previous discussions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590

You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!

I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology.

Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems.

What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people.

But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization.

But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies.

The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure.

But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.

Other than that, I don't mind it, but I still prefer silicon.

I used to be inquisitive but coming from a poor neighborhood, I had no access in the olden days.

This type of article should persist.

I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?