I realized I was going over the same things over and over (people forget or new people come in) so I started saving time by updating old posts. Example: RE my experience (maintaining of course, my anonymity)
This is the internet, anyone could say anything. Arguments are best judged on their own merits. When talking about scientific and technological progress it is inevitable that much opinion will be intermingled with observations of fact and it is well to keep that in mind. It's also true that some of todays "facts" will be tomorrows debunked falsehoods.
That being said, I have had about 7 years of university level education, much of it in the biological sciences and have followed scientific developments closely in the environmental, biological, medical, biotechnological and other areas very closely for a number of decades. I am not a research scientist although I have worked in a lab for one. I have not worked with zinc fingers myself but have followed them for many years (as what I considered the far most promising method of genetic modification and have held Sangmo Biosciences for that reason since shorty after it went IPO in 2000. So I've followed ZFs closely for a long time. Zinc fingers have always been completely in a class by themselves in terms of their potential for making exactly the sequence change desired in any gene in any organism. All other methods of GM have had serious inherent limitations. The main limitation with zinc fingers has been lack of effective delivery techniques but more and more ways are being found to do that (stem cells modified with ZFs will probably become far more important in medicine than antibiotics ever were. We just need to learn a bit more about stem cells and develop a few techniques.)
IMHO I have learned vastly more from subsequent reading than what I learned at university. The decades of reading, IMHO, have given me a reasonable feel for the pace of progress (which generally is slower in the short term and much faster in the long term than expected but with sharp exceptions ("punctuated equilibrium" as it's called in evolutionary science).
What you learn at university is a snapshot in time. But that's not the way life works. What you learn over an extended period of time teaches much more, especially about the limits and the process of predicting the direction and timing of future developments. What you get in schools is a sanitized, PC, and oversimplified version of how things developed. Observing developments as they unfold teaches far more. (Example: How Watson and Crick stole Rosalind Franklin's data (without which they could never have done it) to crack the DNA code and got away with it for many years because she was a woman.) The role of serendipity is, for obvious reasons, usually ignored. Which is unfortunate because researchers don't learn to appreciate it as they should and wind up missing things they shouldn't (The unexpected always teaches far more than the expected. When things go wrong, if you bother to figure out why you often learn far more than you would have had they gone “right”.)
Usually there are "dissenters" who are more accurate than the currently accepted "authorities" (for the good reason that they don't have so much personal interests in "the way things are"). The trick is to learn how to identify the small portion of "dissenters" who have a real grasp of what's going on in contrast to the much larger number who really are "off the wall".
(Example: IMHO, to anyone who was paying attention, it was pretty obvious that J Craig Venter was on the right path with shotgun sequencing despite all the "authorities" claims it was impossible. It was also pretty obvious from the very beginning that the plate tectonics theory was probably right and that Helicobacter Pylori was the real cause of most ulcers. Again the "establishment" was outraged at the "outlandish" theories. You just have to focus on the evidence and ignore all the hype.)
(Who would have thought in 1969 at the time of the first moon landing that 42 years later we'd still have no permanent presence there or would have been absent for so long? OTOH a flying personal automobile had been "just around the corner" for about 50 years now.) And "nuclear fission is just ten years away and always will be."
Do not believe anything because I say it. Believe something (tentatively, little is certain) because it "adds up" and always be ready to change your beliefs when new evidence indicates that something no longer adds up. Always be continually fitting in new ideas with all the old ones. Everything is connected with everything else and consistency is a good error check (but sometimes apparent inconsistencies aren't real because of some error in assumptions (Helicobacter pylori could not possibly cause ulcers because bacteria cannot survive the acidic environment of the stomach.) Well MOST bacteria can't.
By now you should be getting the idea that NOTHING IS CERTAIN. Use that reality in your investing: take risks but limit them by diversification. (enough, too long already!)
AI
