[cjbgkagh]

In a similar analog to machine learning there are fundamentalists approaches and there are empiricists approaches. Most medical researchers need to be able to defend their work and it’s easier to defend fundamentalist ideas - but they spend so much time arguing over minutia that they often miss the forest from the trees. Not to say that such work is unimportant but the academic environment is rather suboptimal in driving research direction. It’s hard to navigate uncertainty when deviations from what is formally known are heavily punished.

Take for example that we can read DNA and therefore have a list of every bioactive peptide that the body produces, we also have WGS so we can identify people with changes to these peptides. By using algorithms on these populations we can understand quite a lot about what these peptides do without understanding the mechanism by which they do it.