
A Statistical Search for Genomic Truths - adenadel
https://www.quantamagazine.org/barbara-engelhardts-statistical-search-for-genomic-truths-20180227/
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hprotagonist
finally, someone with their head seemingly screwed on straight and willing to
talk about it in public.

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.

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searine
>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.

~~~
dekhn
Most _genomicists_ don't care how the system works under the hood. They've
already abstracted things to the level of base pairs and working with
statistics. This

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.

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mangecoeur
I initially read that is 'gnomic truths' which might have been even more
interesting ;)

