from Hacker News

There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring

by abhishaike on 11/9/24, 5:13 PM with 61 comments

• by epgui on 11/9/24, 7:50 PM

  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”.

• by Workaccount2 on 11/9/24, 7:56 PM

  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.

• by titanomachy on 11/9/24, 9:46 PM

  > 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".

• by otoburb on 11/9/24, 10:23 PM

  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.

• by joshdavham on 11/9/24, 7:48 PM

  > 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!

• by odyssey7 on 11/9/24, 8:45 PM

  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.

• by PostOnce on 11/9/24, 8:20 PM

  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.

• by ninetyninenine on 11/9/24, 8:46 PM

  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.

• by practal on 11/9/24, 7:43 PM

  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.

• by irrational on 11/9/24, 7:59 PM

  > 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.

• by bdjsiqoocwk on 11/10/24, 12:19 AM

  Someone said to me, if you look at all activities that have the potential to make you vast amounts of money, what you'll find is that the people doing them are people who are very motivated by money. It's not that the good guys at stripe selflessly accept devoting their lives making society better even tho it's boring, they're doing it for the money. I don't see how "smart" or "boring" enters here at all.

• by sampo on 11/9/24, 10:11 PM

  > 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.

• by philipwhiuk on 11/9/24, 8:41 PM

  > 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.

• by Jerrrrrrry on 11/9/24, 9:45 PM

  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.

• by psyklic on 11/9/24, 8:34 PM

  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.