Calling me stupid and trying to buffalo me with "statistics." Cute. Lemme guess. You're at the top of your field and I should just trust the experts, right?
Brother, his response was about as far from credentialism as you can get.
He may have been rude and combative, and take issue with that if you will. But that's not justification to stoop to putting words in people's mouths.
It's not "just trust me bro" just to list a few key fundamentals and presume understanding of the others, rather than write out the 1000 page book it would take to explain the whole process in detail. Frankly a conversation between two people with very different levels of experience in a field can only happen in mutual good faith and patience, and even then it's like giving free college level 1-on-1 tuition, it's not something you can expect to be given out glibly.
For example the car analogy vis the imprecision of biology. Engines are precise, but they have still have defects and failures occasionally. It's how they respond to failures that makes them a precision system. A broken timing belt on a running engine is an "everything's fucked" moment, but if it were as error tolerant as most biological systems are it would self assemble itself into a smaller engine with a weird tumor of broken parts grafted onto the side. Automotive engineering works because to get a result they do something with a 99.999+% success rate once or twice. Most biological systems work because they do something with a 90% success rate 10,000 times and sweep out the junk. There are so many biological systems that are basically just junk collection or defect recycling, even down at the simplest amoeba level. But it's hard to explain that difference succinctly if someone doesn't have experience with the specifics.
Brother, his response was about as far from credentialism as you can get.
He may have been rude and combative, and take issue with that if you will. But that's not justification to stoop to putting words in people's mouths.
It's not "just trust me bro" just to list a few key fundamentals and presume understanding of the others, rather than write out the 1000 page book it would take to explain the whole process in detail. Frankly a conversation between two people with very different levels of experience in a field can only happen in mutual good faith and patience, and even then it's like giving free college level 1-on-1 tuition, it's not something you can expect to be given out glibly.
For example the car analogy vis the imprecision of biology. Engines are precise, but they have still have defects and failures occasionally. It's how they respond to failures that makes them a precision system. A broken timing belt on a running engine is an "everything's fucked" moment, but if it were as error tolerant as most biological systems are it would self assemble itself into a smaller engine with a weird tumor of broken parts grafted onto the side. Automotive engineering works because to get a result they do something with a 99.999+% success rate once or twice. Most biological systems work because they do something with a 90% success rate 10,000 times and sweep out the junk. There are so many biological systems that are basically just junk collection or defect recycling, even down at the simplest amoeba level. But it's hard to explain that difference succinctly if someone doesn't have experience with the specifics.