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Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

Reading this story gives me SO much hope for where we are as a society at the moment. It also gives me immense reason for pause to ask how many people out there with great ideas presently do not have access to the tools outlined in the story.

We need, now more than ever, an "eli5" or "get up to speed in an hour" source for these very interesting fields where all the progress of the past century is easily visualized at a high level. I get the feeling much of academia shuts down such attempts to preserve their grip on knowledge and thus their authority.

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> I get the feeling much of academia shuts down such attempts to preserve their grip on knowledge and thus their authority

There might be fields like that, but in biology, it really just is that we've accumulated so much knowledge over the past 150 years that I genuinely can't explain modern CRISPR research to a layperson until they've taken courses in molecular biology, microbiology, chemistry, genetics and biochemistry (or the equivalent amount of self-study).

The field is genuinely vast and complex, and there's no way to hide that complexity behind an abstraction without being misleading.

This is a point echoed by professors I've met as well. The complexity of biological systems is quite hard to understate. There's such an immense amount of detail and almost none of it can be written off an unimportant.

> and almost none of it can be written off an unimportant.

I just wanted to say that this is immensely under-appreciated, even by most people in the field. The more you learn, the more you realize that everything matters and every little bit of knowledge connects to a bunch of other knowledge.

Most people in undergraduate classes ask "what part of the textbook is important" or "what part of this is on the exam", or even "what part of this will I need to know for my job", but they have the wrong attitude altogether.

> I genuinely can't explain modern CRISPR research to a layperson

I think this really depends on what you mean by "explain". If you mean explain the precise mechanisms and systems involved in minute detail then sure, but that was never possible in a y subject. Arguably you wouldn't be able to explain with precision how modern CPUs work at the gate level and their manufacture, or how network congestion control works, or this topology to the same level of detail either.

Per Feynman, you should still be able to give pretty accessible abstract descriptions or analogies that are faithful enough, or arguably you don't understand the subject well enough yourself.

I specifically mean: give them enough understanding that they'll make reasonable predictions of what it might be used for in the near term. If they're worried about supersoldiers or immortality then I've failed - if they think that maybe a few simple diseases will be cured and basic research will accelerate, then I've succeeded. If I only use analogies I can essentially never accomplish the latter.

> If I only use analogies I can essentially never accomplish the latter.

I disagree. You can easily liken CRISPR to a new innovative tool, like an auto service pit. That innovation lets you make changes and fixes to your car much more easily and more quickly than you could with the tools that came before it, but it obviously won't let you turn your Ford Pinto into an F1 racer, or get your Tesla to fly.

Of course, I agree all analogies have their limits, but I think you can almost always come up with an analogy that stays within the limits you're trying to describe so people don't get too fanciful an idea.

Tangent: I have years of academic studies. And yet it can be time consuming to truly understand where and how ideas came to be. I might have an equation but to understand how it was initially thought of or derived might require access to physical contemporary books. At least once I've had to resort to 18th century handwritten manuscripts. Wikipedia can be great. But I often wonder if historical scientific progress can be made even more accessible.

This etiological approach is captured, for example, in the book "Inventing Temperature" by philosopher of science Hasok Chang. It chronicles the meandering, dialectical and controversial journey scientists pursue in order to discover what exactly temperature is - now elegantly captured in concise but sterile formulas. It demonstrates the process of science, as opposed to merely its output.

Some fields are insanely hard to get caught up that simply and quickly. There's such an immense amount of detail in biochemistry that it can quickly become overwhelming to sort through information to find what's really pertinent. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is definitely a huge challenge

> I get the feeling much of academia shuts down such attempts to preserve their grip on knowledge and thus their authority.

There’s no need to go all conspiracy theory on it. “People who like doing things like doing them”, i.e. if you like doing protein chemistry you probably like talking about it with other people who do, but aren’t really into, or don’t even know how to talk to people who aren’t into it. The closest to that you’re likely to get is writing grant applications, which are typically read by people who’s are generally knowledgeable about your domain.

The kind of translation you’re talking about is itself generally the domain of specialists, such as science journalists.

And as for “preserving their grip”: typically institutions are the opposite, doing their best to get the message out, all to better their reputation and improve probability of grants and donations. That’s what university press offices do.

> "We need, now more than ever, an "eli5" or "get up to speed in an hour" source for these very interesting fields where all the progress of the past century is easily visualized at a high level. I get the feeling much of academia shuts down such attempts to preserve their grip on knowledge and thus their authority."

"There is no royal road to geometry." - Reply given when the ruler Ptolemy I Soter asked Euclid if there was a shorter road to learning geometry than through Euclid's Elements.

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