while i’m not intimately familiar with her work, i agree with her underlying philosophy: biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe.
I think this is definitely the general feeling among genomicists. We've all learned hard lessons about the difficulty of finding the ground truth.
A running gag among my colleagues and I are pointing out the seemingly endless stream of CS people who claim that "biology is just software" and how they want to use "machine-learning" or "big-data" to "disrupt" medicine. While I'm sure the their heart is in the right place, move fast and break things doesn't really work well when your subject is living beings.
Yup. (I'm a biomedical researcher, so .. very similar observations.)
Biophysicists are the people who care about the underlying physical mechanisms of those systems.
The thing to understand is Barb was cross-trained- she worked in a deep statistics group (Jordan) but was embedded in a bio lab, and picked up all the necessary knowledge to understand the biological context. Most CS and stats people don't do that- they move up the chain to the convenient level of abstraction, and ignore the details below.