My biology paper in Science | Hacker News Reader

My biology paper in Science

scottaaronson.com

209 pointsnabla914 comments

A better title for your link would be - "OUR biology paper in Science." Big congratulations on the paper. Impressive.

That's nice!

Turns out, biologists (many kinds of scientists probably) are in need of computer modelling, information retrieval and so on. Naturally it gives opportunity to us IT folks, even without terribly much scientific background.

I've co-authored a biology paper too. Here is the resulting code: https://github.com/alamar/microbe

If papers themselves were written like that, "science" would be so much more approachable!

Unfortunately this is hard to do because (a) insufficient time (b) insufficient number of Scott Aaronsons. I struggle to think of anyone else who can write about science in such an accessible way (without convenient misconceptions and falsehoods).

Not sure that's true... It takes a lot of effort to translate text into concise science speak ("I'd have written a shorter letter if only I had more time").

This would have a huge added benefit of making per review easier, making science more approachable, and making it all less pedantic.

Domain specific language and formalisms exist for a reason. They enable efficient communication for people who know the field.

Scientific papers are not written for the layman with an interest, but to communicate the results of your research to others in the field.

Admittedly a lot of papers are also just written to keep your University from giving your job to someone else. But publish or perish is another issue.

I agree that there should be more scientists writing articles / blogs that make their research approachable and engaging for the layman, but that does not extend to papers, in my opinion.

Or, perhaps: They enable grants.

I've only ever helped write a single grant application. My parts of that had to be rewritten with more use of passive verbs and general neutral-sounding but largely vacuous prose.

I thought it's like those chick jokes. You don't offer comments about random women's gorgeous breasts because you really want to, it's just expected in some contexts. It tells the audience you're one of the guys. Overlong sentences where all that's done is passively done inform the grant reviewers that the author a proper scientist who should be enabled to continue with valuable research.

This is written for random internet people. Science papers are written for other scientists working in that particular niche. They are not trying to be approachable to the general public.

I would argue its not even accessible to those people. You have to work pretty hard to make text as obtuse as scientific papers can be.

I am a scientist and wish papers in my field were more like it.

tbh, I found this much more confusing to read than normal biology papers.

I would take a guess that anc84 is accustomed to CS, and James001 is accustomed to bio. "Papers" in each of these fields are entirely different animals, and require a different mental skillset to quickly grok.

>ZYXY = GATTACA TAG AGT CTA.

Subtle ;) I like it.

Looks fascinating. Does anyone want to summarize?

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