“Lurking in the Noise” by J Bostock

The Dead Biologist

Suppose you're a biologist working with a bacterium. It's a nasty little bug, so you want to make sure your disinfecting protocol is effective. You have a rather good model of how the bacterium works, and it goes like this:

• The bacterium contains DNA, which is like a master copy of the instructions as to how it works
• This DNA is transcribed to RNA, which are little working copies of parts of the instructions and are disseminated throughout the bacterium
• This RNA is translated into proteins, which actually do the stuff that makes the bacterium function

Yes, there are a few special cases where RNA actually does something, and your model seems to be missing some things---for one, the amount of protein produced from each RNA molecule seems to vary, and you can only account for about 90% of this variance; the other 10% appears [...]

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Outline:

(00:09) The Dead Biologist

(01:33) The Thing in the Noise

(03:29) Heavy Pressure

(04:30) Almost-All is not All

(05:42) The Most Forbidden Technique

(06:40) Beyond Imperfect Models

(07:41) Coda

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 25th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gk3wj6mNWMACQDdZQ/lurking-in-the-noise

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.