Get life-and-death serious about systemic things, including food and sharing all human knowledge
Niko McCarty @NikoMcCarty The whole notion of “Write, Read, Edit” as some great driver of progress in biology is incredibly misguided.
Yes, DNA sequencing and synthesis costs have fallen rapidly. What have we gotten for it?
The vast majority of strains we make don’t work, because we don’t understand the https://pic.x.com/zt1nkt9spv
Replying to @NikoMcCarty
The read edit write, read edit write, read edit write – with humans in the loop is an adult global game of “telephone” or “Chinese whisper” or “whisper”. Filtering through human brains strips most of what was learned and gathered – but not shared – by the original groups.
Incomplete copies scattered on the Internet with no links, or context, no verification, no communities is a recipe for global meltdown.
When a paper it copied, most of the data, equations, references, connections, meaning and solutions – are lost. The powerful visualization tools are condensed to shadows of what they can do – by flattening them into locked and inaccessible “ink on paper” or “marks on a screen”.
A group that has something to say, to share, can put it as “living knowledge and tools” on the Internet. The readers, users, community is linked directly to the many people working on something – together. Everyone sees and uses and can comment and work on ONE body of knowledge, where nothing is lost or forgotten. Where the tiniest whisper is clear and lossless.
Creation and use are tied together in real time globally. Separating “design”, “production”, “markets and impacts” can be a thing of the past.
“Publishing” and “broadcast” in cheap paper is a failed paradigm. It is wrong when used on the Internet. When used for 8.2 Billion humans it is deadly at tens of millions dying scale now, for many different things that cannot be handled without end to end optimization, planning, verification, best practices, continuous improvement methods.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation