6 ms·

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

66 points by abhishaike 2y ago

practal 2y ago
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.
- eu 2y ago
  and what would be some important (and boring) things to focus on?
  - gherkinnn 2y ago
    Not ads. I for one would be happy if the everyday software I use wasn't complete rubbish. It won't make the world meaningfully better, but it certainly won't make it worse. It's a start.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Ad blockers :) Why isn't there a browser which you can just install to have a good Internet experience? It would have to update itself every day with a new definition of "good" due to the arms race with advertisers. It would have to block all ads and trackers and other bad JavaScript; automatically redirect YouTube to Invidious and so on, while seamlessly keeping all YouTube features; automatically open the chronological tab instead of the recommended tab on most social media; be blatantly illegal to possess; and update itself through Tor so nobody can do anything about it.
      - Euphorbium 2y ago
        All of that war can be ended legally in a day. The solution is not technological.
      - lieks 2y ago
        Librewolf is pretty much that. Firefox with stupid features turned off, all privacy settings to the max, uBlock Origin and no other customizations.
    - partomniscient 2y ago
      I agree. I detest that the world I live in, there's an inordinate amount of human effort that goes into diverting my attention to make me behave against my own best interests by buying something, or even just offered the opportunity to notice something buyable, that in both cases enriches someone else. If all of that effort was focused on something meaningful, rather than something 'profitable', I wouldn't despise myself or the rest of humanity. There's a massive difference between making the world a better place versus making the world a better place for a select few. Late stage capitalism has a massively heavy emphasis on the latter. And now the USA has effectively reverted to monarchism. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes
      - exe34 2y ago
        do what I do. every time grammarly interrupts my YouTube viewing, I say out loud clearly to myself "fuck off grammarly", and then I use YouTube-download to get the video without the ads. every time Facebook shows me an advert for solar panels, I close Facebook (I only go for the pictures and stories of cats getting in awkward situations). I've amassed a ton of books for my old age - some day I'm going to go offline and never go back online.
        partomniscient 2y ago
        I actually pay for YouTube to not show me advertising, but I'm also a fan of UBlock Origin and yt-dlp [1], and also physical media, but I do appreciate ebooks a lot. [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
  - javcasas 2y ago
    Imagine you had a team of 10 average (not bad, but also not great) software engineers for a year. Choose between: * Get them to implement the kubernetes ssd/disk attachment plugin for the Adobe cloud offering. * Get them to implement the remote access, scheduling and status control of a biochemistry centrifugue. Both missions are boring, and neither will change much how whe world runs. Well, I lied. Because of incentives, it is actually choosing between 15 decent engineers for the Adobe cloud or 1-2 cheap & bad engineers for the centrifugue (I have worked in embedded, I know software is an afterthought in that industry). And now let's make it more personal: would you rather work for Adobe cloud for 135k per year, or for Centrifugues R Us for 85k per year? Would your spouse agree with your decision, especially after your 3 year old decided to grab and throw the TV to the floor?
- tomrod 2y ago
  Yep, collaboration problems are hard to solve. What are the financial incentives in biotech to trade time for wages?
- hinkley 2y ago
  And building slightly special versions of things that already exist. In some ways I think we’d have more progress with fewer devs. And I don’t mean “cull the bad ones”. I mean necessity is the mother of invention. We’d have 3 CRMs and a dozen content management systems instead of dozens and thousands respectively.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    That may have an effect, but I don't think the root cause is the number of developers. The root issue is that people and groups are disorganized and have inconsistencies between them. Changing habits and convincing other humans and making political coalitions is very hard, so instead people are willing to spend surprisingly large amounts of money in various ways that somehow take the edge off. Creating or adopting software to "organize" is just one way that can occur. It could also be something like a doomed initiative that someone with clout wants, or even just paying the salary of a useless person hoping they'll leave on their own because firing them is too hard.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > > doing something boring > the other way around [...] important things That makes it sound like "boring" and "important" are opposites, but they aren't. There may be some very boring database shuffling import/export problems, but if they aren't done by somebody, a bunch of people won't get paychecks and won't make rent. Or the boring task of reviewing code that needs to be right or else someone dies.
- briandear 2y ago
  Important things pay the most. Or they aren’t important. If they aren’t valuable, they aren’t important. The market determines important. If there is something that someone thinks is important but aren’t willing to spend their own money on it, then it clearly isn’t that important.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Right, which is why oxygen isn't important, because I don't pay anything for oxygen. Praise the Market!
  - Buttons840 2y ago
    The people that maintain the Cobol that runs all the banks make less money than people writing a web page that half works. I have a family member who works for Wells Fargo and discovered this while talking to him and a programmer friend of his. They work on the systems that move money around between accounts, and I work on a shitty half-thought-out web app. I'm paid like 2x what they are.
  - exe34 2y ago
    exactly, that's why nurses are treated like shit and football players are paid so much. we truly live in idiocracy. most recent example being the man who can't string a full sentence together getting elected a second time.
    - 9dev 2y ago
      No, you just don’t get it. It’s the weave, bro. You’re just not smart enough to understand it, bro.
  - fnordpiglet 2y ago
    This assumes people’s preferences are optimally aligned to their best interests in a micro and macro sense and that, more or less, classical economics is precisely accurate. None of this is actually true. There are plenty of things that are important that the “market” doesn’t allocate a ton of money towards and tons of stuff that are really not important but the “market” rewards. The market in the end is a collection of decisions by individuals in aggregation, and decisions by humans are rooted more in their psychology than in some uber rational god mind of optimality. It is very possible to shape behavior, decision making, and capital allocation in ways that are demonstrably pessimal. Indeed with the advent of mass consumption of social media and algorithmic manipulation of psychology you can shape market behavior directly in ways that are detrimental to the participants in the market while rewarding the manipulators. This can be even done as a method of warfare, in which you shape psychology, behavior, and market preferences against a societies best interests. This is why we have non market systems that prioritize objectively important work that’s inefficient by the market’s perspective. This is essentially the outcome of 248 years of economic research after the wealth of nations.
joshdavham 2y ago
> 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!
- Retric 2y ago
  High level topics aren’t what people are doing day to day though. There’s definitely parts of any business that are interesting but that only goes so far. Science also involves a great deal to tedious work. Comparatively high fintech pay suggests it needs those wages to attract people.
- cj 2y ago
  Some people get satisfaction out of solving problems and learning, regardless of what the problem is or what they’re learning. Building a company is a constant exercise of problem solving and learning, especially at the early stages. I grew a SaaS to millions of ARR but the thing that keeps me interested isn’t really the industry we’re in, it’s all of the tangential things that are required to build and grow (learning how to hire well, learning how to build company culture, pitching to investors, M&A, figuring out how to be a good leader, etc) Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not as directly passionate about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate about the people and company and the journey it’s on.
  - Jerrrrrrry 2y ago
    >Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not as directly passionate about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate about the people and company and the journey it’s on. That's because you are a human, that built a company. You are not that company, even if you must embody it - literally and figuratively.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
epgui 2y ago
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”.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  “All generalization is wrong, including this”
  - epgui 2y ago
    That’s a funny quote, but I’m not sure what the relevance is. Did I make a generalization, or did the author of the article make one? There’s probably on the order of 10 million scientists, a sizeable chunk of whom could be said to work in biology (including adjacent fields like microbiology, biochem…). The article contains only references to a handful of non-representative outliers… That’s more than a generalization, it’s a total miss.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      You’re doing it again: complaining about one person’s generalization from a few examples, then making your own, far grander and more absolute generalization, on an even flimsier, vibesier idea, contained only in your head and personal experiences, that you feel is too cumbersome to share, making it subject to none of the scrutiny you are making.
      - epgui 2y ago
        I don't understand what you think the word "generalization" means.
- aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
Workaccount2 2y ago
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.
- georgeburdell 2y ago
  Software engineering is well on the way to normalizing, IMO. The job market has not been great for the past two years. The margins in finance are getting squeezed too by tech. If you’ve been investing for a decade or two, you know how much lower fees are now.
  - arcbyte 2y ago
    Software will continue to eat the world. There's a massive push to cut costs right now and hence the software job market is under considerable pressure, but companies are burying themselves in tech debt and low quality solutions. This will catch up to them very soon.
- dangerwill 2y ago
  We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent. It's also why this will be the Chinese century.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > It's also why this will be the Chinese century. Modulo how important AI turns out to be. 25 years ago, it seemed obvious China was going to be to the 21st century what the USA was to the 20th. But also 25 years ago, AI translation in a video call that not only dubs you in your own voice but also modifies your mouth to sync lips with the synthesised voice, was wild speculative SciFi on par with a warp drive.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    China's population peaked in 2022, 8 years ahead of schedule. It's a massive challenge and no country in history ever managed to reverse a trend in births of this sort.
irrational 2y ago
> 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.
PostOnce 2y ago
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.
psyklic 2y ago
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.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
> 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.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Another meaning of democratization is "the action of making something accessible to everyone."
odyssey7 2y ago
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.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
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.
- syndicatedjelly 2y ago
  If you replace the word “software” with “web development” then yeah you’re right
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    I mean OP calls it software but he and I are talking about the same thing. "Stripe" is a software company that does "boring" stuff.
Jerrrrrrry 2y ago
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/ https://xkcd.com/435/ The real meta-joke to this xkcd is that the horizontal scale is logarithmic.
titanomachy 2y ago
> 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".
- abhishaike 2y ago
  dumb wording on my part! fixed :)
- karmakurtisaani 2y ago
  Now that you point it out, it would be pretty cool to have a word for "extra ultimate".
  - leoc 2y ago
    That would probably be ‘perultimate’ (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per-#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per-#Latin ). Mind you, since ‘ultimate’ means ‘last’ it’s not clear what this word would actually mean.
    - karmakurtisaani 2y ago
      It would of course mean the really extremely last. In other words, abusing language is fun.
sampo 2y ago
> 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.
otoburb 2y ago
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.
- abhishaike 2y ago
  Fixed!
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
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.

66 points by abhishaike 2y ago

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.

eu 2y ago
and what would be some important (and boring) things to focus on?
- gherkinnn 2y ago
  Not ads. I for one would be happy if the everyday software I use wasn't complete rubbish. It won't make the world meaningfully better, but it certainly won't make it worse. It's a start.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Ad blockers :) Why isn't there a browser which you can just install to have a good Internet experience? It would have to update itself every day with a new definition of "good" due to the arms race with advertisers. It would have to block all ads and trackers and other bad JavaScript; automatically redirect YouTube to Invidious and so on, while seamlessly keeping all YouTube features; automatically open the chronological tab instead of the recommended tab on most social media; be blatantly illegal to possess; and update itself through Tor so nobody can do anything about it.
    - Euphorbium 2y ago
      All of that war can be ended legally in a day. The solution is not technological.
    - lieks 2y ago
      Librewolf is pretty much that. Firefox with stupid features turned off, all privacy settings to the max, uBlock Origin and no other customizations.
  - partomniscient 2y ago
    I agree. I detest that the world I live in, there's an inordinate amount of human effort that goes into diverting my attention to make me behave against my own best interests by buying something, or even just offered the opportunity to notice something buyable, that in both cases enriches someone else. If all of that effort was focused on something meaningful, rather than something 'profitable', I wouldn't despise myself or the rest of humanity. There's a massive difference between making the world a better place versus making the world a better place for a select few. Late stage capitalism has a massively heavy emphasis on the latter. And now the USA has effectively reverted to monarchism. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes
    - exe34 2y ago
      do what I do. every time grammarly interrupts my YouTube viewing, I say out loud clearly to myself "fuck off grammarly", and then I use YouTube-download to get the video without the ads. every time Facebook shows me an advert for solar panels, I close Facebook (I only go for the pictures and stories of cats getting in awkward situations). I've amassed a ton of books for my old age - some day I'm going to go offline and never go back online.
      - partomniscient 2y ago
        I actually pay for YouTube to not show me advertising, but I'm also a fan of UBlock Origin and yt-dlp [1], and also physical media, but I do appreciate ebooks a lot. [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
- javcasas 2y ago
  Imagine you had a team of 10 average (not bad, but also not great) software engineers for a year. Choose between: * Get them to implement the kubernetes ssd/disk attachment plugin for the Adobe cloud offering. * Get them to implement the remote access, scheduling and status control of a biochemistry centrifugue. Both missions are boring, and neither will change much how whe world runs. Well, I lied. Because of incentives, it is actually choosing between 15 decent engineers for the Adobe cloud or 1-2 cheap & bad engineers for the centrifugue (I have worked in embedded, I know software is an afterthought in that industry). And now let's make it more personal: would you rather work for Adobe cloud for 135k per year, or for Centrifugues R Us for 85k per year? Would your spouse agree with your decision, especially after your 3 year old decided to grab and throw the TV to the floor?
tomrod 2y ago
Yep, collaboration problems are hard to solve. What are the financial incentives in biotech to trade time for wages?
hinkley 2y ago
And building slightly special versions of things that already exist. In some ways I think we’d have more progress with fewer devs. And I don’t mean “cull the bad ones”. I mean necessity is the mother of invention. We’d have 3 CRMs and a dozen content management systems instead of dozens and thousands respectively.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  That may have an effect, but I don't think the root cause is the number of developers. The root issue is that people and groups are disorganized and have inconsistencies between them. Changing habits and convincing other humans and making political coalitions is very hard, so instead people are willing to spend surprisingly large amounts of money in various ways that somehow take the edge off. Creating or adopting software to "organize" is just one way that can occur. It could also be something like a doomed initiative that someone with clout wants, or even just paying the salary of a useless person hoping they'll leave on their own because firing them is too hard.
Terr_ 2y ago
> > doing something boring > the other way around [...] important things That makes it sound like "boring" and "important" are opposites, but they aren't. There may be some very boring database shuffling import/export problems, but if they aren't done by somebody, a bunch of people won't get paychecks and won't make rent. Or the boring task of reviewing code that needs to be right or else someone dies.
briandear 2y ago
Important things pay the most. Or they aren’t important. If they aren’t valuable, they aren’t important. The market determines important. If there is something that someone thinks is important but aren’t willing to spend their own money on it, then it clearly isn’t that important.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Right, which is why oxygen isn't important, because I don't pay anything for oxygen. Praise the Market!
- Buttons840 2y ago
  The people that maintain the Cobol that runs all the banks make less money than people writing a web page that half works. I have a family member who works for Wells Fargo and discovered this while talking to him and a programmer friend of his. They work on the systems that move money around between accounts, and I work on a shitty half-thought-out web app. I'm paid like 2x what they are.
- exe34 2y ago
  exactly, that's why nurses are treated like shit and football players are paid so much. we truly live in idiocracy. most recent example being the man who can't string a full sentence together getting elected a second time.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    No, you just don’t get it. It’s the weave, bro. You’re just not smart enough to understand it, bro.
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  This assumes people’s preferences are optimally aligned to their best interests in a micro and macro sense and that, more or less, classical economics is precisely accurate. None of this is actually true. There are plenty of things that are important that the “market” doesn’t allocate a ton of money towards and tons of stuff that are really not important but the “market” rewards. The market in the end is a collection of decisions by individuals in aggregation, and decisions by humans are rooted more in their psychology than in some uber rational god mind of optimality. It is very possible to shape behavior, decision making, and capital allocation in ways that are demonstrably pessimal. Indeed with the advent of mass consumption of social media and algorithmic manipulation of psychology you can shape market behavior directly in ways that are detrimental to the participants in the market while rewarding the manipulators. This can be even done as a method of warfare, in which you shape psychology, behavior, and market preferences against a societies best interests. This is why we have non market systems that prioritize objectively important work that’s inefficient by the market’s perspective. This is essentially the outcome of 248 years of economic research after the wealth of nations.

joshdavham 2y ago

> 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!

Retric 2y ago
High level topics aren’t what people are doing day to day though. There’s definitely parts of any business that are interesting but that only goes so far. Science also involves a great deal to tedious work. Comparatively high fintech pay suggests it needs those wages to attract people.
cj 2y ago
Some people get satisfaction out of solving problems and learning, regardless of what the problem is or what they’re learning. Building a company is a constant exercise of problem solving and learning, especially at the early stages. I grew a SaaS to millions of ARR but the thing that keeps me interested isn’t really the industry we’re in, it’s all of the tangential things that are required to build and grow (learning how to hire well, learning how to build company culture, pitching to investors, M&A, figuring out how to be a good leader, etc) Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not as directly passionate about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate about the people and company and the journey it’s on.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago
  >Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not as directly passionate about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate about the people and company and the journey it’s on. That's because you are a human, that built a company. You are not that company, even if you must embody it - literally and figuratively.
ninetyninenine 2y ago

epgui 2y ago

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”.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doctorpangloss 2y ago
“All generalization is wrong, including this”
- epgui 2y ago
  That’s a funny quote, but I’m not sure what the relevance is. Did I make a generalization, or did the author of the article make one? There’s probably on the order of 10 million scientists, a sizeable chunk of whom could be said to work in biology (including adjacent fields like microbiology, biochem…). The article contains only references to a handful of non-representative outliers… That’s more than a generalization, it’s a total miss.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    You’re doing it again: complaining about one person’s generalization from a few examples, then making your own, far grander and more absolute generalization, on an even flimsier, vibesier idea, contained only in your head and personal experiences, that you feel is too cumbersome to share, making it subject to none of the scrutiny you are making.
    - epgui 2y ago
      I don't understand what you think the word "generalization" means.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]

Workaccount2 2y ago

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.

georgeburdell 2y ago
Software engineering is well on the way to normalizing, IMO. The job market has not been great for the past two years. The margins in finance are getting squeezed too by tech. If you’ve been investing for a decade or two, you know how much lower fees are now.
- arcbyte 2y ago
  Software will continue to eat the world. There's a massive push to cut costs right now and hence the software job market is under considerable pressure, but companies are burying themselves in tech debt and low quality solutions. This will catch up to them very soon.
dangerwill 2y ago
We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent. It's also why this will be the Chinese century.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > It's also why this will be the Chinese century. Modulo how important AI turns out to be. 25 years ago, it seemed obvious China was going to be to the 21st century what the USA was to the 20th. But also 25 years ago, AI translation in a video call that not only dubs you in your own voice but also modifies your mouth to sync lips with the synthesised voice, was wild speculative SciFi on par with a warp drive.
- Tade0 2y ago
  China's population peaked in 2022, 8 years ahead of schedule. It's a massive challenge and no country in history ever managed to reverse a trend in births of this sort.

irrational 2y ago

> 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.

PostOnce 2y ago

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.

psyklic 2y ago

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.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

> 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.

skybrian 2y ago
Another meaning of democratization is "the action of making something accessible to everyone."

odyssey7 2y ago

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.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

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.

syndicatedjelly 2y ago
If you replace the word “software” with “web development” then yeah you’re right
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  I mean OP calls it software but he and I are talking about the same thing. "Stripe" is a software company that does "boring" stuff.

Jerrrrrrry 2y ago

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/ https://xkcd.com/435/ The real meta-joke to this xkcd is that the horizontal scale is logarithmic.

titanomachy 2y ago

> 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".

abhishaike 2y ago
dumb wording on my part! fixed :)
karmakurtisaani 2y ago
Now that you point it out, it would be pretty cool to have a word for "extra ultimate".
- leoc 2y ago
  That would probably be ‘perultimate’ (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per-#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per-#Latin ). Mind you, since ‘ultimate’ means ‘last’ it’s not clear what this word would actually mean.
  - karmakurtisaani 2y ago
    It would of course mean the really extremely last. In other words, abusing language is fun.

sampo 2y ago

> 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.

otoburb 2y ago

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.

abhishaike 2y ago
Fixed!

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

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.