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Comment by noosphr | Hacker News Reader

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We must live in different worlds, I’ve been literally blown away by the advances I’ve seen and the new research coming out in the past 40 years. In some ways it feels like we are just getting started, especially in bio. We finally have the tools to discover the wonderful nano machines that make up life and people are using them in wonderful ways.

It's only between 1920 and 1960 that you would have been literally blown away by scientific progress, first as we split the atom then fused it.

That you're impressed by the stamp collecting that science has become since then says a lot more about you than the state of scientific progress.

The commenter was talking about biology and you are talking about physics. Just because your view of one field stagnates doesn't mean the rest of science doesn't, and your quip about stamp collecting (referring to that sneering quote) means you are thinking in memes and are not a serious interlocutor

Understanding how a bunch of baroque proteins interact is the definition of stamp collecting. As a meat bag made up of such machines

I appreciate it for what it is. As a intelligence capable of abstraction I don't measure our progress in science by the number of stamps in our collection.

There are no big ideas, biology included, because peer review is only there for small ideas.

So you think biology is just proteomics and use meme expressions like 'meat bag', got it. Not updating my prior on you being unserious

I'm a coauthor on a peer reviewed biology paper with 5,000 citation.

"Co-author" lol we both know what that means. Still, if that's true that makes it even sadder. Hope you mature and broaden your horizons at some point instead of engaging in undergrad-style petty field rivalries

Science hasn't worked since 1986? HN has some of the wildest claims / exaggerations.

What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.

> Anyone pointing out the obvious - that peer review is broken and science hasn't worked in 40 years - is at best a flat Earther.

Yes, if someone claims that science hasn't worked (what does it even mean?) for 40 years then he's not that far from being flat Eather. It's hard to expect other side to be reasonable while making such absurd claims.

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