3 ms·

This is great. "The mark of a true expert is neglecting obvious explanations to avoid being boring." That said, I do expect this perspective to make church mor

• wpietri 11y ago
  Well, I'm glad to help anybody through getting dragged to church. I always found that miserable. But I meant something different. Software developers, for example, mostly don't talk about voltage levels, even though everything we do is influencing a voltage level somewhere. When I describe a social interaction, I don't open with, "Well, we're all primates, so we often eat together for reasons of social bonding." When you go visit your doctor, they don't open with, "You know you'll die right? So let's talk about slightly prolonging your inevitable gruesome death." Bringing the basic frame back into focus can be interesting, and occasionally it's revolutionary. But when a novice says, "You're ignoring this super-obvious thing!" it's mostly pretty dull. It often drags a conversation from the level of a graduate seminar to a remedial class. That's not to say I'm opposed to teaching somebody the basics. But HN has a depressing tendency to assume that our raw smarts are just as good as somebody else's decades of experience. Even when, as here, those people are also obviously smart. I'd love to see more commenters asking themselves, "What if they already had considered my point?" Rather than just assuming, as here, that a team of 25 MDs and PhDs from a variety of serious institutions had just never even thought of genetics as a possible explanation for a biological phenomenon. And doing that based not on a careful reading of the paper and related work, but on a 6-item Q&A in a lightweight pop-sci magazine.