[HN Gopher] There aren't enough smart people in biology doing so...
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There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring
Author : abhishaike
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-11-09 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.owlposting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.owlposting.com)
| practal wrote:
| I'd rather formulate it the other way around. There are not
| enough smart people in computing working on the really important
| things. Instead they are working on what pays the most.
| eu wrote:
| and what would be some important (and boring) things to focus
| on?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Not ads.
|
| I for one would be happy if the everyday software I use
| wasn't complete rubbish. It won't make the world meaningfully
| better, but it certainly won't make it worse. It's a start.
| immibis wrote:
| Ad blockers :)
|
| Why isn't there a browser which you can just install to
| have a good Internet experience? It would have to update
| itself every day with a new definition of "good" due to the
| arms race with advertisers.
|
| It would have to block all ads and trackers and other bad
| JavaScript; automatically redirect YouTube to Invidious and
| so on, while seamlessly keeping all YouTube features;
| automatically open the chronological tab instead of the
| recommended tab on most social media; be blatantly illegal
| to possess; and update itself through Tor so nobody can do
| anything about it.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| All of that war can be ended legally in a day. The
| solution is not technological.
| lieks wrote:
| Librewolf is pretty much that.
|
| Firefox with stupid features turned off, all privacy
| settings to the max, uBlock Origin and no other
| customizations.
| partomniscient wrote:
| I agree. I detest that the world I live in, there's an
| inordinate amount of human effort that goes into diverting
| my attention to make me behave against my own best
| interests by buying something, or even just offered the
| opportunity to notice something buyable, that in both cases
| enriches someone else.
|
| If all of that effort was focused on something meaningful,
| rather than something 'profitable', I wouldn't despise
| myself or the rest of humanity.
|
| There's a massive difference between making the world a
| better place versus making the world a better place for a
| select few. Late stage capitalism has a massively heavy
| emphasis on the latter.
|
| And now the USA has effectively reverted to monarchism. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes
| exe34 wrote:
| do what I do. every time grammarly interrupts my YouTube
| viewing, I say out loud clearly to myself "fuck off
| grammarly", and then I use YouTube-download to get the
| video without the ads.
|
| every time Facebook shows me an advert for solar panels,
| I close Facebook (I only go for the pictures and stories
| of cats getting in awkward situations).
|
| I've amassed a ton of books for my old age - some day I'm
| going to go offline and never go back online.
| javcasas wrote:
| Imagine you had a team of 10 average (not bad, but also not
| great) software engineers for a year. Choose between:
|
| * Get them to implement the kubernetes ssd/disk attachment
| plugin for the Adobe cloud offering.
|
| * Get them to implement the remote access, scheduling and
| status control of a biochemistry centrifugue.
|
| Both missions are boring, and neither will change much how
| whe world runs.
|
| Well, I lied. Because of incentives, it is actually choosing
| between 15 decent engineers for the Adobe cloud or 1-2 cheap
| & bad engineers for the centrifugue (I have worked in
| embedded, I know software is an afterthought in that
| industry).
|
| And now let's make it more personal: would you rather work
| for Adobe cloud for 135k per year, or for Centrifugues R Us
| for 85k per year? Would your spouse agree with your decision,
| especially after your 3 year old decided to grab and throw
| the TV to the floor?
| tomrod wrote:
| Yep, collaboration problems are hard to solve.
|
| What are the financial incentives in biotech to trade time for
| wages?
| hinkley wrote:
| And building slightly special versions of things that already
| exist.
|
| In some ways I think we'd have more progress with fewer devs.
| And I don't mean "cull the bad ones". I mean necessity is the
| mother of invention.
|
| We'd have 3 CRMs and a dozen content management systems instead
| of dozens and thousands respectively.
| Terr_ wrote:
| That may have an effect, but I don't think the root cause is
| the number of developers.
|
| The root issue is that people and groups are disorganized and
| have inconsistencies between them. Changing habits and
| convincing other humans and making political coalitions is
| very hard, so instead people are willing to spend
| surprisingly large amounts of money in various ways that
| somehow take the edge off.
|
| Creating or adopting software to "organize" is just one way
| that can occur. It could also be something like a doomed
| initiative that someone with clout wants, or even just paying
| the salary of a useless person hoping they'll leave on their
| own because firing them is too hard.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > > doing something boring
|
| > the other way around [...] important things
|
| That makes it sound like "boring" and "important" are
| opposites, but they aren't.
|
| There may be some very boring database shuffling import/export
| problems, but if they aren't done by somebody, a bunch of
| people won't get paychecks and won't make rent. Or the boring
| task of _reviewing_ code that needs to be right or else someone
| dies.
| briandear wrote:
| Important things pay the most. Or they aren't important. If
| they aren't valuable, they aren't important. The market
| determines important. If there is something that someone thinks
| is important but aren't willing to spend their own money on it,
| then it clearly isn't that important.
| kibwen wrote:
| Right, which is why oxygen isn't important, because I don't
| pay anything for oxygen. Praise the Market!
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The people that maintain the Cobol that runs all the banks
| make less money than people writing a web page that half
| works.
|
| I have a family member who works for Wells Fargo and
| discovered this while talking to him and a programmer friend
| of his. They work on the systems that move money around
| between accounts, and I work on a shitty half-thought-out web
| app. I'm paid like 2x what they are.
| exe34 wrote:
| exactly, that's why nurses are treated like shit and football
| players are paid so much. we truly live in idiocracy. most
| recent example being the man who can't string a full sentence
| together getting elected a second time.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| This assumes people's preferences are optimally aligned to
| their best interests in a micro and macro sense and that,
| more or less, classical economics is precisely accurate. None
| of this is actually true.
|
| There are plenty of things that are important that the
| "market" doesn't allocate a ton of money towards and tons of
| stuff that are really not important but the "market" rewards.
| The market in the end is a collection of decisions by
| individuals in aggregation, and decisions by humans are
| rooted more in their psychology than in some uber rational
| god mind of optimality. It is very possible to shape
| behavior, decision making, and capital allocation in ways
| that are demonstrably pessimal. Indeed with the advent of
| mass consumption of social media and algorithmic manipulation
| of psychology you can shape market behavior directly in ways
| that are detrimental to the participants in the market while
| rewarding the manipulators. This can be even done as a method
| of warfare, in which you shape psychology, behavior, and
| market preferences against a societies best interests.
|
| This is why we have non market systems that prioritize
| objectively important work that's inefficient by the market's
| perspective. This is essentially the outcome of 248 years of
| economic research after the wealth of nations.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > Stripe is a fundamentally boring business
|
| I understand what you're trying to say here, but I disagree.
|
| What someone finds interesting or boring is of course subjective,
| but you'd be surpised at how many people find finance endlessly
| interesting - and especially the overlap between finance and
| software ("fintech").
|
| On the surface, it might be bewildering that some people are more
| interested in internet payment processing than say, stem cell
| research, but that's just how peoples interests work!
| Retric wrote:
| High level topics aren't what people are doing day to day
| though. There's definitely parts of any business that are
| interesting but that only goes so far. Science also involves a
| great deal to tedious work.
|
| Comparatively high fintech pay suggests it needs those wages to
| attract people.
| cj wrote:
| Some people get satisfaction out of solving problems and
| learning, regardless of what the problem is or what they're
| learning.
|
| Building a company is a constant exercise of problem solving
| and learning, especially at the early stages.
|
| I grew a SaaS to millions of ARR but the thing that keeps me
| interested isn't really the industry we're in, it's all of the
| tangential things that are required to build and grow (learning
| how to hire well, learning how to build company culture,
| pitching to investors, M&A, figuring out how to be a good
| leader, etc)
|
| Sometimes I feel guilty that I'm not as directly passionate
| about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate
| about the people and company and the journey it's on.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| >Sometimes I feel guilty that I'm not as directly passionate
| about the product itself as I should be, and am more
| passionate about the people and company and the journey it's
| on.
|
| That's because you are a human, that built a company. You are
| not that company, even if you must embody it - literally and
| figuratively.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I hate it when someone tries to take it in a subjective
| direction without accounting for fundamental human biases.
|
| Like any human can understand why space x catching a freaking
| rocket is less boring than stripe payment processing. I mean
| come on!
|
| Do you really expect me to believe you fundamentally think
| payment processing is so much more cooler than catching a
| freaking rocket? If anyone believes that I'd point to them
| having more of an axe to grind with Elon then any depiction of
| what they really feel.
|
| I subjectively think I am god. That's just my subjective
| opinion and it's valid because everything on the face of the
| earth is subjective.
| rgmerk wrote:
| The company I work for runs a wrap platform [1]. Not one
| developer in the company has ever mentioned that they find the
| area intrinsically exciting to work on.
|
| There is a sense of collective responsibility that we are the
| custodian for the retirement savings of hundreds of thousands
| of people, so you do not want to screw that up. There is also
| satisfaction in that our efforts as developers mean that our
| platform is consistently rated the best on the market.
|
| But nobody, least of all management, is kidding themselves that
| people are working for the company because of the problem
| domain - they're working for the company because of the pay,
| conditions, and company culture. And there's absolutely nothing
| wrong with that.
|
| [1] https://www.finance-monthly.com/2020/03/the-benefits-of-
| wrap... (NB: not the company mentioned in the article).
| epgui wrote:
| Strongly disagree. Easily 99% of people in biology are doing very
| tedious boring things. Maybe you just don't hear about it because
| it's "boring".
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| "All generalization is wrong, including this"
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Software engineering and finance have completely sucked the air
| out of the STEM room.
|
| I'll be surprised if in a generation anyone in the US knows how
| to build anything other than JavaScript apps and swap agreements.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Software engineering is well on the way to normalizing, IMO.
| The job market has not been great for the past two years. The
| margins in finance are getting squeezed too by tech. If you've
| been investing for a decade or two, you know how much lower
| fees are now.
| dangerwill wrote:
| We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our
| physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our
| manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent.
|
| It's also why this will be the Chinese century.
| ben_w wrote:
| > It's also why this will be the Chinese century.
|
| Modulo how important AI turns out to be.
|
| 25 years ago, it seemed obvious China was going to be to the
| 21st century what the USA was to the 20th. But also 25 years
| ago, AI translation in a video call that not only dubs you in
| your own voice but also modifies your mouth to sync lips with
| the synthesised voice, was wild speculative SciFi on par with
| a warp drive.
| irrational wrote:
| > most decent or ambitious companies in this field are run by
| exactly one type of person. They are often deeply curious, hard
| working to the point of near pathology, and will almost always
| end up pursuing some sort of crazy pie-in-the-sky mission. Like
| curing aging or making de-novo proteins in a zero-shot manner or
| trying to usher in entirely new dogmas in biology. In other
| words, something where immense intellectual output leads to
| outsized market payoff.
|
| I have a friend who works for Nvidia. I can't remember the
| founder of Nvidia's name, but the above paragraph reminded me of
| the description my friend gives of him. Frankly, my friend is a
| fanboy of this guy for the reasons given in the article about
| biology company founders.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Software doesn't require a degree to get a job, even an advanced
| high paying one, but just about all the other STEM fields do.
| psyklic wrote:
| It's very likely that Stripe initially pitched very cutting-edge,
| ambitious ideas to VCs. So, comparing seemingly "boring" mature
| company to new startups may be misleading.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > the democratization of online payments
|
| What's more democratic about Stripe than WorldPay?
|
| I don't go to a polling station and elect Stripe. I pay it's
| fees.
| skybrian wrote:
| Another meaning of democratization is "the action of making
| something accessible to everyone."
| odyssey7 wrote:
| The way PhD programs work, pursuing a research career is an
| extreme lifestyle.
|
| Don't make it a game of extremes, and you'll get more of the
| "boring" work done.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I have a lot to say about this.
|
| First, Software is saturated. Every idea is being attacked such
| that the boring things are the only niche available. That's why
| you see more boring startups in software.
|
| Second the innovation in software largely raw garbage. Humanity
| moving forward is developing a light speed drive but software
| innovation is mainly something along the lines of: instead of
| looking through the phone book for a plumber there's an app for
| that now.
|
| And if you look even deeper at the technology of software itself
| it's mostly horizontal development of endlessly making new
| abstraction after abstraction without ever really knowing if
| things are improving. Case in point we went from server side
| rendering to single page apps and now we're heading back without
| ever really knowing if things have improved or gotten more
| complex.
|
| I don't want biology to model software. Software is a bunch of
| illusions and no progress anywhere.
|
| Ironically I think AI is the one part of software that isn't an
| illusion as this is real progress in creating an entity that
| can't be differentiated from a human. The thing is most people
| think AI is an illusion because it "hallucinates" and I'm just
| thinking the whole time that the fact that we created something
| that can lie, deceive and hallucinate is a marker of progress
| bigger than all the bullshit progress you see in the rest of
| software and the software startup world.
|
| So I disagree with op. Good on biology to not do boring bs.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| If you replace the word "software" with "web development" then
| yeah you're right
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| Biology is just too vast of the Gap (difficulty) for our own
| exellence/smart people to be incentived to jump.
|
| Every "discovery" is merely reduced to a classification, which
| can reduce one's accomplishments - when every question's answer
| just is a name of a new branch of questions.
|
| Biology is life, life is just an arbitrary nested magnitude of
| complexity.
|
| https://xkcd.com/435/
|
| The real meta-joke to this xkcd is that the horizontal scale is
| logarithmic.
| titanomachy wrote:
| > They live and breathe biology, and their penultimate goal in
| life is to have some sort of fundamental impact on the field at
| large.
|
| But what's their _ultimate_ goal??
|
| "Penultimate" means second-to-most-important. It's not some kind
| of modifier that means "extra ultimate".
| abhishaike wrote:
| dumb wording on my part! fixed :)
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Now that you point it out, it would be pretty cool to have a
| word for "extra ultimate".
| leoc wrote:
| That would probably be 'perultimate' (see
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per-#Latin ). Mind you, since
| 'ultimate' means 'last' it's not clear what this word would
| actually _mean_.
| sampo wrote:
| > Here's one answer: the historical role that for-profit biology
| has played is basically a single thing: developing drugs.
|
| Breeding new plant varieties, and new animal breeds, for
| agriculture, is also for-profit biology.
| otoburb wrote:
| This post doesn't address the elephant in the room -- wages in
| biology seem to be supressed due to an oversupply of life
| sciences scientists willing to do tasks in various corporate and
| academic labs.
|
| Since life science wages (rewards) seem to be so low compared to
| other careers in relation to the density of advanced degree
| holders, the ambitions need to be that much bigger to make it
| worth it to found uncertain and risky startups. Only big ideas
| would be worth funding. Ecosystem tooling startups might be
| founded once more capital for that category trickles in.
|
| >> _And I have no doubt that Patrick Collinson -- the CEO of
| Stripe [...]_
|
| Patrick's last name is Collison, not Collinson, as per the
| wikipedia link that the blog post references.
| abhishaike wrote:
| Fixed!
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