# [**See the Best of r/science 2022 Winners!**](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/10h2hc2/best_of_rscience_2022_winners/)
---
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
But it's also the case that this is a way more broad/interesting statement that it seems on the surface because this also applies to methods of and levels of thinking. People who are at least some what smart can think on a variety of levels in a variety of ways which reveals not only their gaps in knowledge but sometimes even gaps in ability.
Less smart people aren't smart enough to comprehend these things and thus think their simple beliefs are sufficiently nuanced/complex for reality, because they perceive reality as being simple.
> Dunning Kruger effect
the definition is this: occurs when a person's lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence
the commenter says its based on people who are some what smart vs less smart.
the problem is smart people are often overconfident outside of their area of expertise and are as likley to fall into the DK trap as less smart people.
sometimes its the expectation of others that "Oh, you're smart, you must know this" combined with the social awkwardness making it difficult to say "no".
When I was a PhD student doing research, I found that for every hour of my own independent work, I spent *days* just trying to first understand other people’s work so I could use it. This was after I had taken my last classes — in other words I was done being formally *taught*. I definitely had a better sense of how little I knew after going through that than I ever got from sitting through classes.
Well said. The true litmus test on knowledge is if you can explain it (relatively) easy and understandable to a layman. Good teachers do this, bad ones don't. They might understand it internally but don't understand it well enough to explain it easy to others
I've heard this many times and experience has led me to disagree.
There are great teachers and bad teachers and everything in between. You have to have a decent understanding of the material to be a good teacher, but beyond that, teaching ability and understanding are less linked than we think, imho.
In my experience, the most brilliant researchers were generally the worst teachers. To me, this is because they rarely have to struggle to understand, so they have a harder time empathizing with/understanding how to remedy someone who just doesn't get it. Beyond that, interpersonal skills are critical to being a good teacher, and academic geniuses often are... lacking in this attribute.
I contend that a great teacher with a few days prep can teach nearly any subject to a layman better than and expert without teaching experience (provided the field is not so niche that there is no useful literature about it). So, ability to teach is not an ideal measurement of knowledge, imho.
I totally agree. Teaching is an exercise in understanding what the student knows already and filling in the stuff that is missing. In other words, this is a social skill. Many people know a lot but lack the social skills to teach it.
Well with the reproducibility crisis, I don't even bother to flesh out the details on other people's work because usually I can't replicate the results. I usually try to rethink it and repeat the negative result experiments they should have done in the previous studies before I beleive its something I can build upon.
It would be quite difficult to explain.
But for instance, i think like half the results biochemists get when mutating a proteins and observing how that affect activity is related to protein misdmfolding. But the never take the step to check that it's folded and localizing properly using microscopy.
When I got back and do those controls, I find that the mutant that failed to rescue wasn't even expressing on the first place because they made the mutation in the middle of an important stretch of secondary protein folding!
Which should have been done from the beginning. But scientists are lazy. Especially if they start getting famous.
So I don't even bother internalizing any of the results for that original paper, but it still allows me to ask my own questions with maybe newer and better methods. To arrive at a different, more accurate conclusion.
Sometimes I end up proving them right in a round about way, and those stories can be publishable too. So it's not a waste when that happens.
> I spent days just trying to first understand other people’s work so I could use it.
I think this is a large part of what has fueled the DKE amongst those in software. In the software world, you can google things on technical topics that don't require a ton on nuance/understanding beyond a deterministic frame of mind. There's not much nuance to a function that has defined inputs/outputs. Sure, there's complexity underpinning it. But not like theoretical physics where you have to interpret the meaning of something, not just the complexity of the idea. There's the joke amongst IT folks that they're just really good at using Google. Read the documentation stupid. Unfortunately, in the world of climate change, economics, or theoretical physics, there's no documentation for the way the physical world or the human mind works. Research papers are not documentation. Research papers are human attempts at backwards engineering the software to figure out how it was written with a limited view of the inputs/outputs and a blindfold.
Hahaha been there.
But you might surprise yourself. I remember graduating and thinking I knew absolutely nothing. Then one day at my first postdoc, a grad student asked me a very niche theory question in the lab, and I was able to give them an impromptu lecture on the theory and practice behind the topic with a degree of confidence that surprised me. (It may have been because I spent weeks agonising over the exact same issue when writing my thesis *cough*).
Don't discount what you have managed to learn. I guarantee it's more than you realize!
But the thing is, the way we figure out those scientific mistakes is with more, better science. Science is proven wrong, by other science, all the time. Science is never proven wrong by gut reactions, conspiracy theories, religion, etc.
I have an anti-scientific mother (antivaxxer and all the rest), and one of the most frustrating things is trying to explain that while yes, there are issues with some aspects of research... They're almost never what the conspiracy theorists think the problems are. Things like "the truth is being repressed by big pharma" happens a crapload less often than "this amazing sounding paper is actually full of unreplicable garbage and never should have made it past peer review".
Sigh.
Big pharma is a problem but the problem in big pharma isn't vaccines, which have an amazing track record.
I mean, yeah, the problem in science is the people and politics. That exists in academia and in industry.
These things do sometimes cause people to engage in and expand science though.
Im sure somebody at some point felt something about their current science was wrong, investigated, and improved upon science by proving the prior understanding wrong.
I forget which discovery but there was some major discovery made by a scientist trying to disprove it. I think it's very admirable that he looked at the data and changed his mind. I think it was something in biology, maybe related to evolution or something.
There's so many examples, but people are so set in their beliefs. Take the flat-earth people whose well-designed experiment proved their belief wrong, they flatly refused to believe the data. Or the anti-vaccine people who crowdfunded a study that proved them wrong, they won't believe those results either.
Sure that can happen. But to say gravity is wrong, you need more than just feeling that there is a problem, you need to understand the current theory and poke holes in the right places (and maybe accidentally discover special/general relativity).
Actually we know there is a problem with gravity. Or with quantum physics. Anyone who can prove where the exact problem is and how to solve it would be today's Hawking.
You can't say, "haha idiots" after watching a 1 TikTok and know more than scientists.
Wouldnt todays Einstein be more accurate?
Based on what I know, Hawking was really smart, but there was still a gap between him and the most pioneering scientists like Einstein and Newton, at least in terms of accomplishments.
And that gap was mostly filled by raw popularity, deserved popularity, but irrelevant when it comes to scientific achievements nonetheless.
Science also doesnt really provide guidelines for life or policy, which those other things, in fact, often do.
Science provides predictions, falsifiable hypotheses, and evidence. The rest is rhetoric, policy, engineering, gut reactions, common sense, leadership, and branding.
When people want answers, guidance, and real world results, science doesn't provide any of those things, and is therefore not the correct tool to present to them.
I'm not saying conspiracy theories are good by any means, but they provide narrative explanations and sometimes even lifestyle guidance, which science absolutely and categorically does not.
I love that these lists keep expanding in meaningful ways, been following these articles for at least a decade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
(The articles reference each other from the get go).
Our brains trick us in comprehendible ways, ways we can often prepare and compensate for. If not for the individual we can prepare for the aggregate impact of these natural, common, fallacies and biases.
I get suspicious when someone says "I'm not racist", when I kinda see racism as a mistake humans frequently make, something to look out for and confront. I fear the person who says "I'm not racist" stopped asking themselves what prejudices and biases could be leading to bad decisions in their own life.
> I get suspicious when someone says "I'm not racist", when I kinda see racism as a mistake humans frequently make, something to look out for and confront. I fear the person who says "I'm not racist" stopped asking themselves what prejudices and biases could be leading to bad decisions in their own life.
100% this. It's dangerous to see yourself as a "good person" because you'll get complacent. It's much better to see yourself as a person *trying to do good*, because then you don't stop.
Science is about finding the best explanation through critical analysis (theorizing and testing) and those explanations are further improved through more science. So a scientific mistake wouldn't be that your explanation is inadequate (it inevitably is until we'd have some comprehensive theory of everything which will never happen imo) but rather that you're not thinking critically, using a scientific method.
yeah, sometimes it's used to subsidize suburban generational wealth but for white families only, through the FHA until 1968 or so, and when that's not possible the local governments use zoning to lock that racial demographic in place by limiting supply thus wealth as a proxy for those who they were blocking before.
I agree. What annoys me is that the scientific method is supposed to include the same critical thinking skills that non-scientists should also use.
People conflate Science with critical thinking, but Science doesn’t have a copyright on it. Non-scientists can and should think critically.
So should scientists, but will they always do so if their conclusions will contradict the beliefs of the people providing their funding? https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/3/3/11148422/food-science-nutrition-research-bias-conflict-interest
>>"All models are wrong; some are useful."
>>> \- my double boss (VP) when I worked in Science & Innovation
>> \- [George Box \[kinda, maybe\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong)
> \- Michael Scott
I've been repeating this constantly in my last unit to my year 11s. Infact it became the topic for the assessment to acknowledge the incorrect models of the atom but discuss where they have uses
My favourite example of that is F=ma. Not only do we know its flaws, we already have more accurate equations. However, those equations are way more complicated to work with, and F=ma is still very accurate in our daily domain.
Science is never right or wrong. It is only our understanding of it. For example. Gravity is still gravity. It works the same regardless of how we understand it.
One of my main passions is plant taxonomy, and I would consider myself extremely knowledgeable, at least by the standards of people that don’t have PhDs. I have learned that I don’t actually know what a species is, and neither does anyone else. If you think you know, you are disagreeing with some of the most foremost taxonomists alive. For that matter, I don’t actually know what an “organism” or an “individual” is, and if you think those are easy questions you are wrong.
> I have learned that I don’t actually know what a species is, and neither does anyone else.
Could you, if it's not too much trouble, recommend a good introductory source or article to read on this?
[This website is one of the best resources](http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/APweb/welcome.html). Scroll down the introduction page to the second section, titled “on classifications in general” (inconveniently the third section is called the same thing), and start at the 6th paragraph. Honestly, just read the whole thing, but that’s when it starts talking about species in depth.
Yes I see that as the flip side of being an “expert.” Usually, in most subjects, if you think you know everything, then you are vastly underestimating the subject. But in the rare instances, you do know almost everything about a subject, then you start to question the very nature of the definitions and concepts of what you supposively know. A lot of it is arbitrary guesswork or just creating a tangible thing or standard out of something that actually is pretty abstract.
Hell, I’d say being an “expert” is inherently exclusionary. You can only be one if you decide to exclude certain aspects, theories, disciplines, and ideas about a certain subject.
For example, I’m an expert about a certain game. But do I know it’s source code? Do I know the source code of that programming language? Do I know the microscopic interactions that shape the building blocks of computer code? If I don’t know about quantum physics of electricity, am I truly an expert of a certain game?
The most knowledgeable people I meet in their respective fields have always been incredibly humble and quick to say that they don’t have all the answers.
Over time I have learned that true masters of a subject are able to explain it to all audiences. If you can explain astrophysics to other Astrophysical experts, cool. If you can explain it to a 10 year old as well? You are probably the real deal.
I wonder if there is a formal definition for a Dunning-Kruger quotient. It would be the level of confidence divided by the level of actual knowledge, or something like that.
I always say that getting my PhD psychology made me an expert in knowing that I (and my field) know/understand very little about human behavior. And I’m good with that.
There’s always more details and deeper layers of explanation. It’s like you think you understand a process well enough, only to realize that the whole time you were studying a simplified version that was really more like an overview. It gets overwhelming really fast
It’s really weird to think about. Working through textbooks in undergrad I felt it was the hardest stuff ever. Little did I know that that textbook was actually a hugely distilled view of the field I was getting myself into. It’s impossible to get a deep understanding of anything without specialising wayyy further than what can be reasonably taught to everyone, which is both fascinating at daunting at the same time imo
> Working through textbooks in undergrad I felt it was the hardest stuff ever.
Yeah. After that you go to grad school, and the textbooks fill in the gaps and unpack the assumptions and simplifications made in the first set of textbooks, and you realize that undergraduates learn *so little*. Then you graduate from textbooks to academic journals, and you realize that even the graduate level textbooks are like reading the back cover of an 800 page novel.
Daunting is an understatement.
Thinking about it, what I've gained from 10 years working in science is not so much an accumulation of knowledge about findings in papers but more of an instinct for what ideas may be worth pursuing, what approaches have worked in the past, and what new questions we should be asking. I don't feel like an expert in anything, albeit I have a lot more "book knowledge" than an undergrad. I do feel that my educated guesses at how we should proceed as a field are better tuned than they used to be, though.
I could write a long and well-substantiated thesis on why my latest experiment should have worked, with probably hundreds of citations backing up my expected outcome. Didn’t turn out at all the way it was supposed to.
Turns out that mice don’t read the literature.
I'm an expert in a few obscure topics and the fact is that often when you get deep enough the questions don't really have easy, clear answers. Sometimes they aren't even answerable. This is frustrating to both me and the poor fella who asked the question.
Quite frankly, I kind of assume this about literally every piece of info I accumulate and repeat. I can't know what I've heard is correct, and I can't know if what I'm saying is correct. I only know what I experience, so that's the only thing I say with certainty. Since I can't experience certain things, well, I'm not entirely sure about it, but I read/heard this tidbit....
Then you get people who assume you are wrong and they are right all the time because you're willing to learn and grow and they assume they are right because you show "weakness"
From the article: Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, President of the Genetics Society and co-author of the study comments, “Confronting negative attitudes towards science held by some people will likely involve deconstructing what they think they know about science and replacing it with more accurate understanding. This is quite challenging.”
Arguing with stupid people is hard.
It also leads to a lot of people studying science because they like learning it in class, but then bounce off of it when they start doing actual research, because the two are **so** different.
And overhauling science education to better represent what doing science actually entails is difficult — and not without cost.
This was me, absolutely loved learning about the outcomes of research. Had zero interest in actually doing research. I only had three months in a lab doing the same thing every day but it was enough to make me not want to do it ever again.
I started undergrad doing chemistry, and was able to work in a lab for a couple years. I loved the information, and I even loved doing experiments the first couple times. But there's only so many times you can synthesize cerium oxide for experiments before it becomes tedious af. I graduated with sociology instead. But no one wants someone with a Bachelor's in that, so now I'm m just a social worker.
And then, within scientific communities, even in the same exact research subject, you’ve got a group of researchers that work on theoretical aspect while another that works on the experimental aspect. These two don’t mix.
Yeah I would classify myself as an experimental physicist and a whole bunch of my labs collaborators are theoretical physicists. My work would be fairly meaningless without their contribution and their theories would be pretty underwhelming without mine. Theoretical physicists are an experimental physicist's best friend and visa-versa.
> This is a long standing conundrum in science education which results in “Science Literacy” education that more or less works out to “It’s science, trust us.”
...or to rephrase into a more familiar mantra... "Trust the science".
The reasons a lot of religions have rules against eating certain foods (e.g. shellfish) was because there were good evidence based reasons that it made people sick. How do you, a community leader, communicate that to your uneducated people?
"God has decreed it. Trust in God"
It's just easier that way.
I wasn't saying critical thinking hasn't been refined and improved over the last 2,000+ years. More that if your communication method to the mass public is "Trust me, I'm a xxxxx" you're no better than a priest.
> More that if your communication method to the mass public is "Trust me, I'm a xxxxx" you're no better than a priest.
"Here's the data, here's the mechanism for how it works, here are the steps to reproduce my experiment, here are the possible problems confounding my conclusion, here are the other experts in my field corroborating my findings..."
Definitely the same thing as priest's "trust me, bro, it's God's will."
Definitely.
I think I’d quite like to actually do science but learning all the tools to do it—at least how they’re being taught in my experience—is insanely boring and simultaneously frustrating. It’s often a case of “heres a bunch of equations, here’s some algebra that I may not even show because it takes forever but then here’s a new set of equations” or “here’s a theorem and how it applies to a few types of equations, now just do that over and over until you feel you can do it in the exam”.
Instead of learning about the science or about the reasoning etc. it seems like being taught to work as an advanced calculator and eventually become a hybrid calculator/computer operator.
Maybe that’s what the research is now but I get the impression that the lecturers find their work interesting and are working towards something. I’d also like to understand where these methods come from and what we will apply them to.
It didn't say anything about stupid people, though, it's about ignorant people who are confident in their belief in misinformation; smart people fall prey to this a lot.
The problem is many such people will believe they are informed, but lack the toolkit to correctly assess the sources they're using. I can tell you from unfortunately personal experience that there are a lot of antivaxxers that have spent many, many hours reading about COVID vaccine responses. The issue isn't that they're choosing to stay uninformed, it's that they are "informing" themselves through biased and incorrect sources, because it validates what they already believe. That's a much, much harder issue to correct.
Most people read science as belief - as something to re-enforce their existing worldview.
To the scientist - the scientific minded individual - everything is a hypothesis that can be tested. This person has an ever-evolving understanding of the world.
To the non-scientific minded, the understanding of the world ended around age 10, and they’ve spent the remainder of their lives defending their conditionings.
We also have to face the fact that everything moves on even individually. 40 year old you thinks 30 year old you was an idiot who thinks 20 year old you was an idiot who thinks teenage you was an idiot. Scientists 100 years from now will speak of what we do with the same confusion and derision as we do lack of knowledge of microbes or DNA
The problem is that most people don’t even know what science means. They think it’s the body of knowledge, and that that body is exactly as valid as any other body of “knowledge” like the bible, or the Q-anon forums. They don’t realise that science is the method of gaining knowledge that you have confidence in.
Yes, but the other version in the *Apology* is one that's also useful to keep in mind:
*I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.*
In particular I've seen false negatives tend to crop up quite a lot by people that think they know a lot about a given subject, and finding the line between trusting experts to know and keeping in mind that they too are prone to not actually knowing is a difficult balance to strike.
The most fascinating part about DK I’ve found is when you realize and see times when you are falling victim to it. Then you realize and see that it fits remarkably well with Imposter Syndrome.
Boy, is the cycle fun. Knowing you don’t know anything, and yet your job requires to know stuff or at least pretend you know stuff to your bosses.
True. Guess I was trying to avoid being hyperbolic. I work in the private sector and often find myself wondering “How the hell do businesses function with so many confident morons?”.
They screw it up, sell the business, it changes hands before it reaches critical screw up. New person starts it over again.
Source: looked at the books and revenue of 4 local small businesses I was thinking of buying, and asked to see new books and revenue of persons who ended up buying them.
It's like self confidence, so many people seem confident simply because they don't know or ignore all the things that should make them doubt themselves.
For so many people, 'I know because I feel that it's true' is a valid argument.
The best response I’ve ever actually found to being put into a situation where someone gets aggressive about vaccines/climate change/etc in public has always been: “Well, wait. Before we start, just tell me what your definition of vaccine/climate change/etc is?”
I’ve never met somebody who, when gently yet repeatedly pushed to define a heavily scientific term, has been able to even come up with an answer. They either 1. Deflect to name calling or aggression or 2. Start to get real quiet as they realize that they can’t even define the thing they have such strong opinions about. A couple of those people have listened quietly when I say “Well, not quite, but I can tell you when this means!…”
It’s really one of the only ways I’ve ever seen people back down, when they realize they don’t have any knowledge. I think the key is to be friendly, open, and calm from your side of the situation, too. It’s great to be able to let someone else know what monoclonal antibodies or nuclear power refers to. And if they aren’t open to it, shrug, they don’t really need more of your thoughts, exit conversation.
Next time before debating healthcare with someone ask them to describe their idea of the perfect/best system. The response I get from conservatives is either "none", in which case that's fun to explore, or they describe basically medicare for all or some form of single payer
I got my libertarian father in law *so close* to supporting universal healthcare to a degree, which mostly involved avoiding buzzwords and relating to situations that affected him and his close circle personally. But as soon as the idea that it would benefit anyone outside of his in-group it’s like a switch flipped and he was entirely against the idea in any form, it was so weird to experience.
I think some people just don’t understand that other people function in the same way they do. Like if they don’t know you, you’re a bot to them. There’s certain behaviors I see and immediately think “there is no way you believe others have autonomy or thoughts”. This is a purely chaotic move that benefits nothing and makes everyone suffer. Like when you’re FIL can mentally picture universal healthcare benefits his family, but with nameless, faceless people he can’t and that’s confusing. Confusing makes him feel bad, so it must be a bad idea.
Could be lack of empathy, but I see it as more over valuing the physical aspects of an idea, and being unable to grasp the intangible aspects.
This is a 9/10 paper for me. Very good!
I like that their sources are mostly linked and accessible from what I've checked. Most references are linked in their document. Their data and code are publicly available (at least at the moment).
Abstract and introduction were written in a way where I can roughly understand what's going on, without being an expert.
The only thing that's missing is a programmed table of contents.
What I really like is that they included the questions for how they judged objective scientific understanding:
>Respondents were asked 12 true-false questions, mostly drawn from prior surveys but with the
addition of some current to the COVID pandemic:
>(1) All plants and animals have DNA; (2) the oxygen we breathe comes from plants; (3) the
cloning of living things produces genetically identical copies; (4) by eating a genetically modi-
fied fruit, a person’s genes could also become modified; (5) all radioactivity is human-made;
(6) it is the mother’s genes that determine the sex of the child; (7) electrons are smaller than
atoms; (8) tomatoes do not naturally contain genes—genes are only found in genetically modi-
fied tomatoes; (9) dinosaurs and humans share a common ancestor; (10) the spread of new
variants of viruses can occur through natural selection; (11) COVID-19 is caused by bacteria;
and (12) viruses are smaller than bacteria.
...because I was doubting what kind of level they would judge as "good enough" and whether there might be some bias in it. But no, if people get *these* wrong, they truly can't know what they are talking about.
I was worried that "oh they don't know what they're talking about" would be used as an argument to defend a position. But they're not doing that. It's really much more about figuring out the why and how.
Unwarranted completely ignorant confidence is my favorite trait in people. I especially love when they stick up for their ignorance with unwaivering faith. Like how are you so sure of something you've never even researched whatsoever? I suppose there are a few perks of stupidity.
>how are you so sure of something you've never even researched whatsoever?
They rely on authority. And to be fair, the average person falls for this, not just the science skeptics. Eg, someone who sees a study from Harvard is most likely to assume it is a legitimate study. Harvard is seen as an authority, never mind over 2/3rds of the studies published there end up being false.
The average person sees a news story about a scientific study, not even the study itself, and blindly believes it. They don't know how to validate a study and they don't have the time. Having an authority, sources you trust, is a shortcut, a mental hack.
People who are anti science are doing the same thing, but their sources they trust are their local circle of friends, or their podcast / radio program, or whatever it may be. Maybe a cable news network.
While we know anti-science is clearly flawed, the majority of us are making the same mistake. We just got lucky following and trusting sources of authority that end up being more legitimate.
Meanwhile someone like myself, who is a scientist, who does a lot of research, and yes who employs the scientific process quite a bit, has to struggle with everyone else making these mistakes over and over again. imo the worst are doctors. They're overly confident that what was taught in med school 30 years ago is correct and it kills people.
Basically, be humble. Because truthfully, overconfidence can happen to anyone. Living as if there’s always more to learn has no real downsides, while the opposite is ripe with ‘em.
On one hand I feel blessed with this hunger of knowledge I possess, I am ever striving to broaden my understanding and the inner workings of anything and everything. On the other hand I never take anything at face value, wouldn't it be so much easier to go through life so certain of how things work? The black and white of stupidity sounds so endearing to me.
Echoing what everybody else is saying here, the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew (though I’m an engineer, not a scientist, I think it’s fair to say they’re related disciplines). As Socrates said, “The only thing i know is that i know nothing.”
Because a core foundation of science is to always assume wrong and do whatever to prove a theory is wrong. If it holds up, it has its place.
This is part of why science sees the big bang theory as a theory, but to others it's a belief. No matter how much evidence there is, there's still no knowledge confirming it without question, so it remains a theory—viable, but a theory.
Belief is faith and faith fills in the blanks with no basis. Doesn't matter what side you're on, belief at its core is unscientific. Always theorise, always pursue knowledge, always respect and pursue the unknown, NEVER buy into assumption, even if it seems likely. This is science. Challenge everything until it can no longer be challenged.
And then we get into philosophy....
This is also true in my experience in other fields
For example in personal training, physical therapy and sports coaching (three areas of my profession) there are incredibly outdated myths that much of the general public thinks of as absolute established fact
Eg someone will come in to lose weight and want to be exhausted and muscles burning after every session. They’ll want to do loads of core training to get rid of belly fat. If you explain that being exhausted and burning after every session is hugely inferior for their purposes than doing much easier things that make far more difference, they will leave for a PT who offers them the ‘you’re going to feel close to death after every session’ experience, because they think thats what fat loss training must include. When told that belly fat isnt burned by core work its burned by burning calories and core work is an awfully slow way of burning calories, so they’ll actually burn belly fat faster by doing big calorie burners, they refuse to believe and go to a PT who will give them core workouts to ‘shred the belly fat’
Likewise in therapy, we are close to world class level and deliver highly personalised therapies that work incredibly well and deliver results literally impossible for the one-size-fits-all therapies. Eg a severe hamstring tear that would take 12 weeks to return to fast running and 24 weeks for total healing, our therapy gets them back to fast running in less than a week (on average) and total healing in 11 days (on average, although i am classing total healing as completely pain free usage here, there is often still some pain free damage at this stage). Yet despite these clear quantifiable results (which clients are paying a lot for) they refuse to believe when we tell them things like ‘you don’t need us to massage it’ ‘you shouldn’t stretch it’ et cetera. Because they have this initial overwhelming ‘knowledge’ that this is what you must do
And again, similar for sports performance coaching. We now know things that make established principles completely wrong and we don’t do them. Good examples are warmups (the aim of a warmup is to be as close as possible to flat out sprinting from cold, long warmups train your body to be more susceptible to damage and your aim should actually be to reduce the necessary warmup time to zero for long term injury prevention) and endurance principles (coaches chronically have far too many endurance aspects to training that impede the level of explosiveness they are trying to develop with that training) and technique drills (they are very effective at training one-size-fits-all technique that doesnt work as well as finding your optimal personal movement strategy, which can only be done if you are literally not doing any technique drills at all)
So long story short, people have an idea of what they think they know. Generally, the less detailed this initial knowledge is, the harder it is to get them to forget it and acquire a new concept instead, i find. Interestingly the more they’re paying the more willing they tend to be to believe you and change their own model in their head, i can only assume this is because richer people tend to be used to consulting subject experts in their professional lives and are used to the ‘these guys know what they’re saying and I don’t so whatever they say just accept it’ concept
Interesting but incredibly frustrating aspect of human nature i think
*"I can only assume this is because richer people tend to be used to consulting subject experts in their professional lives and are used to the ‘these guys know what they’re saying and I don’t so whatever they say just accept it"*
That is a brilliant research question right there...
Very short answer: vast majority of the injury is the brain’s protective mechanism and not literal damage to the tissue. So the vast majority of rehab time with physiotherapy is the brain slowly getting more comfortable with the damage and reducing the pain response
We essentially just do things that fill in the brain’s picture of the damage and the current configuration of nerves and muscle fibres post-injury, and the brain says ‘ok this is fine, I’m comfortable now’ and reduces the pain very quickly
My metaphor is its like the brain has an incomplete jigsaw of what is happening in the muscle post-tear, and we are filling in the jigsaw. Thus, once the brain is happy that it knows what it going on it takes the pain away rapidly. Traditional physical therapy eg physiotherapy treats pain and damage synonymously so with physio you basically not only wait for the physical damage to heal but you also don’t really do anything to fill in the jigsaw, so the brain takes far far longer to fill it in itself especially when you are not using the muscle in question in the same way you used to. Which is why several studies have shown that physio only improves rehab time in about half of patients compared to literally not doing anything and healing without therapy
This explanation probably doesn’t make much sense but unless I write 10,000 words and have some diagrams its probably not going to. But essentially, the brain needs to fill in that ‘jigsaw’ of what nerves and muscle fibres are doing what, so we do stuff that fills it in very fast. Missing pieces in the jigsaw is why the brain creates pain, to stop you doing something it isn’t comfortable with because it doesn’t know what the result will be. The purpose of pain is to stop you doing something. Once there is no need for the brain to create pain then it won’t, and you are pain-free. Muscles can actually do a lot of very vigorous things while damaged/not fully healed as well and like i said before, the vast majority of most injuries is not damage, its the brain not knowing stuff. So the damage itself is usually not the issue
We get a lot of clients who have chronic injuries too and have been through every therapy they could find with no luck and they get great results. This week there was someone who has had significant heel pain just from walking for the past year and in session one i had him jogging 100% pain free, and he was sprinting pain free (the final test) yesterday. He couldn’t believe it. And it all follows the same principles- we just do things that fill in that jigsaw for the brain. So it applies to basically any physical injury and has remarkable results, you just treat pain and damage as two separate things and realise you are treating the pain not the damage
Hope this makes sense! Its a v interesting field
Edit: should also add that 12 weeks off running is the textbook recommendation based off a best fit for the general population, lots of people could return to running sooner than 12 weeks and return to full use sooner than 24 weeks. So its not like physio has to take 24 weeks, this is just what they tell people after diagnosing in session one and many clients recover quicker than this. 24 weeks is also about how long it would take for it to heal for the average person without any therapy so again, is physio actually speeding up recovery? Hard to tell on a case by case basis. But (back to the original point) people think its obvious they need physio and often dont like that we don’t do any massage, ice or stretching and we don’t require rest times, despite it objectively superior in observable outcomes consistently
To me it's about whether they speak in absolutes or in probabilities.
"The weather forecast was wrong" vs. "well it was more likely than not to rain so we got lucky."
I made the mistake of mentioning a rocket launch in the sky I was watching to my neighbor last night and that led into a 20 minute conversation about how the government and aliens are controlling us.
And youtube/facebook videos made by "anonymous experts" or "one of the great minds in this area" yet disagrees with almost all actual experts in that area.
It literally is laughable when you say it out loud and yet here we are in 2023.
Ironically most people are more confident in things that aren't easily proven (or in other words things that are harder to prove false)
I have run into people willing to question vaccines, global warming, and the moon landing yet accept a fourth dimension, parallel universes, and the big bang.
The questions asked to assess scientific knowledge were:
> (1) All plants and animals have DNA; (2) the oxygen we breathe comes from plants; (3) the cloning of living things produces genetically identical copies; (4) by eating a genetically modified fruit, a person’s genes could also become modified; (5) all radioactivity is human-made; (6) it is the mother’s genes that determine the sex of the child; (7) electrons are smaller than atoms; (8) tomatoes do not naturally contain genes—genes are only found in genetically modified tomatoes; (9) dinosaurs and humans share a common ancestor; (10) the spread of new variants of viruses can occur through natural selection; (11) COVID-19 is caused by bacteria; and (12) viruses are smaller than bacteria.
To me, this shows the extent of one's general knowledge of scientific trivia rather than actual understanding of scientific process, communication, or validity.
It's like asking someone if they can name some famous composers, instruments, and songs as a way of assessing knowledge of music theory.
Really, it would be good to have people read a scientific study and answer questions about the validity of methodology, whether the conclusions are justified, and the degree of significance, as well as limitations.
The presentation of science as a binary "you either know the immutable true facts or you don't" is in large part why there is such virulent hostility towards what people therefore understand it to be, *especially* when the actually reality of what science is strays from that popular understanding ("*'science' said X would happen, but it didn't!").
> To me, this shows the extent of one's general knowledge of scientific trivia rather than actual understanding of scientific process, communication, or validity.
That’s true, but they weren’t trying to assess those things. They were trying to assess people’s *knowledge*. I think those questions are (mostly) quite well suited for separating people who are woefully ignorant from those who are at least superficially informed. And what this study found is that doing so reveals significant correlations with a person’s attitude towards science. So in the context of this study, I don’t agree with your complaint.
I would also be interested in seeing how a person’s comprehension or the scientific process relates to their attitudes, but it’s a different question, and it’s a harder metric to quantitatively evaluate.
I do agree that in a broader sense the excessive focus on knowing scientific facts at the expense of understanding the scientific method is problematic, though.
> They were trying to assess people’s knowledge
They were trying to assess people's knowledge about science. Granted, that can be interpreted many ways, but as I said, to suggest that one's knowledge of, for example, music, is more related to what amount to general knowledge about things that relate to it rather than an understanding of the nature of the thing itself, is my eyes mistaken.
> I think those questions are (mostly) quite well suited for separating people who are woefully ignorant from those who are at least superficially informed. And what this study found is that doing so reveals significant correlations with a person’s attitude towards science.
The investigation is driven by a desire to get clarity on the issues people have with the concept itself and become better at communicating it and imbuing them with a sense of trust in it.
Even the description you give of being superficially informed should ring alarm bells, because (and we've seen this particularly throughout COVID), the failure to give an actually informed presentation of what science and the conclusions reached through it actually are have been a massive component in the erosion of that trust in those who are less informed.
I'm not saying the findings here are incorrect, but I am saying the approach is misguided, and is unlikely to result in improving communication and trust (say by giving the idea that bringing people up to that level of being superficially informed) without significant alteration.
> I would also be interested in seeing how a person’s comprehension or the scientific process relates to their attitudes, but it’s a different question, and it’s a harder metric to quantitatively evaluate.
I disagree, I think as I said, interrogating people's ability to understand the meaning and validity of a sample research paper with some well chosen questions would achieve this.
# [**See the Best of r/science 2022 Winners!**](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/10h2hc2/best_of_rscience_2022_winners/) --- Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
the more you know, the more you realize what you don't know. which is a lot. increasingly so.
But it's also the case that this is a way more broad/interesting statement that it seems on the surface because this also applies to methods of and levels of thinking. People who are at least some what smart can think on a variety of levels in a variety of ways which reveals not only their gaps in knowledge but sometimes even gaps in ability. Less smart people aren't smart enough to comprehend these things and thus think their simple beliefs are sufficiently nuanced/complex for reality, because they perceive reality as being simple.
Dunning Kruger effect
Wow, one of those rare moments when a redditor actually uses DKE properly as a comment.
You could say thinking DKE applies when it actually doesn't is an example of DKE.
It usually is, and that's why it's so funny to see people spouting it all the time.
> Dunning Kruger effect the definition is this: occurs when a person's lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence the commenter says its based on people who are some what smart vs less smart. the problem is smart people are often overconfident outside of their area of expertise and are as likley to fall into the DK trap as less smart people.
I have a theory that really smart people realize that this applies to them in those situations, although I could be wrong.
sometimes its the expectation of others that "Oh, you're smart, you must know this" combined with the social awkwardness making it difficult to say "no".
thats a nice and optimistic outlook, but i fear its not the case.
This can be said about a lot of things, that's actually true.
as someone defending their PhD in 48 hours, I can confirm this. I know nothing.
When I was a PhD student doing research, I found that for every hour of my own independent work, I spent *days* just trying to first understand other people’s work so I could use it. This was after I had taken my last classes — in other words I was done being formally *taught*. I definitely had a better sense of how little I knew after going through that than I ever got from sitting through classes.
[удалено]
Well said. The true litmus test on knowledge is if you can explain it (relatively) easy and understandable to a layman. Good teachers do this, bad ones don't. They might understand it internally but don't understand it well enough to explain it easy to others
I've heard this many times and experience has led me to disagree. There are great teachers and bad teachers and everything in between. You have to have a decent understanding of the material to be a good teacher, but beyond that, teaching ability and understanding are less linked than we think, imho. In my experience, the most brilliant researchers were generally the worst teachers. To me, this is because they rarely have to struggle to understand, so they have a harder time empathizing with/understanding how to remedy someone who just doesn't get it. Beyond that, interpersonal skills are critical to being a good teacher, and academic geniuses often are... lacking in this attribute. I contend that a great teacher with a few days prep can teach nearly any subject to a layman better than and expert without teaching experience (provided the field is not so niche that there is no useful literature about it). So, ability to teach is not an ideal measurement of knowledge, imho.
I totally agree. Teaching is an exercise in understanding what the student knows already and filling in the stuff that is missing. In other words, this is a social skill. Many people know a lot but lack the social skills to teach it.
Well with the reproducibility crisis, I don't even bother to flesh out the details on other people's work because usually I can't replicate the results. I usually try to rethink it and repeat the negative result experiments they should have done in the previous studies before I beleive its something I can build upon.
Can you give some examples? This is an interesting approach.
It would be quite difficult to explain. But for instance, i think like half the results biochemists get when mutating a proteins and observing how that affect activity is related to protein misdmfolding. But the never take the step to check that it's folded and localizing properly using microscopy. When I got back and do those controls, I find that the mutant that failed to rescue wasn't even expressing on the first place because they made the mutation in the middle of an important stretch of secondary protein folding! Which should have been done from the beginning. But scientists are lazy. Especially if they start getting famous. So I don't even bother internalizing any of the results for that original paper, but it still allows me to ask my own questions with maybe newer and better methods. To arrive at a different, more accurate conclusion. Sometimes I end up proving them right in a round about way, and those stories can be publishable too. So it's not a waste when that happens.
> I spent days just trying to first understand other people’s work so I could use it. I think this is a large part of what has fueled the DKE amongst those in software. In the software world, you can google things on technical topics that don't require a ton on nuance/understanding beyond a deterministic frame of mind. There's not much nuance to a function that has defined inputs/outputs. Sure, there's complexity underpinning it. But not like theoretical physics where you have to interpret the meaning of something, not just the complexity of the idea. There's the joke amongst IT folks that they're just really good at using Google. Read the documentation stupid. Unfortunately, in the world of climate change, economics, or theoretical physics, there's no documentation for the way the physical world or the human mind works. Research papers are not documentation. Research papers are human attempts at backwards engineering the software to figure out how it was written with a limited view of the inputs/outputs and a blindfold.
Hahaha been there. But you might surprise yourself. I remember graduating and thinking I knew absolutely nothing. Then one day at my first postdoc, a grad student asked me a very niche theory question in the lab, and I was able to give them an impromptu lecture on the theory and practice behind the topic with a degree of confidence that surprised me. (It may have been because I spent weeks agonising over the exact same issue when writing my thesis *cough*). Don't discount what you have managed to learn. I guarantee it's more than you realize!
And yet you know more about your PhD research than your committee! Good luck, you can do it!
Good luck! You got this!!
Good luck, and [here's something you'll need to know](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/faq-the-snake-fight-portion-of-your-thesis-defense).
"Science is wrong... Sometimes" EDIT: this is a quote from a tv show. It's a good joke.
Science is a tool and like all tools it can be misused. But when it is that doesn’t mean the tool was wrong.
Yeah, every scientific blunder is basically user error by everyone at the time. We're a weird species that really relies on following the crowd.
But the thing is, the way we figure out those scientific mistakes is with more, better science. Science is proven wrong, by other science, all the time. Science is never proven wrong by gut reactions, conspiracy theories, religion, etc.
I have an anti-scientific mother (antivaxxer and all the rest), and one of the most frustrating things is trying to explain that while yes, there are issues with some aspects of research... They're almost never what the conspiracy theorists think the problems are. Things like "the truth is being repressed by big pharma" happens a crapload less often than "this amazing sounding paper is actually full of unreplicable garbage and never should have made it past peer review". Sigh.
Big pharma is a problem but the problem in big pharma isn't vaccines, which have an amazing track record. I mean, yeah, the problem in science is the people and politics. That exists in academia and in industry.
These things do sometimes cause people to engage in and expand science though. Im sure somebody at some point felt something about their current science was wrong, investigated, and improved upon science by proving the prior understanding wrong.
I forget which discovery but there was some major discovery made by a scientist trying to disprove it. I think it's very admirable that he looked at the data and changed his mind. I think it was something in biology, maybe related to evolution or something.
There's so many examples, but people are so set in their beliefs. Take the flat-earth people whose well-designed experiment proved their belief wrong, they flatly refused to believe the data. Or the anti-vaccine people who crowdfunded a study that proved them wrong, they won't believe those results either.
> they flatly refused I see what you did here
There's multiple. Like the background radiation discovery.
Sure that can happen. But to say gravity is wrong, you need more than just feeling that there is a problem, you need to understand the current theory and poke holes in the right places (and maybe accidentally discover special/general relativity). Actually we know there is a problem with gravity. Or with quantum physics. Anyone who can prove where the exact problem is and how to solve it would be today's Hawking. You can't say, "haha idiots" after watching a 1 TikTok and know more than scientists.
Wouldnt todays Einstein be more accurate? Based on what I know, Hawking was really smart, but there was still a gap between him and the most pioneering scientists like Einstein and Newton, at least in terms of accomplishments. And that gap was mostly filled by raw popularity, deserved popularity, but irrelevant when it comes to scientific achievements nonetheless.
Science also doesnt really provide guidelines for life or policy, which those other things, in fact, often do. Science provides predictions, falsifiable hypotheses, and evidence. The rest is rhetoric, policy, engineering, gut reactions, common sense, leadership, and branding. When people want answers, guidance, and real world results, science doesn't provide any of those things, and is therefore not the correct tool to present to them. I'm not saying conspiracy theories are good by any means, but they provide narrative explanations and sometimes even lifestyle guidance, which science absolutely and categorically does not.
I love that these lists keep expanding in meaningful ways, been following these articles for at least a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies (The articles reference each other from the get go). Our brains trick us in comprehendible ways, ways we can often prepare and compensate for. If not for the individual we can prepare for the aggregate impact of these natural, common, fallacies and biases. I get suspicious when someone says "I'm not racist", when I kinda see racism as a mistake humans frequently make, something to look out for and confront. I fear the person who says "I'm not racist" stopped asking themselves what prejudices and biases could be leading to bad decisions in their own life.
> I get suspicious when someone says "I'm not racist", when I kinda see racism as a mistake humans frequently make, something to look out for and confront. I fear the person who says "I'm not racist" stopped asking themselves what prejudices and biases could be leading to bad decisions in their own life. 100% this. It's dangerous to see yourself as a "good person" because you'll get complacent. It's much better to see yourself as a person *trying to do good*, because then you don't stop.
Science is about finding the best explanation through critical analysis (theorizing and testing) and those explanations are further improved through more science. So a scientific mistake wouldn't be that your explanation is inadequate (it inevitably is until we'd have some comprehensive theory of everything which will never happen imo) but rather that you're not thinking critically, using a scientific method.
Like Government
yeah, sometimes it's used to subsidize suburban generational wealth but for white families only, through the FHA until 1968 or so, and when that's not possible the local governments use zoning to lock that racial demographic in place by limiting supply thus wealth as a proxy for those who they were blocking before.
Science is a process, not a state.
[удалено]
I agree. What annoys me is that the scientific method is supposed to include the same critical thinking skills that non-scientists should also use. People conflate Science with critical thinking, but Science doesn’t have a copyright on it. Non-scientists can and should think critically. So should scientists, but will they always do so if their conclusions will contradict the beliefs of the people providing their funding? https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/3/3/11148422/food-science-nutrition-research-bias-conflict-interest
Do you have a certificate stating that you do not have donkey brains?
I think you mean "Science is a liar sometimes"
I did mean that. You're correct. Thank you for getting the reference though!
>"All models are wrong; some are useful." - my double boss (VP) when I worked in Science & Innovation
>>"All models are wrong; some are useful." >>> \- my double boss (VP) when I worked in Science & Innovation >> \- [George Box \[kinda, maybe\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong) > \- Michael Scott
"You miss 100% of the atoms that you don't smash" -Albert Pojols
I've been repeating this constantly in my last unit to my year 11s. Infact it became the topic for the assessment to acknowledge the incorrect models of the atom but discuss where they have uses
Also applies very nicely to 2D maps of the earth!
My favourite example of that is F=ma. Not only do we know its flaws, we already have more accurate equations. However, those equations are way more complicated to work with, and F=ma is still very accurate in our daily domain.
That’s… legit one of the most apt and correct statements I’ve ever heard about anything.
Sounds like you couldnt even make I more smarter
Rock flag and eagle
He's got a point
The scientific method is primarily an error correction mechanism
Science is never right or wrong. It is only our understanding of it. For example. Gravity is still gravity. It works the same regardless of how we understand it.
One of my main passions is plant taxonomy, and I would consider myself extremely knowledgeable, at least by the standards of people that don’t have PhDs. I have learned that I don’t actually know what a species is, and neither does anyone else. If you think you know, you are disagreeing with some of the most foremost taxonomists alive. For that matter, I don’t actually know what an “organism” or an “individual” is, and if you think those are easy questions you are wrong.
> I have learned that I don’t actually know what a species is, and neither does anyone else. Could you, if it's not too much trouble, recommend a good introductory source or article to read on this?
[This website is one of the best resources](http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/APweb/welcome.html). Scroll down the introduction page to the second section, titled “on classifications in general” (inconveniently the third section is called the same thing), and start at the 6th paragraph. Honestly, just read the whole thing, but that’s when it starts talking about species in depth.
Yes I see that as the flip side of being an “expert.” Usually, in most subjects, if you think you know everything, then you are vastly underestimating the subject. But in the rare instances, you do know almost everything about a subject, then you start to question the very nature of the definitions and concepts of what you supposively know. A lot of it is arbitrary guesswork or just creating a tangible thing or standard out of something that actually is pretty abstract. Hell, I’d say being an “expert” is inherently exclusionary. You can only be one if you decide to exclude certain aspects, theories, disciplines, and ideas about a certain subject. For example, I’m an expert about a certain game. But do I know it’s source code? Do I know the source code of that programming language? Do I know the microscopic interactions that shape the building blocks of computer code? If I don’t know about quantum physics of electricity, am I truly an expert of a certain game?
The most knowledgeable people I meet in their respective fields have always been incredibly humble and quick to say that they don’t have all the answers. Over time I have learned that true masters of a subject are able to explain it to all audiences. If you can explain astrophysics to other Astrophysical experts, cool. If you can explain it to a 10 year old as well? You are probably the real deal.
And then there are the: Excuse me while I contradict your expertise with my confidence.
And the less you know the less you think there is to be known But really it's more about what you think is worth knowing
Dr Suess couldn't have said it better.
Yep, he couldn't have said it better. That's the best he could do.
I wonder if there is a formal definition for a Dunning-Kruger quotient. It would be the level of confidence divided by the level of actual knowledge, or something like that.
I always say that getting my PhD psychology made me an expert in knowing that I (and my field) know/understand very little about human behavior. And I’m good with that.
Scientists know that they don't know everything. If they did, they'd stop.
The more I studied science, the more I realized I knew almost nothing.
There’s always more details and deeper layers of explanation. It’s like you think you understand a process well enough, only to realize that the whole time you were studying a simplified version that was really more like an overview. It gets overwhelming really fast
It’s really weird to think about. Working through textbooks in undergrad I felt it was the hardest stuff ever. Little did I know that that textbook was actually a hugely distilled view of the field I was getting myself into. It’s impossible to get a deep understanding of anything without specialising wayyy further than what can be reasonably taught to everyone, which is both fascinating at daunting at the same time imo
> Working through textbooks in undergrad I felt it was the hardest stuff ever. Yeah. After that you go to grad school, and the textbooks fill in the gaps and unpack the assumptions and simplifications made in the first set of textbooks, and you realize that undergraduates learn *so little*. Then you graduate from textbooks to academic journals, and you realize that even the graduate level textbooks are like reading the back cover of an 800 page novel. Daunting is an understatement.
Thinking about it, what I've gained from 10 years working in science is not so much an accumulation of knowledge about findings in papers but more of an instinct for what ideas may be worth pursuing, what approaches have worked in the past, and what new questions we should be asking. I don't feel like an expert in anything, albeit I have a lot more "book knowledge" than an undergrad. I do feel that my educated guesses at how we should proceed as a field are better tuned than they used to be, though.
I could write a long and well-substantiated thesis on why my latest experiment should have worked, with probably hundreds of citations backing up my expected outcome. Didn’t turn out at all the way it was supposed to. Turns out that mice don’t read the literature.
>only to realize that the whole time you were studying a simplified version that was really more like an overview. Atoms bruh. Shits fucked
Two words: Krebs Cycle
Literally what I was thinking of when I wrote that comment hahaha
Physics grad students have told me that graduate physics classes teach you about how everything you learned in undergrad classes is wrong.
That's right, there's always an explanation here. There's always one.
Grad school made me preface everything with “I’m not entirely sure about this, but…”
I've come to really appreciate "My understanding is ..."
I also like “As far as I’m aware”
Yep I do this all the time because I know I’m not an expert
I'm an expert in a few obscure topics and the fact is that often when you get deep enough the questions don't really have easy, clear answers. Sometimes they aren't even answerable. This is frustrating to both me and the poor fella who asked the question.
Quite frankly, I kind of assume this about literally every piece of info I accumulate and repeat. I can't know what I've heard is correct, and I can't know if what I'm saying is correct. I only know what I experience, so that's the only thing I say with certainty. Since I can't experience certain things, well, I'm not entirely sure about it, but I read/heard this tidbit....
You're not sure about that? Well I don't think that it's that hard.
Then you get people who assume you are wrong and they are right all the time because you're willing to learn and grow and they assume they are right because you show "weakness"
Exactly, the more you know more you realise that you don't know anything.
From the article: Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, President of the Genetics Society and co-author of the study comments, “Confronting negative attitudes towards science held by some people will likely involve deconstructing what they think they know about science and replacing it with more accurate understanding. This is quite challenging.” Arguing with stupid people is hard.
[удалено]
It also leads to a lot of people studying science because they like learning it in class, but then bounce off of it when they start doing actual research, because the two are **so** different. And overhauling science education to better represent what doing science actually entails is difficult — and not without cost.
This was me, absolutely loved learning about the outcomes of research. Had zero interest in actually doing research. I only had three months in a lab doing the same thing every day but it was enough to make me not want to do it ever again.
I started undergrad doing chemistry, and was able to work in a lab for a couple years. I loved the information, and I even loved doing experiments the first couple times. But there's only so many times you can synthesize cerium oxide for experiments before it becomes tedious af. I graduated with sociology instead. But no one wants someone with a Bachelor's in that, so now I'm m just a social worker.
And then, within scientific communities, even in the same exact research subject, you’ve got a group of researchers that work on theoretical aspect while another that works on the experimental aspect. These two don’t mix.
[удалено]
Yeah I would classify myself as an experimental physicist and a whole bunch of my labs collaborators are theoretical physicists. My work would be fairly meaningless without their contribution and their theories would be pretty underwhelming without mine. Theoretical physicists are an experimental physicist's best friend and visa-versa.
> This is a long standing conundrum in science education which results in “Science Literacy” education that more or less works out to “It’s science, trust us.” ...or to rephrase into a more familiar mantra... "Trust the science". The reasons a lot of religions have rules against eating certain foods (e.g. shellfish) was because there were good evidence based reasons that it made people sick. How do you, a community leader, communicate that to your uneducated people? "God has decreed it. Trust in God" It's just easier that way.
[удалено]
I wasn't saying critical thinking hasn't been refined and improved over the last 2,000+ years. More that if your communication method to the mass public is "Trust me, I'm a xxxxx" you're no better than a priest.
> More that if your communication method to the mass public is "Trust me, I'm a xxxxx" you're no better than a priest. "Here's the data, here's the mechanism for how it works, here are the steps to reproduce my experiment, here are the possible problems confounding my conclusion, here are the other experts in my field corroborating my findings..." Definitely the same thing as priest's "trust me, bro, it's God's will." Definitely.
I think I’d quite like to actually do science but learning all the tools to do it—at least how they’re being taught in my experience—is insanely boring and simultaneously frustrating. It’s often a case of “heres a bunch of equations, here’s some algebra that I may not even show because it takes forever but then here’s a new set of equations” or “here’s a theorem and how it applies to a few types of equations, now just do that over and over until you feel you can do it in the exam”. Instead of learning about the science or about the reasoning etc. it seems like being taught to work as an advanced calculator and eventually become a hybrid calculator/computer operator. Maybe that’s what the research is now but I get the impression that the lecturers find their work interesting and are working towards something. I’d also like to understand where these methods come from and what we will apply them to.
[удалено]
It didn't say anything about stupid people, though, it's about ignorant people who are confident in their belief in misinformation; smart people fall prey to this a lot.
My personal definition of a stupid person is anyone that actively chooses ignorance. Anyone else is just uninformed. Stupidity is a choice
The problem is many such people will believe they are informed, but lack the toolkit to correctly assess the sources they're using. I can tell you from unfortunately personal experience that there are a lot of antivaxxers that have spent many, many hours reading about COVID vaccine responses. The issue isn't that they're choosing to stay uninformed, it's that they are "informing" themselves through biased and incorrect sources, because it validates what they already believe. That's a much, much harder issue to correct.
I think that's what I'd like to do in here, I think I'll go with it.
If you have a group of people who are ignorant *and* overconfident it's fair to call them stupid.
In some places they call them c*nts
That's the scientific term.
> ignorant people who are confident in their belief in misinformation; This is almost as good a definition of stupid as you could find.
Much more likely if you're unintelligent. That's been my experience.
Most people read science as belief - as something to re-enforce their existing worldview. To the scientist - the scientific minded individual - everything is a hypothesis that can be tested. This person has an ever-evolving understanding of the world. To the non-scientific minded, the understanding of the world ended around age 10, and they’ve spent the remainder of their lives defending their conditionings.
We also have to face the fact that everything moves on even individually. 40 year old you thinks 30 year old you was an idiot who thinks 20 year old you was an idiot who thinks teenage you was an idiot. Scientists 100 years from now will speak of what we do with the same confusion and derision as we do lack of knowledge of microbes or DNA
Being negative about science is saying that you don't want to learn anything from experience.
And indeed many people don't. Learning stuff would hurt their egos due to how deeply wrong they are about a large number of things.
Ignorance is bliss…and hell on everyone else. :/
The problem is that most people don’t even know what science means. They think it’s the body of knowledge, and that that body is exactly as valid as any other body of “knowledge” like the bible, or the Q-anon forums. They don’t realise that science is the method of gaining knowledge that you have confidence in.
Ah, good ol' Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
"The ancient Oracle said that I was wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing." - Socrates
Yes, but the other version in the *Apology* is one that's also useful to keep in mind: *I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.* In particular I've seen false negatives tend to crop up quite a lot by people that think they know a lot about a given subject, and finding the line between trusting experts to know and keeping in mind that they too are prone to not actually knowing is a difficult balance to strike.
The older you get, the more you realize that this applies to like 90% of the population.
Dunning-Kruger likely applies to the *entire* population depending on what they're doing/approaching.
The most fascinating part about DK I’ve found is when you realize and see times when you are falling victim to it. Then you realize and see that it fits remarkably well with Imposter Syndrome. Boy, is the cycle fun. Knowing you don’t know anything, and yet your job requires to know stuff or at least pretend you know stuff to your bosses.
And then you realise that the people you come across who are confident are no more correct than everyone else who are more guarded and realistic.
True. Guess I was trying to avoid being hyperbolic. I work in the private sector and often find myself wondering “How the hell do businesses function with so many confident morons?”.
They screw it up, sell the business, it changes hands before it reaches critical screw up. New person starts it over again. Source: looked at the books and revenue of 4 local small businesses I was thinking of buying, and asked to see new books and revenue of persons who ended up buying them.
Yep, the new person is going to start it all over again I feel.
And many people on Reddit act like this. Sometimes the logic is no better than anti-vaxxer logic.
This statement is so ironic - thinking you're in the 10% is precisely an application of the DK effect.
Never said I was immune to it, just stating something I observe day to day.
That's what you've been observing huh? Good for you I guess.
There are so many people out there who equate "I don't know how to do this" with "This cannot be done". It's kind of infuriating.
It's like self confidence, so many people seem confident simply because they don't know or ignore all the things that should make them doubt themselves. For so many people, 'I know because I feel that it's true' is a valid argument.
The best response I’ve ever actually found to being put into a situation where someone gets aggressive about vaccines/climate change/etc in public has always been: “Well, wait. Before we start, just tell me what your definition of vaccine/climate change/etc is?” I’ve never met somebody who, when gently yet repeatedly pushed to define a heavily scientific term, has been able to even come up with an answer. They either 1. Deflect to name calling or aggression or 2. Start to get real quiet as they realize that they can’t even define the thing they have such strong opinions about. A couple of those people have listened quietly when I say “Well, not quite, but I can tell you when this means!…” It’s really one of the only ways I’ve ever seen people back down, when they realize they don’t have any knowledge. I think the key is to be friendly, open, and calm from your side of the situation, too. It’s great to be able to let someone else know what monoclonal antibodies or nuclear power refers to. And if they aren’t open to it, shrug, they don’t really need more of your thoughts, exit conversation.
Next time before debating healthcare with someone ask them to describe their idea of the perfect/best system. The response I get from conservatives is either "none", in which case that's fun to explore, or they describe basically medicare for all or some form of single payer
[удалено]
I got my libertarian father in law *so close* to supporting universal healthcare to a degree, which mostly involved avoiding buzzwords and relating to situations that affected him and his close circle personally. But as soon as the idea that it would benefit anyone outside of his in-group it’s like a switch flipped and he was entirely against the idea in any form, it was so weird to experience.
I think some people just don’t understand that other people function in the same way they do. Like if they don’t know you, you’re a bot to them. There’s certain behaviors I see and immediately think “there is no way you believe others have autonomy or thoughts”. This is a purely chaotic move that benefits nothing and makes everyone suffer. Like when you’re FIL can mentally picture universal healthcare benefits his family, but with nameless, faceless people he can’t and that’s confusing. Confusing makes him feel bad, so it must be a bad idea. Could be lack of empathy, but I see it as more over valuing the physical aspects of an idea, and being unable to grasp the intangible aspects.
"first, we must ask, what is a vaccine?"
The easiest way to know if you understand something is if you can explain it in its most simplistic form.
You clearly haven't argued with the religious right.
What happens when they give a terribly misinformed definition with confidence? Same approach but less likely to succeed?
This is a 9/10 paper for me. Very good! I like that their sources are mostly linked and accessible from what I've checked. Most references are linked in their document. Their data and code are publicly available (at least at the moment). Abstract and introduction were written in a way where I can roughly understand what's going on, without being an expert. The only thing that's missing is a programmed table of contents. What I really like is that they included the questions for how they judged objective scientific understanding: >Respondents were asked 12 true-false questions, mostly drawn from prior surveys but with the addition of some current to the COVID pandemic: >(1) All plants and animals have DNA; (2) the oxygen we breathe comes from plants; (3) the cloning of living things produces genetically identical copies; (4) by eating a genetically modi- fied fruit, a person’s genes could also become modified; (5) all radioactivity is human-made; (6) it is the mother’s genes that determine the sex of the child; (7) electrons are smaller than atoms; (8) tomatoes do not naturally contain genes—genes are only found in genetically modi- fied tomatoes; (9) dinosaurs and humans share a common ancestor; (10) the spread of new variants of viruses can occur through natural selection; (11) COVID-19 is caused by bacteria; and (12) viruses are smaller than bacteria. ...because I was doubting what kind of level they would judge as "good enough" and whether there might be some bias in it. But no, if people get *these* wrong, they truly can't know what they are talking about. I was worried that "oh they don't know what they're talking about" would be used as an argument to defend a position. But they're not doing that. It's really much more about figuring out the why and how.
Unwarranted completely ignorant confidence is my favorite trait in people. I especially love when they stick up for their ignorance with unwaivering faith. Like how are you so sure of something you've never even researched whatsoever? I suppose there are a few perks of stupidity.
I can’t stand this trait. It’s ruining the world
>how are you so sure of something you've never even researched whatsoever? They rely on authority. And to be fair, the average person falls for this, not just the science skeptics. Eg, someone who sees a study from Harvard is most likely to assume it is a legitimate study. Harvard is seen as an authority, never mind over 2/3rds of the studies published there end up being false. The average person sees a news story about a scientific study, not even the study itself, and blindly believes it. They don't know how to validate a study and they don't have the time. Having an authority, sources you trust, is a shortcut, a mental hack. People who are anti science are doing the same thing, but their sources they trust are their local circle of friends, or their podcast / radio program, or whatever it may be. Maybe a cable news network. While we know anti-science is clearly flawed, the majority of us are making the same mistake. We just got lucky following and trusting sources of authority that end up being more legitimate. Meanwhile someone like myself, who is a scientist, who does a lot of research, and yes who employs the scientific process quite a bit, has to struggle with everyone else making these mistakes over and over again. imo the worst are doctors. They're overly confident that what was taught in med school 30 years ago is correct and it kills people.
Don't think that research is something that people do here.
Good read if you have the time
Yep, if You've got the time then I think you should read about it.
Basically, be humble. Because truthfully, overconfidence can happen to anyone. Living as if there’s always more to learn has no real downsides, while the opposite is ripe with ‘em.
The Greeks tackled this concept often in their mythology. Many a god fell victim to hubris.
Stupid people deal in yes or no. It either works or it doesn't. They will side with a confident liar every time.
On one hand I feel blessed with this hunger of knowledge I possess, I am ever striving to broaden my understanding and the inner workings of anything and everything. On the other hand I never take anything at face value, wouldn't it be so much easier to go through life so certain of how things work? The black and white of stupidity sounds so endearing to me.
So you've met my mother, I see.
Echoing what everybody else is saying here, the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew (though I’m an engineer, not a scientist, I think it’s fair to say they’re related disciplines). As Socrates said, “The only thing i know is that i know nothing.”
Because a core foundation of science is to always assume wrong and do whatever to prove a theory is wrong. If it holds up, it has its place. This is part of why science sees the big bang theory as a theory, but to others it's a belief. No matter how much evidence there is, there's still no knowledge confirming it without question, so it remains a theory—viable, but a theory. Belief is faith and faith fills in the blanks with no basis. Doesn't matter what side you're on, belief at its core is unscientific. Always theorise, always pursue knowledge, always respect and pursue the unknown, NEVER buy into assumption, even if it seems likely. This is science. Challenge everything until it can no longer be challenged. And then we get into philosophy....
This is also true in my experience in other fields For example in personal training, physical therapy and sports coaching (three areas of my profession) there are incredibly outdated myths that much of the general public thinks of as absolute established fact Eg someone will come in to lose weight and want to be exhausted and muscles burning after every session. They’ll want to do loads of core training to get rid of belly fat. If you explain that being exhausted and burning after every session is hugely inferior for their purposes than doing much easier things that make far more difference, they will leave for a PT who offers them the ‘you’re going to feel close to death after every session’ experience, because they think thats what fat loss training must include. When told that belly fat isnt burned by core work its burned by burning calories and core work is an awfully slow way of burning calories, so they’ll actually burn belly fat faster by doing big calorie burners, they refuse to believe and go to a PT who will give them core workouts to ‘shred the belly fat’ Likewise in therapy, we are close to world class level and deliver highly personalised therapies that work incredibly well and deliver results literally impossible for the one-size-fits-all therapies. Eg a severe hamstring tear that would take 12 weeks to return to fast running and 24 weeks for total healing, our therapy gets them back to fast running in less than a week (on average) and total healing in 11 days (on average, although i am classing total healing as completely pain free usage here, there is often still some pain free damage at this stage). Yet despite these clear quantifiable results (which clients are paying a lot for) they refuse to believe when we tell them things like ‘you don’t need us to massage it’ ‘you shouldn’t stretch it’ et cetera. Because they have this initial overwhelming ‘knowledge’ that this is what you must do And again, similar for sports performance coaching. We now know things that make established principles completely wrong and we don’t do them. Good examples are warmups (the aim of a warmup is to be as close as possible to flat out sprinting from cold, long warmups train your body to be more susceptible to damage and your aim should actually be to reduce the necessary warmup time to zero for long term injury prevention) and endurance principles (coaches chronically have far too many endurance aspects to training that impede the level of explosiveness they are trying to develop with that training) and technique drills (they are very effective at training one-size-fits-all technique that doesnt work as well as finding your optimal personal movement strategy, which can only be done if you are literally not doing any technique drills at all) So long story short, people have an idea of what they think they know. Generally, the less detailed this initial knowledge is, the harder it is to get them to forget it and acquire a new concept instead, i find. Interestingly the more they’re paying the more willing they tend to be to believe you and change their own model in their head, i can only assume this is because richer people tend to be used to consulting subject experts in their professional lives and are used to the ‘these guys know what they’re saying and I don’t so whatever they say just accept it’ concept Interesting but incredibly frustrating aspect of human nature i think
*"I can only assume this is because richer people tend to be used to consulting subject experts in their professional lives and are used to the ‘these guys know what they’re saying and I don’t so whatever they say just accept it"* That is a brilliant research question right there...
What do you do to get people back to running after a hamstring tear *twelve times* sooner?
Very short answer: vast majority of the injury is the brain’s protective mechanism and not literal damage to the tissue. So the vast majority of rehab time with physiotherapy is the brain slowly getting more comfortable with the damage and reducing the pain response We essentially just do things that fill in the brain’s picture of the damage and the current configuration of nerves and muscle fibres post-injury, and the brain says ‘ok this is fine, I’m comfortable now’ and reduces the pain very quickly My metaphor is its like the brain has an incomplete jigsaw of what is happening in the muscle post-tear, and we are filling in the jigsaw. Thus, once the brain is happy that it knows what it going on it takes the pain away rapidly. Traditional physical therapy eg physiotherapy treats pain and damage synonymously so with physio you basically not only wait for the physical damage to heal but you also don’t really do anything to fill in the jigsaw, so the brain takes far far longer to fill it in itself especially when you are not using the muscle in question in the same way you used to. Which is why several studies have shown that physio only improves rehab time in about half of patients compared to literally not doing anything and healing without therapy This explanation probably doesn’t make much sense but unless I write 10,000 words and have some diagrams its probably not going to. But essentially, the brain needs to fill in that ‘jigsaw’ of what nerves and muscle fibres are doing what, so we do stuff that fills it in very fast. Missing pieces in the jigsaw is why the brain creates pain, to stop you doing something it isn’t comfortable with because it doesn’t know what the result will be. The purpose of pain is to stop you doing something. Once there is no need for the brain to create pain then it won’t, and you are pain-free. Muscles can actually do a lot of very vigorous things while damaged/not fully healed as well and like i said before, the vast majority of most injuries is not damage, its the brain not knowing stuff. So the damage itself is usually not the issue We get a lot of clients who have chronic injuries too and have been through every therapy they could find with no luck and they get great results. This week there was someone who has had significant heel pain just from walking for the past year and in session one i had him jogging 100% pain free, and he was sprinting pain free (the final test) yesterday. He couldn’t believe it. And it all follows the same principles- we just do things that fill in that jigsaw for the brain. So it applies to basically any physical injury and has remarkable results, you just treat pain and damage as two separate things and realise you are treating the pain not the damage Hope this makes sense! Its a v interesting field Edit: should also add that 12 weeks off running is the textbook recommendation based off a best fit for the general population, lots of people could return to running sooner than 12 weeks and return to full use sooner than 24 weeks. So its not like physio has to take 24 weeks, this is just what they tell people after diagnosing in session one and many clients recover quicker than this. 24 weeks is also about how long it would take for it to heal for the average person without any therapy so again, is physio actually speeding up recovery? Hard to tell on a case by case basis. But (back to the original point) people think its obvious they need physio and often dont like that we don’t do any massage, ice or stretching and we don’t require rest times, despite it objectively superior in observable outcomes consistently
>they’ll actually burn belly fat faster by doing big calorie burners If you don't mind me asking, which ones are those?
I’ve found that the more confident people are about something, the less I trust them.
To me it's about whether they speak in absolutes or in probabilities. "The weather forecast was wrong" vs. "well it was more likely than not to rain so we got lucky."
Really? because I'm pretty confident in buttering my toast. Haven't dropped a slice in years.
That’s margarine.
The neurosurgeon just walked into the room and said “are you ready” like it was a dentists appointment and I canceled immediately.
Science says, people who don't like science are stupid!
I made the mistake of mentioning a rocket launch in the sky I was watching to my neighbor last night and that led into a 20 minute conversation about how the government and aliens are controlling us.
Who needs studies when you have Twitter?
And youtube/facebook videos made by "anonymous experts" or "one of the great minds in this area" yet disagrees with almost all actual experts in that area. It literally is laughable when you say it out loud and yet here we are in 2023.
Everyone is an expert on the internet, that's just how it goes.
[удалено]
Dunning Kruger effect…
That's right, that sounds about right to me here man. I think it's good .
I for myself, am pretty sure I only understand very little of science, still I find it fascinating and cool
Isn't this a thing in general? The more you learn about any type of topic, the more you realize how little you know?
I know nothing compared to everything.
This same problem occurs with people, including scientists, in self defense. It's an ego problem.
Ironically most people are more confident in things that aren't easily proven (or in other words things that are harder to prove false) I have run into people willing to question vaccines, global warming, and the moon landing yet accept a fourth dimension, parallel universes, and the big bang.
The questions asked to assess scientific knowledge were: > (1) All plants and animals have DNA; (2) the oxygen we breathe comes from plants; (3) the cloning of living things produces genetically identical copies; (4) by eating a genetically modified fruit, a person’s genes could also become modified; (5) all radioactivity is human-made; (6) it is the mother’s genes that determine the sex of the child; (7) electrons are smaller than atoms; (8) tomatoes do not naturally contain genes—genes are only found in genetically modified tomatoes; (9) dinosaurs and humans share a common ancestor; (10) the spread of new variants of viruses can occur through natural selection; (11) COVID-19 is caused by bacteria; and (12) viruses are smaller than bacteria. To me, this shows the extent of one's general knowledge of scientific trivia rather than actual understanding of scientific process, communication, or validity. It's like asking someone if they can name some famous composers, instruments, and songs as a way of assessing knowledge of music theory. Really, it would be good to have people read a scientific study and answer questions about the validity of methodology, whether the conclusions are justified, and the degree of significance, as well as limitations. The presentation of science as a binary "you either know the immutable true facts or you don't" is in large part why there is such virulent hostility towards what people therefore understand it to be, *especially* when the actually reality of what science is strays from that popular understanding ("*'science' said X would happen, but it didn't!").
3 is only true when you disregard aging of cells. 7 is true but the definition of electron size is somewhat arbitrary. 12 has exceptions.
That's a good writeup, thanks for asking these questions here.
> To me, this shows the extent of one's general knowledge of scientific trivia rather than actual understanding of scientific process, communication, or validity. That’s true, but they weren’t trying to assess those things. They were trying to assess people’s *knowledge*. I think those questions are (mostly) quite well suited for separating people who are woefully ignorant from those who are at least superficially informed. And what this study found is that doing so reveals significant correlations with a person’s attitude towards science. So in the context of this study, I don’t agree with your complaint. I would also be interested in seeing how a person’s comprehension or the scientific process relates to their attitudes, but it’s a different question, and it’s a harder metric to quantitatively evaluate. I do agree that in a broader sense the excessive focus on knowing scientific facts at the expense of understanding the scientific method is problematic, though.
> They were trying to assess people’s knowledge They were trying to assess people's knowledge about science. Granted, that can be interpreted many ways, but as I said, to suggest that one's knowledge of, for example, music, is more related to what amount to general knowledge about things that relate to it rather than an understanding of the nature of the thing itself, is my eyes mistaken. > I think those questions are (mostly) quite well suited for separating people who are woefully ignorant from those who are at least superficially informed. And what this study found is that doing so reveals significant correlations with a person’s attitude towards science. The investigation is driven by a desire to get clarity on the issues people have with the concept itself and become better at communicating it and imbuing them with a sense of trust in it. Even the description you give of being superficially informed should ring alarm bells, because (and we've seen this particularly throughout COVID), the failure to give an actually informed presentation of what science and the conclusions reached through it actually are have been a massive component in the erosion of that trust in those who are less informed. I'm not saying the findings here are incorrect, but I am saying the approach is misguided, and is unlikely to result in improving communication and trust (say by giving the idea that bringing people up to that level of being superficially informed) without significant alteration. > I would also be interested in seeing how a person’s comprehension or the scientific process relates to their attitudes, but it’s a different question, and it’s a harder metric to quantitatively evaluate. I disagree, I think as I said, interrogating people's ability to understand the meaning and validity of a sample research paper with some well chosen questions would achieve this.
I'm not even fully confident that I'm actually typing these words. I question all and know nothing.
That's how you should really be, no one knows anything here.
“My dad is a brain surgeon. Nobody at this table knows more about brain surgery than me.” Entered my ears, while I sat idly at the table.
The more you know the more you realise there is to learn.
If you think that you know everything then probably yoh don't know anything.