• Hegar@kbin.social
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    2 months ago

    Obviously almost everyone who claims this on the internet is full of it. Full of themselves and full of shit.

    That said, with time, patience, study and luck you can contribute meaningfully to an expert understanding of the world! A year or two back it was an amateur enthusiast who discovered that some markings near cave paintings of animals may correlate with reproductive cycles for those animals - an interpretation that gathered some expert support.

  • Worx@lemmynsfw.com
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    2 months ago

    Right, but people don’t actually say that, do they? It’s more like

    “Honey, I found some information that the world’s top scientists and doctors are being paid to hide”

    • Katrisia@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Or:

      “Honey, I found some information that the world’s top scientists and doctors are ignoring/minimizing due to biases”.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I’ve just started seeing information that the world’s top scientists and doctors have known about for some time, but that large business interests have been strategically covering up to protect against a public backlash.

    • reinei@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      And I still want my cut of that money damnit! I mean hiding the true secrets of quantum mechanics from the rest of the world really starts losing its appeal if all hush money payments are always late…

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      “Mr. Snowden, how am I supposed to take any of this seriously. If a globe-spanning internet-encompassing spy program existed, don’t you think we’d have heard about it by now?”

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    2 months ago

    Well… Yes. This is what researchers do. It’s part of science. Now you take the new data, form a falsifiable hypothesis, and do empirical experiments. Publish your research. The cycle is complete

    • AreaKode@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yeah. All that jazz too… But it’s right here on Facebook. Isn’t that evidence enough?

    • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      The cycle is complete

      The cycle is NEVER complete. It’s ongoing until someone else proves you were wrong and they were a bit more correct.

    • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
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      2 months ago

      The comic is mostly referring to physics crackpots. People outside academia who rejects current established physics in favor of their own pet theories.

      • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Like how I reject quantum superposition in favor of my pet theory that it’s really only in one state and the superposition is just a convenient way to refer to the chances of each when you can’t observe it because your observation tools will interfere with it?

        • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          The term quantum was made up by a physisyst who couldn’t admit that they didn’t understand math. It spiraled from there.

    • suction@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s not nearly all they do. Sometimes you have to get off social media. This cartoon is so obviously about the lowlife chuds who don’t understand that anyone can pretend to be anyone on the internet and also write anything.

    • suction@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      This is my hope, that these “researchers” will eventually take themselves out of the gene pool when they finally find some website claiming that drinking bleach will kill any cancer but “the globalists” have managed to hide that information from the masses.

      • Dharma Curious@slrpnk.net
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        2 months ago

        I have a good friend whose wife drinks borax water every day. They spent just about everything they had on in vitro and lost the baby. I love them to death, and I’d never, ever suggest to them that something they did is why they lost the baby, but sometimes I genuinely wonder if it’s because she drinks borax. To clarify, I did tell them not to drink borax when they started, I’m just saying I wouldn’t specifically point out losing the baby with the borax connection.

        I get the inclination to not trust things at face value, to do your own research, et cetera. Especially in the US, we’re bombarded with new meds we’re supposed to “ask our doctor about,” but there’s a pretty thick, fucking mile wide line between researching the meds you take and listening to Becky on tiktok and deciding to drink a literal poison that even the victorians knew probably wasn’t the best for you by the end of their run.

  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Honey! It turns out viruses bigger than 5-10 microns CAN be airborne! Lots of bigger viruses are airborne! Some engineer told me! Yes, I know he’s not a doctor and the CDC says otherwise.

    The guy who came up with that number was doing secret bioweapon research on weaponizing TB! Yes, I know it’s not very secret if the results ended up in every textbook in the last 70 years.

    But the Chinese are using air filters to fight it!

    -Like 10 people in 2020 when everyone was washing groceries and not wearing masks.

    You can also get Casandra Syndrome if you apply some critical thought to the news.

  • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    More like the client who paid for my firms services coming in, belittling the very professionals they paid to do their job and acting as if they know better.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Oh. I just thought that’s how things worked. You hire a consultant and pay them a bunch of money to tell you to do something that half of every current employee is already telling you to do, that you’re definitely not going to do anyway, then you vehemently disagree with the consultants.

      Is that not the consulting process?

      • tempest@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        My experience is a little different.

        You bring in consultants to gin up some reasons to do what you already wanted to do. The consultants are an important part of coving your ass if things don’t work out as they make a nice scapegoat.

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “Albert, you’re just a patent clerk. Do you really think you figured out something all those scientists around the world haven’t?”

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The difference is he was a patent clerk working on his PhD thesis, not some keyboard warrior browsing Facebook 12h a day…

      • kromem@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        “Frank, all the experts say those books are just made up stories. Stop chasing the ghost of Helen and that damned city.”

  • BreadOven@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Depending on the field it can be “I found a way to synthesize something in a way other scientists didn’t think was possible”.

    But that’s generally attributed to using new techniques that weren’t a thing when the “other scientists” made the claim.

  • sazey@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    This is literally what researchers do and this is literally how civilisation has always progressed. Feel free to blindly suck dick at the altar of science like a momo but there are far too many examples of world renowned “experts” either missing the blindingly obvious or being entirely incorrect for me to take their word for it.

    • suction@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Dude, how old are you? The cartoon is about chuds thinking they can research shit on infowars or Russian disinformation sites.

      • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        I guess the point is, yes, a lot of people stupidly think they’ve sussed out some great mystery based on limited knowledge and nonsense, against experts who have been patiently and carefully studying the matter; but the principle of investigating lines of thought that the - even expert - consensus has ruled out, is still an important one.

        • suction@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          But it has to be done by experts who have full knowledge of the consensus. Not some backwater racist builder from Flyover, USA.

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            2 months ago

            It doesn’t have to be done by experts.

            All it needs is an individual who can keep to the scientific method, which some rednecks can do.

            It is just that most people don’t understand it, so their method of researching is flawed and will come to flawed conclusions. It is why we have Flat Earthers

            • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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              2 months ago

              Doesn’t even have to be proper scientific method. People see patterns; patterns are science. A layman can spot something that was missed by experts: it happens sometimes.

              Now, you don’t want to trust that layman’s findings against an expert, without proper investigation, preferably by those same experts! Step one is finding something; step two is verifying it in a way that other people can trust.

            • nifty@lemmy.world
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              Overall I agree, hate the term “redneck” though. Nothing wrong with working that kind of job, always thought it was a classist term

        • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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          2 months ago

          This is very much a known concept in the philosophy of science, especially under Feyerabend who mentions ‘counterinduction’ often as a tool to prevent scientific thought from stagnating into a dogma because it might turn into a system where every fact that might prove it wrong is discarded right away. Like how the heliocentric system was opposed to almost every fact given by science at the time.

          But this is a method (for a lack of a better word; ironically, Feyerabend’s whole point is that there is no strict and rational method) of actual scientific research by competent researchers. Someone with no more than the most basic understanding of biology, ecology and climate rejecting the consensus with no findings of their own to provide makes them a conspiracy theorist. ‘The Earth moves around the sun because xyz, and you can prove it’ in a geocentric society is a counterinductive questioning of the consensus. ‘Vaccines don’t work’, ‘Masks don’t work’, ‘CO2 isn’t making the planet warmer’ is 100% of the time a conclusion found on the internet with at most one or two shallow arguments disproved decades ago (see Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s: “Systematicity is necessary but not sufficient: on the problem of facsimile science”)

          • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            Someone with no more than the most basic understanding of biology, ecology and climate rejecting the consensus with no findings of their own to provide makes them a conspiracy theorist.

            Eh, perhaps we can be careful with the term ‘conspiracy theorist’. A conspiracy theory is that others have conspired to hide the truth. No need to think about conspiracies yet. Someone who looks at the ocean and says, meh, that’s flat, is just doing science at the most basic of levels. Somebody who heard vaccines increased autism is just someone who believes someone. It’s an academic survey at the most basic of levels.

            Thus I’d like to coin the term, negligible science.

            And if I’m considering my family’s health, or how to sail to India, I’d better trust the non-negligible science.

            Of course, the global consensus that Australia exists is a deliberate lie sustained by powerful conspirators; so that’s a conspiracy theory: on top of the negligible science wherein I haven’t seen Australia recently so it doesn’t exist. (That one time was just a placebo Australia. You can tell because the kangaroos looked like people in suits.)

            • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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              2 months ago

              I did stop to think whether to use that term or not. I still chose to because (at least in my experience) the way such people explain away the consensus is by giving political/economical motives to the scientists that uphold it. ‘Global warming isn’t man-made, they are just paid to say that’, ‘Vaccines don’t work, they just say that to sell more of them’, ‘Scientists have to fit the woke agenda’ etc.

              For that reasoning to work you would need a huge connected network of researchers all hiding the actual truth and spreading lies for nefarious gains, and that’s a conspiracy if I ever heard one. Ofc there are people who just think they’re smarter than all of the scientists combined, but I mostly encountered the former type.

              Thus I’d like to coin the term, negligible science.

              Paul Hoyningen-Huene calls it facsimile science in the paper I mentioned and gives an overview of their characteristics, it’s quite a nice read.

          • suction@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Oh shit you’re right, I now remember Feyerabend talking about banned.video and 4chan/pol as being worthwhile sources of counterinduction!

            • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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              You didn’t read half of my comment, did you? I literally said that there is a huge distinction between knowledgable people giving a full account of alternative theories (like Copernicus arguing against the consensus of a geocentric system) and conspiracy theorists just saying ‘no’ to the consensus with nothing to back it up.

      • sazey@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        brain dead take.

        tf does age have to do with any of this? you’re here replying too, how old are you? how are you pigeon holing the cartoon according to your own limited interpretation?

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Oh, so now I suppose you know better than astrologists and chiropractors with decades of experience.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        Of course! Phrenology is the future!

        Being more serious for a moment, my mother’s MS was first diagnosed by her chiropractor (he’d asked for imaging for some other reason and noticed a lesion on the spine) who got her sent to a real doctor for confirmation and treatment. Her current QoL is in part because she was diagnosed with MS and under treatment before there were symptoms.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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          No, there are multiple ways to find out, that is the point of science.

          If you come to a conclusion after only one experiment, you are doing it wrong.

    • deaf_fish@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      You’re correct. Anyone can find out something new. But it’s kind of like winning the lottery. You have to spot something that all the many professional researchers missed. Researchers who spent their entire life studying the subject. Also, you have to beat any of the 6 billion people on the planet from figuring it out.

      So yes I agree it’s possible, but it would be like winning the most challenging lottery ever. It’s a very unlikely thing to occur.

      A lot of people think they’ve done it too. So many experts have to debunk so many things. And it’s really frustrating because some people who think they’ve discovered something lack the capability to understand why they actually haven’t. How their Discovery is actually already been taken in to account in some other model. Or how their Discovery is just their brain being biased.

      That’s why this meme is really on point in my opinion. It’s not that no Non-Expert can make a discovery. It’s just the probability that they can is so infinitesimally small, and we’ve had so many false positives, that it’s worth making a meme about.

      I’m not saying non-experts should stop trying. Before you can become an expert researcher, you need to be a novice researcher. And while the chance is small, I still think it’s worth trying to discover something anyway. If you’re a novice, just keep in mind it may not be as straightforward as you think it is. Every failure is a growth opportunity.

      • sazey@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        That is exactly how most research works and has always worked. Most major discoveries were not the direct result of tackling a problem head on but in fact a side effect of unrelated tinkering or discovering new uses for older research gathering dust. No one has a monopoly on the unpredictable nature of it and I find the sneering, gate keeping attitudes (portrayed in op) nauseating.

        • deaf_fish@lemm.ee
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          Which time period Are we talking about? In the modern day way, way more discoveries are made by professionals than hobbyists. Not all of them get big flashy news stories. Some people work all of their lives to discover something that increases solar efficiency by 2%. The days of Newton and Einstein are gone and done with. We have thousands of researchers at the same or more intelligent as those guys. The problem is that we’ve discovered all the easy answers already. All that’s left is the super hard ones. Again, it’s not impossible that some random person stumbles upon it. But it is highly unlikely.

          Your feelings are valid. It sucks to be in a world where you’re probably not going to be a Newton or Einstein and modern academics and research is not without its problems.

    • rsuri@lemmy.world
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      But that started happening a lot less once modern science and its principles gained mainstream acceptance, say 1900 or so. Yeah back when the “experts” were interpreting bible passages to determine physical laws or poking around corpses to guessing how the human body works with no verification, the experts were wrong a lot. But while things have been tweaked a lot, it’s hard to find any widely accepted scientific expert conclusion occurring after 1900 or so that’s been proven flat-out wrong.

      • sazey@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Have you ever come across thalidomide? Or asbestos? Or smoking? Or a laundry list of other such, some even genuinely well intentioned interventions, that have caused a small benefit yet a great harm which was only discovered half a generation later at times. I’m not even talking about the known harms caused in the name of profit.

        With this, it would be kinda silly to say we haven’t been wrong at all for the past 120 years. I’m not knocking being wrong either, we can often learn much more from failures, especially failures of others if we are really smart. Science (of all kinds) has, does and always will progress in a trial and error, haphazard fashion despite all grand standing to otherwise. To deny others that same opportunity is hypocritical and ignorant.

        /Ted talk

        • shneancy@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          though I agree that there could be many things wrong with science today. Your examples aren’t the best fit

          both asbestos and smoking at first appeared to everybody to be something good. And it for sure wasn’t your anti-vax neighbour who proved they were dangerous because of “toxins” and “5G mind control implants”

          non-experts today are at an incredible disadvantage when it comes to science simply because science got really complicated and interconnected. I believe this is also a part of why some people are losing their trust in it, it’s hard to simply trust something you can’t understand yourself

    • brey1013@lemmy.world
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      Civilisation has always progressed through the discoveries made by the biased and inane googling of idiots? Huh.

      • brey1013@lemmy.world
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        Thank goodness for the ancient Greeks, and all they contributed to the advancement of civilisation via their inept googling of ludicrous conspiracy theories.