If I had a nickel for every terrible biology to computer processes analogy I saw on this website since joining, I’d probably have enough money to buy a beer. Which is what I feel I need after I see something like this.
Biology does not act like a computer. You cannot reduce biology to an operating system
Ok, but can you please make your substantive points informatively? Just putting someone else or the community down doesn't help. It just makes the thread shallow and dyspeptic.
If you know more than others do, that's great, but then please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn (edit: like you did here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36330052) If you don't want to do that, that's fine too, but in that case the thing to do is remind oneself that the internet is more or less wrong about everything and move on.
I know it's tempting to leave an empty negative comment to relieve oneself of annoyance, but this is the worst choice, at least on HN. It not only isn't the curious conversation we're looking for, it actively impedes it.
p.s. You're a good HN commenter generally - so thanks for that!
I don't think the programming analogies are helpful here, they seem to cause a serious amount of confusion. The basic idea isn't so bad, but too many people seem to try and push them much, much further than they can work.
For a developer this analogy also implies a lot of assumptions that they know to be true for code that are simply wrong for biology.
The fundamentals of biology are not difficult to grasp. Evolution, DNA -> RNA -> Protein, basic cell signalling, etc are all really easy to grasp with just the tiniest bit of effort. There's really no place for bad analogies, especially such a misleading one.
Sorry to bite your head off, but the reason that I'm passionate about this topic is, and I'm not joking, young earth Creationism. An analogy like the grandparent is something simple to grasp by many people, and then the Creationists can quickly turn around and say, "Well you see how biology is like a computer; somebody built a computer; therefore, God created us in six days, 6000 years ago."
How does a computer act? I think your understanding of that is too narrow ... consult the Church-Turing thesis; biology computes. And an operating system is just one sort of program ... it makes no sense to talk about reducing to an operating system; that's a category mistake.
This is sometimes called „Andrew Grove Fallacy” after Intel Ceo’s interview in Newsweek where he famously commented how drug research should look at CPU engineering for inspiration to improve itself, missing point that in biology we dont have privilege of knowing how each part of the system works, compared to, eg. designing CPUs, and making invalid analogies.
I've also heard this described as "Engineer's Disease": "We think because we're an expert in one area, we're automatically an expert in other areas." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812804).
I think the core lazy assumption that enables is the idea that all the other fields are properly understood as just like your field. Sometimes it's so bad that a software engineer will outright dismiss the ideas of actual experts as misguided, and insist on some "disrupting" the fields with some half-ass software-thinking.
Parts of biology act like analog computers even if the whole of biology exceeds what we see in computing.
But more importantly: the existence of DNA demonstrates that information processing is universal and that there are many common aspects between current approaches to silicon-based information processing and biology-based information processing.
dang|2 years ago
If you know more than others do, that's great, but then please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn (edit: like you did here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36330052) If you don't want to do that, that's fine too, but in that case the thing to do is remind oneself that the internet is more or less wrong about everything and move on.
I know it's tempting to leave an empty negative comment to relieve oneself of annoyance, but this is the worst choice, at least on HN. It not only isn't the curious conversation we're looking for, it actively impedes it.
p.s. You're a good HN commenter generally - so thanks for that!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
TeMPOraL|2 years ago
Nobody is doing that. Analogies are drawing rough outlines in the thought-space[0], they aren't a definition. As such, they are helpful.
--
[0] - Or latent space, if I want to make an analogy inside the analogy apologia.
fabian2k|2 years ago
For a developer this analogy also implies a lot of assumptions that they know to be true for code that are simply wrong for biology.
getoffmycase|2 years ago
Sorry to bite your head off, but the reason that I'm passionate about this topic is, and I'm not joking, young earth Creationism. An analogy like the grandparent is something simple to grasp by many people, and then the Creationists can quickly turn around and say, "Well you see how biology is like a computer; somebody built a computer; therefore, God created us in six days, 6000 years ago."
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
Viliam1234|2 years ago
jibal|2 years ago
Ralfp|2 years ago
tivert|2 years ago
I think the core lazy assumption that enables is the idea that all the other fields are properly understood as just like your field. Sometimes it's so bad that a software engineer will outright dismiss the ideas of actual experts as misguided, and insist on some "disrupting" the fields with some half-ass software-thinking.
dekhn|2 years ago
But more importantly: the existence of DNA demonstrates that information processing is universal and that there are many common aspects between current approaches to silicon-based information processing and biology-based information processing.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
FrustratedMonky|2 years ago
What terms/concepts should be used in their place?