Thinking About Bioinformatics

As I discussed in a previous post, I want to emulate the admirable clarity and accessibility of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics in my own attempt to write an introductory textbook on information metrics for statistical inference.  Below are my thoughts on how I can apply the lessons that I drew from Feynman in my previous post.

More to the point, I’ve rewritten Chapter 1  What is Inference? based on these lessons.  So now I ask you: is this a genuine improvement?  Note that this is an intro chapter with only the simplest math (some addition and multiplication), so anyone should be able to understand it and critique it!  Please add comments to this post to give your opinion of whether you think the specific changes I outline below improve the chapter, compared with the original version.  I am particularly interested in both whether you think the ideas in my plan are the right direction to pursue, versus whether their actual “reduction to practice” in the new draft chapter works or not.  Above all, tell me how I need to improve my chapter and my writing!

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 I’ve been thinking about how to make my draft textbook on “information metrics” more accessible.  In particular, I’ve spent some time looking at a text that I admire as very accessible — Feynman’s Lectures on Physics — to see what I could learn.  I thought I’d post some of my conclusions here.

Feynman achieves a remarkable combination of intellectual engagement — plugging you into the fundamental ideas of a problem area — and accessibility. Conventional textbook treatment uses formalism and jargon to elevate the author and distance the reader from the material. It feels like you are being inducted into the holy mysteries… which puts most people to sleep. Instead of stimulating your own questioning of the material, it implies that such Difficult and Important Ideas will require long, hard hours of study to get even a glimmer. Feynman could easily come across as “too smart for a normal human to understand”, but unlike some writers, that’s not what he wants. Somehow he is able to prick that bubble effortlessly and give you the feeling of a wonderful tour guide who is going to show you his favorite marvels. No barriers of jargon or “obfuscation-sophistication” get in the way of understanding him. He simply refuses the conventional academic tone. He doesn’t believe in it!

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