discover ideas in subjects like mathematics and grammar - deriving them as they try to solve problems instead of having them dictated to them.
Suppose that biology was taught in a game-like environment where students were designing cells or organisms in some way. Maybe the game could be structured so that each organelle could be "discovered" by the student as they designed the cell to survive in some environment. Perhaps that'd make the purpose of each cell component more grounded and memorable.
Papert's book Mindstorms covers all this in detail, and I highly recommend reading it. I feel like it's especially important today given fears of how AI will affect childhood education. At best, I hope that computing can be a boon to education instead of a detriment if it's woven into pedagogy thoughtfully.
Skin in the game. Being "smart" isn't an immutable property of a noun. It's a verb. It's something you do, something you practice, constantly.
Even in fields like Math where ostensibly we have universal truths accessible to all, we still must learn how to derive proofs. Without doing math, one cannot understand math.
Learning IS experiential. It requires concentration and effort. Those who seek to make learning "easier" by removing effort are embarrassingly misguided about human cognition.
Education serves two purposes: Understanding and developing skills for employment. Unfortunately, there usually isn't enough time to teach both for all subjects. The latter usually takes priority.
I saw this happen twice in my university life. I took the honors version of CHEM101. 80% of it was more about exploring and discovery, and 20% was more traditional problems, calculations, etc.
For people like me who were not chemistry majors, this was great. For the chemistry majors - they really struggled when they got into CHEM102.
The same happened with Quantum Mechanics I. The professor didn't want to teach all the bra-ket notation, and more or less skipped much of the linear algebra aspects of QM - focusing on a purely calculus approach. He then retired. The professor who taught QM II saw what the professor did, and said "WTF?!" He spent most of the semester reteaching QM I.
As a result, those like me who went on to grad school had to retake QM II at the new university to make up for all that wasn't taught to me.
Completely off topic, but I really don't understand the demographic of physics educators that are resistant to Dirac notation in a first QM course. It isn't really that hard to explain or understand, it's extraordinarily convenient, and it's essential for engaging with most quantum adjacent literature. I understand that it conceals the distinction between vector space and dual space a bit but it's really not that hard to get through. I may be biased because I learned the notation in week 2 of intro quantum, so I am curious if anyone with the opposite experience disagrees.
I think he just felt the students wouldn't be able to handle the linear algebra aspects of QM. Strange notion, given that all the students were seniors, and had all taken a linear algebra course from the math department.
Probably wanted less formalism overall.
Like when I took an E&M course in the EE department, and the professor insisted on teaching only the integral forms and not the differential forms of the Maxwell's equations (i.e. no divergence, curl, etc in the whole course).
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I would have loved that kind of biology game, particularly if failed designs were part of the lesson
You should try Thrive - https://www.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/
It's a open-source clone of Spore that aims to be more scientifically accurate. Right now you can play as microbes and very simple multicellular organisms.
This is a very romantic view of life sciences.
Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response.
The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America.
The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.
You managed to blame feminists and immigrants in one paragraph, impressive. I'm sorry to hear about your experiences tho.
Re: immigrants. I have several relatives who totally upended their lives in foreign countries to become grad students in the US. If nothing else, they are very excited to get to spend 5 years in the US. Believe me, they would not be even the slightest bit offended by that post. I think that type of offense on behalf of others is mostly a US citizen thing.:-)
Thank you for your kind words. It's mostly because this particular American thinking is driven by a sense of belonging to an in-group and need to feel that they are good people (versus actually doing good and staking something of value, which I respect completely regardless if I agree with someone's politics or religion or whatever). I push back on them because (a) most of time, ad-hominen attacks mean they have already lost the argument and (b) for people who are too timid to speak against the toxic group-think. Life is too short to live and placate this type of mentality held by people who don't really like you or mostly don't really believe in it themselves, just go along to get along.
I think it says more how you read things and where we are coming from - I meant int'l students earn my respect for being cleared eyed and pursue both their economic and academic interest. For the feminists professors, I'm actually shading the sciences by saying that a lot of times, the so-called tangible and much well-funded science departments produce just as little tangible value as the intangible humanities. But don't get me wrong, I also understand your comment - hope you get social capital up so one day you can stake it in the future to help an immigrant or a feminist stranger for real.
…. scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studie…..
It says more how you write things and where you are coming from.
Your post sounds like it is made by a disgruntled misanthrope. I lead teams of biologists and data scientists and both are part of a vast team, each of us playing our bit part, myself included. If your desire is to be the center of attention, you are in the wrong field.
And lay off the immigrants. Jeez.
My post may come off disgruntled (point taken). But my point is to completely dispel any romantic notion for someone who is young and want to make the switch into life science research, if they learn all of these ugly things and still want to do it - then they made the right decision and I've done my job. Kindness imho is not being polite and then taking advantage of people's passion/enthusiasm later (nobody so far has disputed the -EV nature of the field itself just my tone) - it is doing right by people from the jump, not serving the institution or my interest in it. And I'm not sayin you're wrong either or that you are not dedicated (by default I presume everybody is in the research), just sharing my perspective, hope you have a good one.
As long as we acknowledge that is your perspective, and in my opinion based on 30+ years of experience, is one that is typical. Most people on the data side, enjoy their work and are well paid, perhaps not near FAANG standards, but they do enjoy their work and life.
I have no doubt you had a bad experience. There are a LOT of egotistical professors and grad studentss who don’t value others. Have you given industry a fair go yet though? You may find a job there more to your liking. The people are generally less arrogant than those in academia, and we view ourselves, rightfully so, as cogs in a big machine.
Did you see the announcement from Moderna today? That was the result of decades of us grunts chipping away the problem.
Wild comment - first of all, the author's point is that biology should be taught better, not that it's an amazing career on the ground as it is today.
Second of all, I like how you called out the degeneracy of gambling, I can't think of any bigger contrast between the author's goals and actual application of talent. Bravo on your W-2G, society is proud.
> The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble
Lol that took a turn, I was expecting a link to a how to course at the end; or some nfl week one picks!
> or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that);
one thing's for sure, there are certain spaces for people who lack people skills, and that seems to be associated with "STEM" skills
I suspect that the money taxpayers used to spend on humanities professors in women's studies is a pittance compared to the money they're now wasting because grab-em-by-the-***** regime never took one of those classes. Ignoring half of your population comes at the price of social unrest, which it turns out is very expensive.
This applies just as well to biology.
My original point is to make a point that biology or academia in general is very romantic to outsiders - but it's not a very +EV play unless (1) you are already very independently wealth, or (2) you are really really into the subject and know what you're signing up for (the long odds, hours and politics). 99% of the people will take this as a pessimistic view and stop there but 1% will actually pursue option (2).
RE: your political point, I submit to you many institutions are very left-leaning and "Woke-1" was defeated by its emphasis on shaming tactics and identity politics - which ironically brought upon the identity politics of the right and the current "regimen's" backlash on defunding DEI initiatives, which hurts ironically the sciences most due to its outsized reliance from NIH/NSF/DARPA etc. And I welcome actually "Woke-2.0" where DSA is actually focused on kitchen table issues such as grocery and health insurance cost; and anticipate that our political pendulum will swing to the left at the next cycle.
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Appreciate your comment and opinion, I can't say I agree but I really do respect the honesty and where you are coming from!
I'm not sure who is the next DSA candidate versus the Democratic establishment or Republican candidate (e.g., Francesca Hong v. Dave Crowley, or Abu Sayed v. Mike Rogers). But I encourage you to go to the "machine" (Polymarket, Kalshi) to take position and express your opinion!
Given that people use that info to decide how to spend their money on influencing political outcomes, aren't we better off if it's as inaccurate as possible?
> But I encourage you to go to the "machine" (Polymarket, Kalshi) to take position and express your opinion!
I am not a gambler. Also, gambling is not "expressing opinion", it is ... gambling.
> I'm not sure who is the next DSA candidate versus the Democratic establishment or Republican candidate
Yeah, you seem to be unaware of democratic party positions in last election and DSA positions in these elections either.
Lol you literally clipped my quote (citing the exact candidates) - so thank you for being you! Just a pro-tip, politics is not changing the minds of ideologues, addressing directly to the middle and silent majority and letting them observe your political opponents make their own mistakes. Thank you again for the engagement in my top comment thread.
"STEM major actively dismissive of other disciplines" has been a candidate category and major red flag everywhere I've worked. Especially the places full of STEM majors.
Yes for me, it's mutually beneficial and gives me a quick way to polarize, filter out people I don't want waste time associating with (and vice versa too - people who are institutionalist, professional managerial class (PMCs); thank you for making my point!)
Just nitpicking but I'd like to point out "professional-managerial class" means the class consisting of both people who are college educated professionals (i.e. most people on Hacker News reading this) _lumped together_ with people whose career is management, not just career management alone. Putting down the PMC is putting down ourselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
The life sciences are diverse and multi gender. What a sad state of affairs this causes a crisis for modern techies.
> humanities professor in women's studies
Better a thousand women's studies departments than one business school.
One of the things that struck me the most, watching keynote presentations from the absolute best-of-the-best in my field (infectious diseases) was how often those presentations, which were often reflections on the path of ones career, involved a liberal arts education.
Donald Michie, a trained classicist specialising on old Greek, was drafted to Bletchley Park and became a codebreaker (and Alan Turing's chess partner "because we were both not very good at it compared to the others" [personal comm.]). After WW II., he became a professor of veterenary sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and eventually he founded the department of artificial intelligence there. He is the editor of the first book series on machine learning (1950s).
In his lifetime, Michie published impactful papers in genetics, biology, statistics and computer science -- and classical philology.
A liberal arts education and a science education are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.
Trader/gambler complains about humanities professors scamming word by studying about women's issues.
hilarious. i also made a pivot to life sciences from a hard math field and my experience was the exact same.
i make more money trading options and have way more fun! in a way - it is "real" science in a way whereas the modern Life Science Industrial Complex is anything but that.
Thanks labrat! I appreciate your comment - when you made a living "shaving" p-values, shrinking fat tails and crafting a narrative in the life science industrial complex, maybe it's easy to make the switch to exposing bad risk/reward payoffs in the manic and /r/wallstreetbets-driven options and binary options casinos??? Best of luck to you!
everyone's a genius in a bull market
Where can I learn what you learn to make +EV plays? I did some poker back in the day, it was fun :)
One of my favorite books was The Mathematics of Poker
You should buy my ebook on how to get rich quick by selling ebooks, it has excellent EV and guarantees returns that beats the market.
To be precise It has excellent mEV for you.
"... and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer""
It's always been this way and I'm pleased to hear it hasn't changed
Despite Silicon Valley marketing and hype
The unexpected conclusion here seems to be that biology taught you enough statistics to leave biology financially behind. That is interesting, although six profitable years of gambling may also encourage a rather romantic view of gambling
I did always love biology, not because of my teachers, but because of my own wonder of it ("I sort of get how an engine works, but how do humans work?"). And I became a biologist, and thinking about the things this author describes indeed still blows my mind. I get the high level of a lot of things now, but every time I need to do a deep dive, I feel like "how the hell can this even work". But it works, and it works incredibly well. I still think it's the nicest field to be in (even though I love computers and Linux and FOSS as well).
Agreed, I loved my biology courses and lab work and had always had a similar sense of wonder about it all. It's interesting, I'm not sure that came from any teacher in particular and I bet there are plenty of people who just never feel it no matter how you teach the subject. That said, those are beautiful illustrations referenced in the article and they have a ton of teaching value, and I think a lot of core concepts that went over my head would have been way more accessible using tools like that.
This is one of those perennial HN favorites
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20bi...
yes! I first found it on HN. The other front page piece on Thickness reminded me of it.
Always happy to pass along a good article to the next generation of Posters
Yes.
Every generation needs to rediscovery the old chestnuts. That's why I think old but good textbooks should stay available and new text books should cute them. That is how knowledge is retained over generations.
Some dislike new text books that rehash the same old material. I think it is necessary to do it even if there is nothing new to add other than new artwork and a contemporary typeface.
Yep, and given that the original author posted it in 2020, should probably be marked (2020).
Physics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too.
The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read.
Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy.
One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it.
Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.
Compared to some other books on the same topic, A Brief History of Time is a poor book. It just happened to be the first popular book on the topic.
Fully agree with labs (not just science but engineering as well). 2 years into my grad program, I visited my undergrad campus and a professor asked for feedback on the education I received. I told him that all the labs need to be revamped. As taught, they were a waste of time. Virtually every lab I did went like this: "Design a circuit (e.g. amplifier) with the following characteristics. Then build it and confirm via measurements."
The challenging part was the design, which was all theoretical. It was then trivial to wire it up.
I recall one time I was given a project to build some circuit. I built it, but when the professor evaluated it, he saw the output was very fuzzy. He wanted to know if it was due to my circuit or whether the input was fuzzy. He did a bunch of interesting things on the oscilloscope to determine that it was indeed the input. Now that's the sort of stuff they should have taught us!
As for motivation for subjects like physics/other sciences. It's a challenge. As I said in a different comment, there often just isn't enough time to teach both. I think professors expect students to have some level of intrinsic motivation already. For something like physics, you really cannot reduce the math involved - most undergrad physics curricula have too little math as it is!
> One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur.
Well, a lot of places would penalize you if your data is incorrect, so most of the focus ends up on execution rather than the why. If you were angling for a high GPA for whatever reason, you cannot afford to experiment too much during lab work. It's another case entirely of course if you are conducting research.
I would say this is fine for lab work as part of a course. The majority of people have never worked in a laboratory environment before, beside what their school could offer. Precision balances, calipers/micrometers, electronic measuring equipment, fume hoods, etc. Especially chem and bio where you start working with more dangerous reagents and very specialized instruments. Were you able to follow instructions to get the experiment to work? Did you correctly apply what you know about experimental error to get sensible results? Were you able to actually get those steps done in the few hours a week you had? Did you write it up legibly and keep good notes?
"Labs" are not research projects. Those come later and are usually also heavily guided. As a mentor you do not want to set a stupid-hard undergraduate project that might not work, unless you really discuss it with the student. It's demoralizing and the majority of the student population only needs to show that they did some original thinking, tried out some hypothises and wrote up the results in a coherent way. Good schools offer extra-curricular/summer programs to push motivated students that are considering research careers.
Really a shame because understanding why your results were incorrect is much more important than stumbling on the right answer by accident.
> the focus ends up on execution rather than the why
Exactly right. School teaches you that the point of running an experiment is to try and get the same result as the teacher, while performing a ritual with steps called "hypothesis" and "method".
As a physics major I agree a lot with this.
Most of my courses were very "Point A" to "Point B". You're given a set of formulae, then a problem, then you use some combinations of those formulae to solve the problem. Most labs were the same way: you're given an exact script to follow without any explanation of the experiment design. It felt like both were optimized for easy instruction / grading and not for learning new skills or concepts.
Only two of the courses I took were substantially different. One was an upper division lab that actually was more open-ended, where we were given a goal and some equipment and had to figure out how to use the equipment to meet the goal. Another was a more conceptual course where we explored how to approach broad problems to come up with rough estimates for a wide variety of questions. Both were much more engaging, but I saw many students good at the typical course type struggle with how open ended these courses were.
I should have studied a 'real' topic instead of computing, and then tackle issues therein (ie, in my chosen topic) using programming as a TOOL to help me realise things, and experiment.
All my career is about computing, for computing sake, now I find myself in trouble in this AI-driven world as I don't have a base to stand on, with interesting problems, and a lot of programming is just being 'generated' in a black-box.
And no, I'm not talking about becoming a major software ARCHITECT, solving deep infrastructure problems and whatnot. I'm thinking on day-to-day issues.
Whatever, just a minor rant - if it helps future generations realising that and change course, my job is done.
Cheerios
I realized after getting a degree in engineering from CMU that I should've loved biology so I went back to school after working as a software engineer for a year and studied neurobiology. And since then, I've suggested that people early in their career should take a break and go back to school and study something totally different.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig suggests something very similar. He makes the point that students should go and work a job before picking what to study because they'll see where the value comes from (he of course puts it in much better words)
I've heard this advice a lot with respect to graduate school/PhD work. And indeed, the students that came from industry jobs tended to be much more impressive; some of that was probably from the "real-world" experience, and some probably from a self-selection effect where folks who came in from a presumably well paying job had to have really wanted it and were therefore more motivated.
That might be difficult given the job market now compared to Pirsig's time. Of course you could get menial job but that won't tell you much about the real job you want, just about what work is like in general.
Definitely true. I still frequently think about this and how I'd value school so much more now. I think I'd literally be excited about every subject.
With what money?
I went back to graduate school - where you get paid to be a student
PhD programs in technical fields usually give you a stipend
the money you got from your lucrative job you got easily after graduating from the worlds top computer science school of course
I had a similar experience with nature. My dad was the outdoors type, a conservation officer who loved hunting & fishing; I wanted nothing more than to be inside reading an encyclopedia. I have always liked science, but biology was just one subject among many.
When I became an adult, I gravitated to computers because there is so much to learn about them. My focus has been infrastructure, but I've picked up software development, assembly, kernel hacking, data science, and a dozen other things along the way (mostly at amateur levels, but I'm always happy to learn).
I have have other interests (economics, homebrewing, astronomy, sociology, making music), but in each of those cases I learned what I wanted to after a few years & moved away. When covid hit, I picked up natural history through iNaturalist -- and that has so far been very very different, much more the same kind of endless opportunity for discovery that computers felt like.
There is so much weirdness in biology. Parasitic wasps with genes that came from viruses that suppress caterpillar immune systems, male spiders that have appendages (pedipalps) that look like boxing gloves, the many kinds of bumble bees around me, introduced species, nests, microorganisms -- it's insane. It's higher up the stack than the stuff the author is describing, but no less wonderfully complex and fascinating.
The quote from Lewis Thomas really hit home for me: "People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that" [cell|insect|weird relationship|phenology|behaviour]. Kudos to the author for putting this all into words so well, and for adding a dozen books to my must-read list.
Yes, the article is about awe and the fact that there isn't enough of it because we get fed into our brains what happens "matter of fact" by the education syste, without taking time to wonder and be surprised.
>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology]
You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!
I remember so well, being in boarding school in the 11th grade and really learning about evolution(might be late haha). It gave me my first ever existential crisis. I really resonate with this article because the awe of biology was so understated in school. It felt like the driest subject ever.
The cell is a factory. You can have deep dive with the book Molecular Biology of the Cell, although it's used in university. It's the SICP of biology. The latter was published in 1985 the former in 1983. I read it in 1995 and it's amazing how much was known then. I haven't followed a cellular/genetic path to experience the evolution.
[2020]
previous discussions:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
I should have loved biology (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 - April 2024 (253 comments)
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments)
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
is there a way to pin comments like this up top? I've just spent 5min doing the same by hand, before scrolling all the way down to see this one
I'm sorry for the duplicated effort!
We don't pin those comments to the top because it would nudge the conversation in too meta a direction. It's better that they hover partway down the page.
What I do is ctrl+F 'ycombinator' on the thread before posting one, though of course that doesn't avoid race conditions.
Is there a tradition for this blog post to appear every 2 years?
2024, 253 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590
2022, 271 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054
2020, 298 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422
I absolutely experienced this in college. I signed up as a computer science student, as one does. I took all of the freshmen classes across broad topics, and the first biology class was basically just like the article describes. Words and memorization and microbiology and boring stuff. Who cares, let's get back to the dorm room to play CounterStrike on the school LAN.
But then I took the second required biology course. And rather than be about memorizing the krebs cycle, it was macrobiology. Ecology, evolution, and everything I hadn't realized I wanted to learn about the world around me. I instantly fell in love and 99'd the class. I changed my major to Biology, went pretty heavy into biology and chemistry, and didn't take more than a few Java classes in Comp Sci. I graduated with a B.S. in Biology.
I'm still a software developer, mind you, but I wouldn't trade the Biology degree for anything. Learning statistics, experimental design and experimentation, and just having the opportunity to deep dive into the physical world from the biggest to the smallest details, it was life-changing.
I still ended up learning data models, algorithms, and probably would be a better engineer if I had dug in deep on comp sci, but I like to think the biology degree helped me be a better developer for different reasons.
One of the threads like this one has prompted me to start reading the book Molecular Biology of the Cell several years ago. I need to get back to it.
I like this blog and its a romantic view of Biology, and I agree with the sentiments. However I would say its a narrow view of large issue: Lack of Rigor and Depth in School. Biology doesn't get enough into the nuts and bolts, and instead focuses on regurgitation of facts, with not enough experimentation. Mathematics doesn't have enough of a focus on rigor, proofs and building models from first principles, just a formulaic approach of decomposing equations and fitting them into patterns to solve. History is a list of facts, with a little bit of essays connecting ideas, where you might say how the Leviathan affected Enlightenment thinking but you don't actually read the Leviathan, and learn how Napoleonic warfare changed things, but don't read primary evidence.
Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.
I did (and do albeit somewhat in a neglected way) love biology. As much as I admired pure science (maths / physics) there is a certain romantic-ness to the real world application of chemistry and the emergence of it I suppose at the most scientific PoV, but really just that it's so complex and we appreciate the emergence of it.
I wrote biology-online.org shortly after education and it's achieved a few thousand years worth of page views. wikipedia tends to cover all those informational queries nowadays and I've been programming for 20 years since.
It's so easy to forget that much of our inspiration comes from biology (and ecology of course) and its emergent behaviour. When I hear hype about anything I think about how it's taken 4 billion years for anyone to say it and you simply can't forget we're standing on the shoulders of giants.
Paul Lockart paper shows Not Found, so here’s an Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170514160142/https://maa.org/e...
The paper shows a dotted line dividing the triangles and showing the areas to be equal, which makes things clearer.
I loved math, chemistry, and physics, but I hated biology for some similar reasons to the author.
In chemistry or physics I felt like I was actively problem solving, learning about systems and how to manipulate them. By contrast in my biology class I felt like all I did was memorize different names of things.
In college chemistry I enjoyed lab work and I've always loved the outdoors and the natural world, so maybe bio would have been a good fit for me in some ways... but I never took another biology related course after the first one turned me completely off the subject.
In contrast, I loved biology and felt its applications call to me, and it took me like five years after struggling through calculus to go "Oh, that's what that's for."
I liked the connection of the central dogma of biology (DBA to RNA to Proteins) with Lisp programs.
I connected that to streaming flow-based programs though, as opposed to cell-to-cell signaling which shares many characteristics with, Erlang style, fire-and-forget message passing:
https://livingsystems.cc/posts/flowbased-vs-erlang-message-p...
This article should be of interest to this crowd.
"Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis - Yuri Lazebnik"
https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)0013...
>It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach
I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?
It's definitely signaling for the majority of people still talking about it today. Though, that's not saying much that you didn't already know about the groups you mentioned.
Being that it's more of a Gen Xer pop-sci book, it's not to "prove smarts", but to share a vibe. It belongs on someone's shelf next to their copies of The Naked Lunch and Aja. Maybe even a signed copy of A New Kind of Science?
I'm not trying to be dismissive. It's just true. Nobody is even ashamed of it, nor should be. It's an interesting and still relevant perspective, but because there's no resolution to this line of thinking, many find it underwhelming. There's no "aha" moment to be found in any of this. Just lots of introspection.
You gotta take the good with the bad though. The tall grass is an easy place to hide.
The author prefers people read his newer book I am a strange loop since it more directly represents his views. He’s apparently frustrated that nobody gets the point of GEB (which is to discuss consciousness).
If you like the mathematical aspects of computer science and computability theory, cranking out proofs using lambda calculus and Turing machines fascinates you, and you think Lisp is an elegant language, you may like it. For the average developer, it's unlikely to be interesting.
I read it shortly after it came out when I was in high school and it was sort of a mind blow - perhaps just because in the early 80s we didn't really get exposed to so many interesting ideas.
Back then I got most of my books used from Half Price Books (prior to being able to do a quick internet search for a review) so bought both this and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of… mostly off the title and cover blurbs and once I was able to grok both was happy to have made it through and kind of underwhelmed probably due to the hype building my expectations too high.
It's a good book, despite its flaws. It offers a lot of deep insights and I think it really inspired a lot of people, myself included.
I wasn't a huge fan, to be honest. some good ideas, but overall the book felt self-indulgent. "metamagical themas" is a far better book if you want to read one thing by hofstadter, and "le ton beau de marot" if you want a deep dive into something.
It is unique; you've certainly never read anything else quite like it. Hofstadter is a deep and careful thinker who loves language and wordplay. He writes in order to communicate something he has spent a long time thinking about, not merely for the sake of cranking out a book. I've read a number of his other books, and some of his ways of thinking have stuck with me for years and shaped the way I see the world.
This resonated strongly. I hated biology as a kid but have been blown away at the wonder of it all as I've started to study it as an adult. I wish more of the magnificence and wonder of it all was conveyed vs the rote memorization that is so commonly taught.
As an ex-microbiologist, the thing I can't stand is how smelly life is. Be in the same room as gangrenous flesh and your intestinal fortitude will be severely tested.
Other than that, I don't mind it, but I still prefer silicon.
If i had access to articles/blogs/YT/TT/AI like this, I'd have had become Leornardo Da Vinci.
I used to be inquisitive but coming from a poor neighborhood, I had no access in the olden days.
This type of article should persist.
maybe a stupid question, but, don’t you have access to all those things now? What’s stopping you from becoming Da Vinci now?
Limited time and energy left?
On the other hand, Da Vinci became Da Vinci without those tools either and whether he became the genius if he would have offloaded his thinking to AI from small on, is up for debate I guess.
He probably thinks his vibecoded things are in some genius level
This is why I loved biology; I must have had better high school teachers than the OP, because basically all of what he writes was conveyed.
Is anybody in here both engineer and biologist? How far away are we from the complexity of the human body? Pretty far I guess. Although we're producing features at molecular size now with lithography. I choose engineering because I felt I could pay the bills with that. But we have so much to learn from biology that could be applied in engineering perhaps?
I'm sympathetic to this; but hard for me to really think this is actionable. Odds are quite high that someone did push for these perspectives a few times, but someone didn't have the vantage point to appreciate them at the time.
That can be a really hard thing for people to realize. We will ask, "why didn't someone use this really compelling framing to get me hooked on something?!" And then move to something like "how come nobody has ever said just walking an hour a day will get you in pretty good physical shape?" Thing is, plenty of people say stuff like that.
And don't mistake this as blaming the listener! The point is messages can often come when you flat out aren't prepared for them.
So, what do we do? We spend time on the rote muscle memory of facts. In the hopes that that will prepare you for the next time a message comes and you are then ready for it.
Ideally, you rinse and repeat this. Constantly. All too often, the cycle gets subverted, though, and you forget to reopen yourself to the messages that came before.
One of the motivating reasons I majored in Biology my sophomore year was that the Vatican was took centuries in accepting the heliocentric theory, and I thought if they got evolution wrong too, then there might be more work to do.
But then I realized that a lot of biologists are religious, and it didn't have to be an antagonistic competition.
Like 7 years ago I read the most amazing book on biology..it described that inside cells literal skyscrapers of protein-based structures and machinery took individual ATP molecules and stripped them of an outer electron thus creating what I believe is called a "proton gradient".
This imbalance of electrical charge across a membrane is LITERALLY what creates life. Everything that living things do to recreate themselves is powered by this machinery and, as I remember this book telling me, the idea that a cell could suddenly pop into existence with all this truly incredible and unbelievable complex machinery is exactly like the idea of taking all the parts of a 747 and throwing them into a large box and then opening the box and a fully functional 747 is there waiting to take off.
The use of proton gradients gives an insight not only into how life got going in the first place, but also, perhaps, its deepest mindfuck point: the evolution of complex eukaryotic (nucleated) cells, which arose just once in 4 billion years of evolution.
There are no signs at all of some sort of gradual path to eukaryotic cells as evolution would lend us to think. Just the sudden appearance of this self-replicating nucleic cell which allows ALL multi-cellular life to exist.
I was utterly shocked that it took me 53 years to learn this most amazing of all facts I've every learned, and to be honest it makes the whole Black Hole fascination seem pedantic and almost trivial.
Of course I hate myself for not remembering either the name of this book or it's incredible author, so yes I know I suck.
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life?
I should have loved Latin. I should have loved Greek.
Isn't biology the applied reverse-engineering of a billion years of DNA evolution, where the laziest solution that works wins, is all written in assembly, with tremendous amounts of dead code and hardly any refactorings?
I've already seen the horrors that lurk inside of poorly-written 90s video games. Hard pass.
OMG! it's true! I have skipped so much!
One take-away: At the very least, each school library schould provide:
• Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• David Goodsell, The Machinery of Life
• William W. Cohen, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology
• Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology
• Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did).
I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology.
Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems.
What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people.
But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization.
But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies.
The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure.
But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.
It is the same for all subjects. Classes don't talk about how and why things came about, which is half the fun. It is all a pile of facts to be memorized to pass some test, not for its own sake. I think it is best to learn on your own, and use class for consolidation.
Avery's experiment is memorable not because "DNA carries heredity" is an important fact but because protein looked like the plausible answer and a relatively simple experiment overturned it...
We say often that the purpose of an undergraduate degree, whether taken in a specific domain or in the liberal arts, is not to teach any subject in depth, but rather to give a broad overview of the subject.
This is sometimes explained (excused?) as ingraining into the learner a kind of index of the state of a field and the methods of its practice, a thing that can be relied upon as a kind of highway map of knowledge, an intuition to direct the learner from then on onto the right arterial roads, from which their own research can then guide them to the actual street and building, per se.
But I would argue that the true function of an undergraduate degree, in surveying the subfields of a field, is to simply expose the learner to those fields, and hopefully bait them into an appreciation for one of them: to find the learner a specific cragged surface along the frontier of human knowledge that captivates them not only to explore it, but to solidify the foundations of their understanding of the field as a whole so that they feel better equipped to explore it.
(Certainly, while not everyone who graduates with an undergraduate degree can say they found such a thing, then at least everyone who continues within academia to become a researcher on the frontier of knowledge, will likely say they found their love of the subject they would eventually research some time during their undergraduate studies.)
I bring this up because it feels like early (elementary and secondary) education should be designed around the same goal, to the same degree if not moreso: to expose the learner to the many amazing things there are to be passionate about within every field of learning.
As a business would say, “you must convince your customer that they have a problem, before you attempt to sell them the solution.”
In other words, you must convince the learner that there is a promised land of continual wonderment on the other side of the huge inferential gap that separates them from those knowledgeable in a field, before they will ever be intrinsically motivated to cross that gap, and thus to accept your offer of tools and exercises to bridge that gap.
The funny thing is that everyone except the teachers and staff of primary/secondary schools, seem to know intuitively that this is the right order to approach education in. No science communicator on YouTube tries to lecture in the dry way schoolteachers do. No historian at a museum presents their subject to a tour group without a compelling framing narrative. No space center tries to teach you orbital mechanics before first convincing you how damn cool it is to ride in a rocket or do a space-walk, or how wonderfully alien the surface of another planet is. Aquariums hook you with the fleeting flashes of color of live fish you’ve never seen before first, never pushing the information about them on you, simply expecting your own building curiosity get the better of you as you decide to start reading the placards beside the most-interesting exhibits.
We have a special field, Early Chidlhood Education, that tries to guide educators into best attunement with the expectations and capabilities infants and young children bring to the table.
But we have no similar field of Late Childhood Education. We just have “education” (which is almost more the cargo-cult reverse-engineering of traditions inherited from aristocratic finishing schools, than it is a coherent theory of how to produce well-educated adults) and then, very separately, the loose assemblage of knowledge of our public educators, academic-topic communicators, edutainment media writers, etc. (which has, as far as I know, never been put together to be studied as an academic subject, let alone taught as a discipline.)
We can see fictional schoolteachers (your Mrs. Frizzles, your John Keatings) and on-camera educational personas (your Bill Nyes and Carl Sagans) doing a perfect [if implausibly-well-resourced] rendition of what an educator trained in such a field would be like, if it existed—yet we don’t expect real schoolteachers to engage with students on anything like that wavelength. We don’t expect real textbooks to present the world to children the way such a field would encourage. We don’t expect governments to evaluate late-childhood educational quality by the metrics the researchers in such a field would propose.
And while part of this is surely because we expect public education to serve certain public goods — one of those being to produce adults who are employable in the average entry-level job, jobs that in turn require certain skills and knowledge (and so to force children to absorb those skills and that knowledge whether they feel any interest in it or not) — that’s no excuse for making the process of ingraining that knowledge downright adversarial. Not when it would be both faster, cheaper, and less laborious to both the teachers and students (at least when measured by some long-term Total Cost of Education), to have the kids actually be enthusiastically cooperative in their own education.
But the downright-weird thing to me, is that even private schools don’t generally approach education this way. And nor do most homeschooling parents. They’re all either traditionalists of the “finishing school” bent who think the best possible education is each individual having a set of learned tutors there to force knowledge down their throat in a personalized way; or they’re believers in kids’ “drive to learn” (and so tend to provide no structure whatsoever, leaving kids to be “self-driven” — i.e. to either flail or hyperfocus on the few things they already know are cool, receiving little exposure to things outside their bubble, and so missing out on entire subjects because the existence of those things just never occurred to them.)
Is the problem just a lack of imagination? “This is how I learned, so this is what learning is”?
Or is it that approaching education this way would require that schoolteachers actually be both passionate and knowledgeable about something; and that each school retain enough such teachers that together they can share with their students a passion for every subject the school hopes to expose the kids to? And maybe the wrong “type” of people go into education (maybe people passionate about the process of education itself, or about giving kids opportunities, or something), so it’s actually challenging to build a school where every teacher is carrying the spark of some particular academic passion they wish to share with the students?
(Personally, I hypothesize that you could get by just fine with people holding a Masters or PhD in a subject of interest and no “education in education” at all, just common sense and empathy enough to not expect children to perform intellectual miracles. And hiring for that doesn’t seem to be too hard; there are vast swathes of “over-degreed” under-employed people, currently stuck doing something utterly divorced from their passion, who’d love to instead be communicating their love of a subject to the next generation. As long as the school can promise that that won’t translate to torturing unwilling students with rote memorization, and then giving them tests they know the kids will fail, because they never studied, because they had zero interest.)
I should have loved history.
It was my worst subject (until Power and Statics in college). It was about memorizing dates and big generalizations about events.
Now I'm active in a historical recreation society. I have learned to translate 3 ancient languages (and Latin, with great difficulty). I can intricately describe minutiae about what a late-1390s Englishman would know, and do on a daily basis. I can rant about "his" political opinions on France, the two popes, the various ruling families, Italians and Italian literature...
I have organized and attended classes on: Chinese rice winemaking, primitive latitude tools, fiber and cloth production, religious daily artifacts, recipe redaction, ...
Hated History. Got a "C". My only "C".
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