Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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There's one complaint here that seems valid:

> gives us a false sense of confidence in how much we know about the biological world

A false sense of confidence could make people vulnerable to bold false claims, which might lead to poor consumer choices and poor policy choices.

Beyond that, the approach seems really wrong-headed. Popular science education has a successful approach when you want people to understand the limitations of a model: you hook people with a fun headline of "COOL NEWS, THINGS ARE MUCH WEIRDER THAN YOU THINK!" You teach forward from the oversimplified model.

You aren't going to reach many people with a negative, moralizing message that people need to go backwards and give up a model that has given them insight. "Oh, we should never have given you this, you're not smart enough for it, you're going to make a mess."

The sad thing is that the information conveyed here is really cool, and it could easily be framed in a fun way! Instead, it's presented in a way that sends the message, "Look, you need to understand how dumb and dangerous it was for you to think you had any insight into this."

> It's finally dawning on us that the cell is not a machine

I really, really, really don't understand the sense of moralistic fear infusing this whole presentation. Reading the piece and watching the video, I feel like I'm reading and watching a religious sermon on the spiritual dangers of materialism instead of a piece of popular education to help the public have a better-informed understanding of science.

you are thinking about individual understanding, but science writers must be concerned with population understanding. People die and get born, and this is a force in the population making it know less over time. This force and education must reach some sort of equilibrium, and the author is concerned about the shape of the resulting steady state of knowledge.

It is far more important, typically, to not lie to people than it is to tell them the truth, for if you are lying to them in service of later telling them the truth, and people don't seek out further education, then most people will just believe lies, and then eventually die, never having contributed their knowing the truth to the population knowledge distribution.

On the other hand, if everything is always presented in its full complexity with a million caveats and you lose people because they don't have the prerequisite knowledge to be able to digest it, I guarantee this will result in many, many more potential contributions being lost than from those who were just "satisfied that it was all worked out already".

Your "guarantee" is insufficient evidence that lying to the population is worthwhile. The burden of evidence is on you, I think.

You're also making unreasonable assumtpions about the burden associated with not lying. You don't have to completely solve the miscommunication problem in order to do something about it, and even if you were to try to completely solve the miscommunication problem, it would not require you to include a million caveats. Basically you could solve the whole problem by not making analogies.

Yeah I mean, we could just never use real structural data and just communicate purely in symbols that way users would know it's "not real", or inherit a billion dollars and come up with a perfect simulator and high-end computers for all of humanity to view it. This stuff is HARD to make, and nearly impossible to satisfy everyone. Drew Barry's animations are "lying" because they're not a perfect representation of reality? In my opinion, it's better for his animations to exist and be "lying" than have nothing.

You're falling into your own trap of what is and isn't a lie.

Lets go with the common aphorism 'all models are wrong, but some are useful'. As it puts forth there are a large number of useful models, but wouldn't that fall under your term of a lie since it's not the truth of a situation.

The problem with reality is it feels no need to be explainable.

I think I meant to post this to the user above you....

Exactly? I wasn't the one who classified Drew Barry's work, widely acknowledged as some of the very best and most accurate in molecular animation, as "lies" ... so, not really sure what you're saying? In reality, humans can't see down to the nanoscale with their eyes, yet there are real 3D structures down there that have a physical form. If we display them as being a couple of inches large so that humans can see the shape, is that misleading? Should we never try to visualize anything for fear of it not accurately representing reality?

I guess my point is, as someone who has done a ton of work in this area, there are a million choices one can make when choosing what to visualize, and the lines between truth/reality/lies/accuracy can get muddled. A lot of it depends on context, use cases etc. For example, a star high school teacher may show one of Drew Barry's animations to their class and use it as an example of the limitations of visualization. A creationist could use the same animation as evidence of "God's perfect design".

What I'm understanding from the article and from your arguments, is that unless you can guarantee that a piece of work 100% represents reality in all its complexity, it does more harm than good. I'm politely disagreeing, I think it's better for these works to exist: "Perfection is the enemy of done".

People like this are one of the reasons biology visualization is so difficult: Nothing less than a perfect simulation is good enough, and any editorial/design choices to make certain processes perceptible to humans are problematic in some way. It's all true really, but there are many valid reasons to create visualizations that are less-than-perfect. But yeah it's a fine balance between accuracy and the appearance of accuracy (e.g presenting a process as linear when it's really stochastic)

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