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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

> manipulate life ... at will

Cure for cancer? Cure for any genetic disease? Antibiotic resistant bacteria?

Do you genuinely believe this is an insightful response? Without knowing your background, this makes it seem rather likely you are arguing from the 'larger population' point of view.

Given the forum, let's assume you're a little more familiar with tech: Perfect encryption? NLP that understands meaning? Do you see now how it's a fallacy to take cutting edge scientific breakthroughs and demand instantaneous applications, and if these aren't met, discard the breakthroughs as having little meaning?

His comment is spot on. We cannot manipulate life almost at will. We have some amazing tools, but the actual outcomes of manipulation are mostly just selecting for rare, random positive outcomes, than actual intent and engineering leading to rational results.

(background: PhD in Biophysics, I've cloned genes and run huge simulations of protein folding, as well as worked in genomics and pharmaceutical chemistry).

I think you misunderstand, what you are saying is my point. I argue that science, unlike the parent comment's claim, has not stagnated but made amazing progress. Yet, that when seeking to identify scientific progress by looking at new applications one might not arrive at a valid conclusion.

Why do others misunderstand? Maybe you say one thing and mean something else? It is clear you're arguing for the sake of arguing, and this community is worse off for it.

OK. I would say "discovery is stochastic", such that we do make amazing progress in a theoretical sense, although that progress doesn't seem to lead to tangible improvements.

Certainly our understanding of the world is improved, no? When you mean 'tangible' in the sense of 'solving a real world problem', i.e. an immediate application, then I feel this is getting a little circular. I simply reject the claim that one of the parent comments were making whereby science in general is not progressing. (edit: question mark)

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