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Unlike what the title and headers imply, this article seems to be much more about biochemistry than biology
This is definitely not Biology 101.
I can't really argue with that. I've been going back and forth with myself over whether I should call it something different. Suggestions?
In response to
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
Nice article, just a minor quibble:
Unlike what the title and headers imply, this article seems to be much more about biochemistry than biology - is that because my perception of the place of biochemistry in biology is flawed? Is it because this is a building block for later posts, that will breach other subjects in biology?
It's a foundation - it's easiest to illustrate the patterns I'm describing on a molecular/cellular level, but they apply across the board. My current intent for the actual series is to start with a group of posts on molecular/cellular systems, both because a basic understanding of genetics and metabolism is extremely useful to understanding everything else, and because it's the area I'm most familiar with.
However, recognizing that about half the interest expressed in the suggestions thread was for topics above the molecular level, I'm trying to figure out how to do some posts on them earlier without making things disjointed/difficult to follow. I might settle for weaving in short bits about how molecular topics will apply to macroscale ones later.
In response to
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
I really like this article, but I have a background in the subject material. How do folks who don't have prior familiarity with the subject matter find the inferential distance?
I'm hoping that I'll be able to keep the posts within the realm of reasonable understanding for most people on this site by focusing on principles, patterns, and analogies to other fields; however, if at any point I'm failing to do so, I will ardently welcome that being pointed out.
The assumptions I made when constructing my tentative post outline were that readers here were likely to have some general scientific background, and at least a high school level of chemistry. I recognize that the latter might not be a good assumption.
(If you, or anyone else has suggestions at any point on how to improve the usefulness of these posts for those without a background in related fields, please let me know!)
In response to
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
Interesting!
Reflects my engineering-slanted opinion on the future of biology
I have a non-engineering-slanted preference for the future of biology; this is all quite scary. Given the direction that biology is going, dangerous thing will soon be widely accessible. FAI is hard, but at least AI is too. As a member of the field, what are your opinions on this?
If you mean my opinion on whether it's worth being afraid of - I don't think it is. Any powerful new technology/capability should be implemented with caution and an eye to anticipating risk, but I don't view bioengineering in a different capacity than any other scientific frontier in terms of risk.
On a practical level, the oversight on manipulation of organisms beyond your run-of-the-mill, single-celled lab workhorses (bacteria, yeast) is massive. In the not-too-distant past, it was an uphill climb just to be able to do genetic engineering research at all.
I got a lot of questions about 'bacteria FOOM,' if you will, around the time the synthetic bacterium paper came out. The short version of my answer then is worth repeating - if we want to make super-germs or other nasty things, nature/Azathoth does it quite well already (ebola, smallpox, plague, HIV...). Beyond that, this sort of research is exceptionally time- and resource-consuming; the funding bottleneck reduces the chances of the lone mad scientist creating a monster essentially to nil. Beyond even that, putting some DNA in a cell is not hard, but designing an idealized, intelligent organism on the level of strong AI is at least as hard as just designing the AI.
So my stance is one of.... let's call it exuberant caution. Or possibly cautious exuberance. Probably both.
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
Since the responses to my recent inquiry were positive, I've rolled up my sleeves and gotten started. Special thanks to badger for eir comment in that thread, as it inspired the framework used here.
My intent in the upcoming posts is to offer a practical overview of biological topics of both broad-scale importance and particular interest to the Less Wrong community. This will by no means be exhaustive (else I’d be writing a textbook instead, or more likely, you’d be reading one); instead I am going to attempt to sketch what amounts to a map of several parts of the discipline – where they stand in relation to other fields, where we are in the progress of their development, and their boundaries and frontiers. I’d like this to be a continually improving project as well, so I would very much welcome input on content relevance and clarity for any and all posts.
I will list relevant/useful references for more in-depth reading at the end of each post. The majority of in-text links will be used to provide a quick explanation of terms that may not be familiar or phenomena that may not be obvious. If the terms are familiar to you, you probably do not need to worry about those links. A significant minority of in-text links may or may not be purely for amusement.
What is meant is n tickets are sold, and then you do something like 'each ticket bought a particular plutonium atom out of n atoms; whichever atom decays first is a winning ticket'. Many Worlds says that each atom decays first in some world-line.
The idea is to, like the least convenient possible world, to avoid a cheap rhetorical escape like 'I deny the trilemma because in my world the possibility of winning has already been foreclosed by my buying a predetermined losing ticket! Hah!'
In response to
On the Anthropic Trilemma
I think I'm hung up on the lottery example in Eliezer's original post - what is meant by a quantum lottery? He said 'every ticket wins somewhere' - does that mean that every ticket wins in some future timeline (such that if you could split yourself and populate multiple future timelines, you could increase your probability of winning)? If not, what does it mean? Lacking some special provision for the ticket, the outcome is determined by the ticket you bought before you queued up the split, rather than the individual probability of winning.
If anyone could clarify this, I'd be grateful.
In response to
Seeking suggestions: Less Wrong Biology 101
This would be great! I'd love to know more about sleep, but I hear there's not much known about it anyway.
What constitutes 'more?' I ask because it seems to be a fairly frequent topic on the site (people trying to do less of it), and I don't want to write a primer post that ends up being rehash for 90% of readers.
In response to
Seeking suggestions: Less Wrong Biology 101
I'd be interested. Overall, I'd prefer a focus on foundational/technical topics than the most recent Awesome New Study, although if you can tie in both, that would be great. My past experience with biology tended to involve a bunch of technical terms being thrown at me and my eyes glazing over. Are there a handful of broad principles that constrain anticipation about biological systems or processes that you could highlight?
Are there a handful of broad principles that constrain anticipation about biological systems or processes that you could highlight?
There are. My thought about the current event idea for the topics would be simply to use those as a jumping-off point to talk about the foundational aspects, since otherwise I'd feel somewhat aimless as to where to start. But the way you phrased that made me think about more about how to structure a foundations only-type post, and I think I could pull at least some of that off in a way that would be useful.... I shall continue to think on this. Thanks for the suggestion!
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I'm afraid I'm not sure what you like to call stuff within your field. But if I was going with the university subject metaphor and pulling something out of thin air it'd be:
BIO253: Modelling Cellular Systems
A second year Bio subject with a prereq of BIO101 and two semesters of maths and stats. :)
(Note: If I was actually within the field I expect at I would cringe at the inaccuracy.)
Hah, no, that does sound like a real course title, although usually they call it "cellular engineering" to sucker in more people who would be turned off by an explicit mention of math in the title.
(I kid. Mostly.)
It is only a small subset of what I want to cover, though. I shall continue to think on it.