I have never understood how can we, in the same breath, admit the horrifying death that await us all, and also parrot that Gilgamesh story or the like about how futile is to resist. Sure, the blood of the virgins doesn't work, but now we have incredibly good science and technology. For God's sake, we even have enough compute to run monstrous language models; I have an inkling that kind of compute would go a long way on simulating cellular processes. Shouldn't we all[1] just go a bit crazy and start trying to prevent our little, chaotic sacks of bio-molecules from going amok?
[^1]:"All", as opposed to just scientists and clinicians.
I don't think it's as easy as "simulating cellular processes". I feel like sometimes HN tends to severely underestimate the difficulty of problems in other fields. Just off the top of my head I can see several hard problems in this situation
- How precise do you want the simulation? Do you want physical processes fully simulated? You'd need that to get an accurate simulation of molecular interactions, but full physical simulation is computationally expensive even for single, simple molecules.
- Even simplificated simulations are hard. Simulating just the shape of DNA strands is computationally very expensive (usually done with Monte Carlo simulations).
- How many cells do you simulate? The body has ~37 trillion cells. Even if it only took one processor cycle to simulate a cell, you'd need 9250 4GHz processors. That should give an idea of how hard it would be to simulate just an organ.
- How do you take into account interactions? There's a lot of difficulty in understanding how drugs affect the whole human system. Lots of trials show promising results against in-vitro cells and then fail spectacularly in animal models. There's a lot influencing how drugs work and single cellular processes are just a small part of it. The body is incredibly complex.
- How do you validate the models? It's not like we can go into a cell and see where the molecules are. We don't have enough visibility into actual cellular processes to build such complex models to a sufficient degree of accuracy.
Compared to even a single human cell, a monstruous language model is a trivial thing.
All of those things you say are correct, but scientists are doing it anyway[^1]. In that paper, you will see there are ways to "compress" the amount of computation needed.
Five years ago, I would have said that we were further away from having a computer correctly interpret a joke (i.e., I would have agreed with [2]) than from simulating E.Coli. The thing is, people went and did (both) anyway. But they did one more than the other. Research effort and capital flowed, and now we have LLMs. IMO, a big reason for this paradox is that there is no stigma in wanting to make a computer smarter, and everybody started playing with computer code and data and due to the huge amount of effort, there have been results. But when it comes to the very things that keep us alive, we are not so eager to play with computer code. That, I think, has less to do with the complexity of the subject and more with a certain moral disposition...which is the thing I find perplexing.
But when it comes to the very things that keep us alive, we are not so eager to play with computer code. That, I think, has less to do with the complexity of the subject and more with a certain moral disposition...which is the thing I find perplexing.
Honestly it's the first time I hear about moral stigma having anything to do with research. Again, I think you underestimate how much harder it is to simulate biological processes than LLMs. Even from the paper you've linked, you'll see the massive amount of simplifications they had to do: they're using a minimal cell, not all metabolites are included, multimeric proteins are left out/replaced, spatial distributions are simplified, the simulation timescale is below 10μs, they do not simulate reactive processes, they do not talk about how much time did they need to perform the simulation... Don't get me wrong, it's a massive achievement. But the amount of computation that needs to be done just to simulate a single cell is absolutely massive, let alone simulating multiple cells in a system. Considering how much it would cost it's no wonder other avenues are explored first.
“Let us grant that this woman is correct about the science and that the project is technologically possible, although I don’t think that has actually been proven. Now she desires that we get rid of the dragon. Presumably, she thinks she’s got the right not to be chewed up by the dragon. How willful and presumptuous. The finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not. Getting rid of the dragon, which might seem like such a convenient thing to do, would undermine our human dignity. The preoccupation with killing the dragon will deflect us from realizing more fully the aspirations to which our lives naturally point, from living well rather than merely staying alive. It is debasing, yes debasing, for a person to want to continue his or her mediocre life for as long as possible without worrying about some of the higher questions about what life is to be used for. But I tell you, the nature of the dragon is to eat humans, and our own species-specified nature is truly and nobly fulfilled only by getting eaten by it...”
You could live just well without a dragon alive. It's just that it's easy to assume things will always be the way you have known them and that the absence of this or that constraint would render things meaningless. Bollocks, I say to that!
It is my opinion and my direct lived experience that yes, we should all start trying to prevent our little chaotic sacks of bio-molecues from going amok.
I would emphatically suggest starting here: Read scientific papers. Read the academic literature.
Read. Know you can read.
And, please bear with me: Know that your doctors most probably do not read.
It sounds so paranoid or bitter. I haven’t found another way to put it into words.
If only for the fact that doctors are usually very busy people. Many of them are probably overworked.
And even among those doctors that do read, a doctor will not be able to view the literature from the urgent perspective of the individual. We are all specialists in ourselves, know the details of our lives, our family history.
It is possible for a layman to read academic literature. To the point that you can help the doctor help you. Don’t tell anyone you can’t read.
There is a severe disease in my close family. The doctors missed the diagnosis for years. Diagnosis happened through sheer luck, insistent advice from a nurse speaking “out of their place”, and our persistence. At diagnosis, biomarkers were so far out of range that it can be known that death would most probably have occurred within days.
After this, we read academic literature.
After this, we trust the doctor like we trust our parachute.
As proof that a layman can read academic literature to save their life and preserve their health:
After the diagnosis, papers we have read have clearly shown that a course of action ordered by a doctor is wrong, harmful, potentially life-threatening. Multiple times. Harmful prescriptions, or abject denial of severe side-effects known to occur in some people. We have had to step in and intercede. The crucial part: This has then been confirmed by another doctor’s opinion. Multiple times.
Relatedly, I am in a Facebook group for $condition, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people post that a doctor prescribed them $treatment. Although $treatment is a very common thing to give to healthy people, $treatment is KNOWN to potentially cause death in patients with $condition. The other patients in the group always jump in and alert the original poster to the danger, but I can’t believe it still happens week after week and year after year.
My point is that fully outsourcing your healthcare—even to specialists—is a very bad idea, especially if you might have a rare condition of any sort. No doctor will ever care about you/your family member the way that you do. And they are always so pressed for time that mistakes are to be expected.
Comments
I have never understood how can we, in the same breath, admit the horrifying death that await us all, and also parrot that Gilgamesh story or the like about how futile is to resist. Sure, the blood of the virgins doesn't work, but now we have incredibly good science and technology. For God's sake, we even have enough compute to run monstrous language models; I have an inkling that kind of compute would go a long way on simulating cellular processes. Shouldn't we all[1] just go a bit crazy and start trying to prevent our little, chaotic sacks of bio-molecules from going amok?
[^1]:"All", as opposed to just scientists and clinicians.
I don't think it's as easy as "simulating cellular processes". I feel like sometimes HN tends to severely underestimate the difficulty of problems in other fields. Just off the top of my head I can see several hard problems in this situation
- How precise do you want the simulation? Do you want physical processes fully simulated? You'd need that to get an accurate simulation of molecular interactions, but full physical simulation is computationally expensive even for single, simple molecules.
- Even simplificated simulations are hard. Simulating just the shape of DNA strands is computationally very expensive (usually done with Monte Carlo simulations).
- How many cells do you simulate? The body has ~37 trillion cells. Even if it only took one processor cycle to simulate a cell, you'd need 9250 4GHz processors. That should give an idea of how hard it would be to simulate just an organ.
- How do you take into account interactions? There's a lot of difficulty in understanding how drugs affect the whole human system. Lots of trials show promising results against in-vitro cells and then fail spectacularly in animal models. There's a lot influencing how drugs work and single cellular processes are just a small part of it. The body is incredibly complex.
- How do you validate the models? It's not like we can go into a cell and see where the molecules are. We don't have enough visibility into actual cellular processes to build such complex models to a sufficient degree of accuracy.
Compared to even a single human cell, a monstruous language model is a trivial thing.
All of those things you say are correct, but scientists are doing it anyway[^1]. In that paper, you will see there are ways to "compress" the amount of computation needed.
Five years ago, I would have said that we were further away from having a computer correctly interpret a joke (i.e., I would have agreed with [2]) than from simulating E.Coli. The thing is, people went and did (both) anyway. But they did one more than the other. Research effort and capital flowed, and now we have LLMs. IMO, a big reason for this paradox is that there is no stigma in wanting to make a computer smarter, and everybody started playing with computer code and data and due to the huge amount of effort, there have been results. But when it comes to the very things that keep us alive, we are not so eager to play with computer code. That, I think, has less to do with the complexity of the subject and more with a certain moral disposition...which is the thing I find perplexing.
[^1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2023.1106...
[^2]: https://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visi...
Honestly it's the first time I hear about moral stigma having anything to do with research. Again, I think you underestimate how much harder it is to simulate biological processes than LLMs. Even from the paper you've linked, you'll see the massive amount of simplifications they had to do: they're using a minimal cell, not all metabolites are included, multimeric proteins are left out/replaced, spatial distributions are simplified, the simulation timescale is below 10μs, they do not simulate reactive processes, they do not talk about how much time did they need to perform the simulation... Don't get me wrong, it's a massive achievement. But the amount of computation that needs to be done just to simulate a single cell is absolutely massive, let alone simulating multiple cells in a system. Considering how much it would cost it's no wonder other avenues are explored first.
“Let us grant that this woman is correct about the science and that the project is technologically possible, although I don’t think that has actually been proven. Now she desires that we get rid of the dragon. Presumably, she thinks she’s got the right not to be chewed up by the dragon. How willful and presumptuous. The finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not. Getting rid of the dragon, which might seem like such a convenient thing to do, would undermine our human dignity. The preoccupation with killing the dragon will deflect us from realizing more fully the aspirations to which our lives naturally point, from living well rather than merely staying alive. It is debasing, yes debasing, for a person to want to continue his or her mediocre life for as long as possible without worrying about some of the higher questions about what life is to be used for. But I tell you, the nature of the dragon is to eat humans, and our own species-specified nature is truly and nobly fulfilled only by getting eaten by it...”
https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
You could live just well without a dragon alive. It's just that it's easy to assume things will always be the way you have known them and that the absence of this or that constraint would render things meaningless. Bollocks, I say to that!
I think that’s more or less the idea, yes.
It is my opinion and my direct lived experience that yes, we should all start trying to prevent our little chaotic sacks of bio-molecues from going amok.
I would emphatically suggest starting here: Read scientific papers. Read the academic literature.
Read. Know you can read.
And, please bear with me: Know that your doctors most probably do not read.
It sounds so paranoid or bitter. I haven’t found another way to put it into words.
If only for the fact that doctors are usually very busy people. Many of them are probably overworked.
And even among those doctors that do read, a doctor will not be able to view the literature from the urgent perspective of the individual. We are all specialists in ourselves, know the details of our lives, our family history.
It is possible for a layman to read academic literature. To the point that you can help the doctor help you. Don’t tell anyone you can’t read.
There is a severe disease in my close family. The doctors missed the diagnosis for years. Diagnosis happened through sheer luck, insistent advice from a nurse speaking “out of their place”, and our persistence. At diagnosis, biomarkers were so far out of range that it can be known that death would most probably have occurred within days.
After this, we read academic literature.
After this, we trust the doctor like we trust our parachute.
As proof that a layman can read academic literature to save their life and preserve their health:
After the diagnosis, papers we have read have clearly shown that a course of action ordered by a doctor is wrong, harmful, potentially life-threatening. Multiple times. Harmful prescriptions, or abject denial of severe side-effects known to occur in some people. We have had to step in and intercede. The crucial part: This has then been confirmed by another doctor’s opinion. Multiple times.
I second this advice.
Relatedly, I am in a Facebook group for $condition, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people post that a doctor prescribed them $treatment. Although $treatment is a very common thing to give to healthy people, $treatment is KNOWN to potentially cause death in patients with $condition. The other patients in the group always jump in and alert the original poster to the danger, but I can’t believe it still happens week after week and year after year.
My point is that fully outsourcing your healthcare—even to specialists—is a very bad idea, especially if you might have a rare condition of any sort. No doctor will ever care about you/your family member the way that you do. And they are always so pressed for time that mistakes are to be expected.
Correction :sweat-smile:
Don’t tell anyone you can’t read.
→ should have been →
Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t read.