[rackjack]

Biology is not programming, man.

We can work on different abstraction levels because in the worst case, we can just crack open a hex editor and write raw assembly or mess with the OS directly. We've built on that to get C, and Java, and Python, and all that other good stuff, but we can go all the way to the bottom if we need to.

Now imagine you're working on a computer with proprietary hardware. The easiest way to interact with it is via a provided high level language, like Lua. This is eating, drinking, sleeping, exercising. Now imagine that you crack open the assembly because something is just not working right. Some illness or something. And you come to realize there are thousands of different opcodes (proteins, enzymes, genes, etc.). Not only that, but sometimes they work differently depending on where in the computer they are located or the time of day or whatever (organs, menstrual cycle, circadian rhythm, etc.). You can make some good guesses on what a couple of them do, but you are not sure of the entirety of their effects for the majority of them.

So you're looking at the interfaces and you figure out if you send the right data to this and that place, you can get it to work right, maybe with some acceptable or unforeseen consequences. This is medicine, and it is a miserable way to do things due to the complete lack of understanding and control, much like driving your car from the backseat with a 10 foot pole while facing backwards.

So you've discovered a lot of hacks, made a lot of medicine, collected a lot of 10 foot poles. And as you look at your ever expanding collection, now easily in the thousands, you begin to get the creeping feeling that (a) you will never find a panacea, (b) the system you are working on is a disgusting mess of patchwork jobs on patchwork jobs developed over millions of years, and (c) there is probably an underlying system directing all of this, but its complexity might not even be better than what you're operating on now, and you definitely lack the technology to utilize it properly anyway.

And what you're doing is saving and bettering people's lives on the whole. And then some big shot comes in and says "Ackchyually, why don't you just access the lowest layer directly? Pretty sus." Try to have some perspective and humility on how horrifically complicated biology is. Life was evolved, not designed. Life isn't a computer. The relative simplicity and sanity of technological systems is a blessing absent in biology.

[pessimizer]

You're objecting to the metaphor, not the substance or the reference. The metaphor has no bearing on whether Michael Levin (who I am not familiar with) is right or wrong. I can't decode anything in your objection to the metaphor that seems to have a bearing on that, either; it just seems like a copypasta extolling expertise and showing frustration at naive internet amateurs. It takes a single google search to find that Levin is not a naive internet amateur.

Biology is not programming, except when it is like programming, or when it involves programming. But that could also be said about golf.

[LadyCailin]

Also, the development environment is nothing like prod, and there are ethical constraints on making them too similar.