I don’t know much about how the biotech industry works, but are you saying that he should “work in the field” before pitching this idea? In software that would be almost laughed at as a suggestion, if the idea is indeed promising.
>In software that would be almost laughed at as a suggestion
yes because we don't care if our software breaks every five minutes and if its clobbered together by people who have no idea what they're doing because 99% of the time it's just consumer gadgets anyway. If you deal with technologies that affect people's health that's not really how things work, or in any other serious engineering discipline.
If the semiconductor or aeronautics industry would work like the software industry your computer wouldn't boot up and the planes would double their fuel consumption every year
>yes because we don't care if our software breaks every five minutes and if its clobbered together by people who have no idea what they're doing because 99% of the time it's just consumer gadgets anyway. If you deal with technologies that affect people's health that's not really how things work, or in any other serious engineering discipline.
Yeah, you're not really gonna get away with an "oopsie woopsie!! we made a widdle fucky wucky! our elves are working vewy hard to fix this!" after you kill a few people due to negligence.
No, in software terms, he's saying that is somebody comes and tells you "Software that has enough spaces, never crashes", and he "happens" to be selling the "Extra-spaces-adder" IDE, then maybe don't believe him...
It would be hard to overstate how complicated the nervous and immune systems are. On top of the biology, the provision of medical care is also absurdly complex: there are all sorts of biases in how patients are treated, some of which turn into feedback loops. An early heart transplant might stave off vascular dementia, while a patient with severe dementia might not be eligible for transplants at all.
It is certainly possible for a new person to notice something that people already working in the field have missed. At the same time, domain knowledge is worth a lot, especially when trying to figure out if a relationship seen in messy, observational data is real. I'd be skeptical either way, but collaborating with a more established team would help a little bit.
I don't think that software, in general, has quite so many foot-guns laying around. However, people do give similar advice for cryptography and (sometimes) machine learning because those fields do offer a number of subtle ways to really foul things up.
