3 ms·

In many ways, I like the spirit of this post. I've tried a bit of it myself, since I'm interested in questions that aren't easily packaged for a grant (in the c

In many ways, I like the spirit of this post. I've tried a bit of it myself, since I'm interested in questions that aren't easily packaged for a grant (in the current era/error). BUT: "And second, for the first time in human history, the tools of science are cheap, and knowledge is nearly free. Your laptop can store and analyze more data than Galileo could have even imagined." A big chunk of the problem in biology is with the data being collected. Garbage in, garbage out. If you aren't running real experiments, not just pushing bytes around, you are unlikely to find something truly novel. (I say this as a computational biologist who pushes lots of bytes around.) Good luck affording modern tools and data collection on your own dime. The bar for new discoveries is simply higher than the past. ARPA-H (DARPA for healthcare) was recently established, which will be interesting to watch. However, I'm pessimistic that anything will significantly change until the current system crashes and burns under its own weight. Nevertheless, incremental progress is still happening in biology even if it lacks elegance and involves a lot of missteps. Some of it even makes it to the real world (e.g., current trends in cancer survival rates).

musicale 3y ago
> the tools of science are cheap More accessible, but not always cheap. Still a lot of expensive equipment involved in particle physics, nanotechnology, astronomy, etc. Training large AI models is still expensive and requires tons of data. And medical research still requires expensive clinical trials. And of course if you're not getting paid to do science then you probably need income from somewhere else.
bentoniteclay 3y ago
I'm curious what your thoughts are on iNaturalist, as a computational biologist. I'm a frequent user of that platform and I often wonder about the biases involved with user-generated content like that (people probably have a higher propensity to upload observations of flowering plants than they do of ferns, or bacteria, etc.). So I guess I wonder: is it a common resource for a computational biologist (or similar), or is it just considered a source of mostly garbage data?
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  iNaturalist sightings are fed into gbif.org and obis.org, the two major databases of biological sightings that collate everything. From my experience in my niche, iNaturalist sightings generally agree with the 'professional' sightings in the same database (various scientific expeditions' sightings data). It's definitely valuable data! Of course, it has some interesting biases, for starters, small species and fast species are generally not submitted because it's hard to take good photos. But scientific expeditions also have their own biases; if they use underwater nets, for example, they'll also select for larger animals. Some data is far better than no data!
- biomcgary 3y ago
  See the sister comment by a_bonobo for a better insight than I have, since I'm primarily focused on biomedicine rather than ecology. My guess is that ecology (which I was peripherally involved in grad school) is one of the areas where amateurs could have the biggest impact, largely because the field is so woefully underfunded and fieldwork requires more dedication and time than money, other than living expenses! Collaborating on an existing academic project might be a great way to get started, both for training and learning about the open questions in the field.
hutzlibu 3y ago
"The bar for new discoveries is simply higher than the past." Likely, but there is this point of reconfirming findings. There are so many bogus papers - if at least some of them can be exposed by "amateurs", that would be a real win.

musicale 3y ago

> the tools of science are cheap More accessible, but not always cheap. Still a lot of expensive equipment involved in particle physics, nanotechnology, astronomy, etc. Training large AI models is still expensive and requires tons of data. And medical research still requires expensive clinical trials. And of course if you're not getting paid to do science then you probably need income from somewhere else.

bentoniteclay 3y ago

I'm curious what your thoughts are on iNaturalist, as a computational biologist. I'm a frequent user of that platform and I often wonder about the biases involved with user-generated content like that (people probably have a higher propensity to upload observations of flowering plants than they do of ferns, or bacteria, etc.). So I guess I wonder: is it a common resource for a computational biologist (or similar), or is it just considered a source of mostly garbage data?

a_bonobo 3y ago
iNaturalist sightings are fed into gbif.org and obis.org, the two major databases of biological sightings that collate everything. From my experience in my niche, iNaturalist sightings generally agree with the 'professional' sightings in the same database (various scientific expeditions' sightings data). It's definitely valuable data! Of course, it has some interesting biases, for starters, small species and fast species are generally not submitted because it's hard to take good photos. But scientific expeditions also have their own biases; if they use underwater nets, for example, they'll also select for larger animals. Some data is far better than no data!
biomcgary 3y ago
See the sister comment by a_bonobo for a better insight than I have, since I'm primarily focused on biomedicine rather than ecology. My guess is that ecology (which I was peripherally involved in grad school) is one of the areas where amateurs could have the biggest impact, largely because the field is so woefully underfunded and fieldwork requires more dedication and time than money, other than living expenses! Collaborating on an existing academic project might be a great way to get started, both for training and learning about the open questions in the field.

hutzlibu 3y ago

"The bar for new discoveries is simply higher than the past." Likely, but there is this point of reconfirming findings. There are so many bogus papers - if at least some of them can be exposed by "amateurs", that would be a real win.