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The Researcher
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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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.
Dude, how old are you? The cartoon is about chuds thinking they can research shit on infowars or Russian disinformation sites.
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.
But it has to be done by experts who have full knowledge of the consensus. Not some backwater racist builder from Flyover, USA.
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
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.
Overall I agree, hate the term “redneck” though. Nothing wrong with working that kind of job, always thought it was a classist term
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")
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.)
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.
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.
Oh shit you're right, I now remember Feyerabend talking about banned.video and 4chan/pol as being worthwhile sources of counterinduction!
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.
I read it but it did a bad job refuting mine so I didn’t care
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?
Oh, so now I suppose you know better than astrologists and chiropractors with decades of experience.
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.
Only one way to find out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Civilisation has always progressed through the discoveries made by the biased and inane googling of idiots? Huh.
Thank goodness for the ancient Greeks, and all they contributed to the advancement of civilisation via their inept googling of ludicrous conspiracy theories.