The Researcher

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.

Someone once solved a 25 year old math problem and posted the proof on 4chan.
- I love the subtitle. The fact that it was
  A debate over the most efficient way to watch a cult classic TV series' episodes, in every possible order
  makes it completely believable.
- Wasn't the formula to calculate turbulence from a russian math genius who lives somewhere in the woods, appeared with the solution and disappeared again?
- Reminds me of https://www.techspot.com/news/61680-australian-whistleblower-leaks-top-secret-report-4chan-users.html
Yeah, not super long ago some kid discovered that an animal wasn't endangered while doing a research paper for school.
I would love to hear more about this!
- There's a lot of over hyping about 'writing' but here's the first article I found with a reasonable sounding headline: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-64161861
  If you search for 'cave painting animal reproductive cycle' you'll find a lot of major outlets reporting on it, which should include the names of the paper's authors if you want to dig deeper.
- I mean calling that research is a bit of an exaggeration, right? Or else anyone using search engines for anything would be doing „research“. People trying to make their everyday activities sound like the most advanced work ever is as hilarious as it is sad.
- It sounds like you did a lot of research and aren't claiming to have found something new that every expert has missed.
  I'm not sure why you're directing either the comment or the anger to me though.
- To be "weary" is to be tired.
  To be "wary" is to be sceptical.
Not even almost. The internet is done, thanks to Russia
- thanks to Russia
  I thought it was China that ruined the internet. Or maybe it was North Korea? Idk, the point is that it was definitely an evil foreign government who ruined America's premier information sharing network.
  Not a profit-hungry former Yahoo executive who failed upward into the world's most successful internet company or the founder who made a multi-billion dollar bad bet on VR or the guy who bought Twitter and proceeded to wage a War on Woke.

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"

Or:
"Honey, I found some information that the world's top scientists and doctors are ignoring/minimizing due to biases".
- 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.
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...
"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?"

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

Yeah. All that jazz too... But it's right here on Facebook. Isn't that evidence enough?
- It also says the government doesn’t want us to know about it. It must be true suppressed information.
- tHEy CaLL It tHeOrY BEcaUsE ITs NoT A FaCT!
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.
- Sounds like my parents
  (/s, they are actually pretty good)
The comic is mostly referring to physics crackpots. People outside academia who rejects current established physics in favor of their own pet theories.
- Also with medicine
- 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?
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.

Y'all laugh, but I know how secretly good for me drinking lead-sweetened borax water is!

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.
- 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.

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.

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.

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?
- 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.

Reminds me of Trae Crowder's video about Ivermectin. "This is what every doctor in the world has missed!"

Yep, this is going in my reply images folder

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

The difference is he was a patent clerk working on his PhD thesis, not some keyboard warrior browsing Facebook 12h a day.....
- "Frank, all the experts say those books are just made up stories. Stop chasing the ghost of Helen and that damned city."

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.

Oh look it's your average Lemmy user talking about how Palestine should have Israel! Cute

I doubt that's the context. Sounds more like conspiracy theories like those around covid
- I doubt he thought that was the context (given the scientist/doctors/internet part)
  He's clearly just turfin'
Bro. Are you okay? Are you lost? Confused? Dizzy? You should probably see a doctor because your comment makes zero sense and no rational person would attribute that to this meme. Make sure you ask your doctor to check for post concussion symptoms.
- They are using Israel to refer to the disputed land, to support the unfounded argument that it is in fact the land of Israel. Which it is not.

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.
- 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.
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.
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
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.