> the people charged with progressing science for our species learned it in a couple lectures a week over three years or less.
I beg to differ. Even for the undergrad level this feels naïve. There's much more learning going on outside the lecture and I'd wager that's where most of it is happening. For grad school this is definitely true. You learn the most when you stop taking classes and that period is generally associated with extremely unhealthy work life balances. I'm in my 5th year of grad school and I read probably a few papers in depth and a dozen or more at lighter levels every week. This is not including all the time I'm writing code, reading other people's implementations, or reading math books and blogs on the subjects. The people I know that research that have graduated also do a lot of similar things, just not at as high of a rate, and they have a healthier (but I'm not sure I'd call healthy) work life balance.
This inane kind of thinking only promotes the absurd armchair expertise we see where people think a few YouTube videos by communicators gives them sufficient knowledge to arrogantly argue with domain experts. I'll take pretentiousness over arrogance any day. The Internet is dominated with these armchair experts who group together in their bubbles and push out any who disagree with the "obvious" answers. They commonly criticize experts for not seeing something "obvious" which the experts actually accounted for but would require reading their actual publication rather than the telephone game that is science communicators.
No one is stopping you from getting domain expertise. No degree required. PhDs demonstrate self learning every day. But if you can't walk the walk then don't talk the talk. Shits a lot more complicated than you think. You're holding us back by trivializing things. It just encourages substaceless bickering between parties who are both severely misguided, instead of problem solving and working towards actual resolution.
Interesting divide. I prefer someone who is arrogant over someone who is pretentious because at least you know that while their arrogance may be ignorant and fatuous, at least it is sincere. You can fix arrogance with some sudden humility, but pretension defends itself to the death because it knows it is an impostor and it is fighting for its survival.
I have some sympathy for the beleaguered experts who respond to cranks, but if you are in the professing business, you don't always get to choose your audience. Who cares if someone criticizes an expert, criticism isn't science. Science means reproducible results or GTFO. The only question anyone needs to ask of their amateur interrogators is whether they are pursuing truth, or just acknowldegment and prestige. If it's the latter, you can just say, "go to school."
I beg to differ. Even for the undergrad level this feels naïve. There's much more learning going on outside the lecture and I'd wager that's where most of it is happening. For grad school this is definitely true. You learn the most when you stop taking classes and that period is generally associated with extremely unhealthy work life balances. I'm in my 5th year of grad school and I read probably a few papers in depth and a dozen or more at lighter levels every week. This is not including all the time I'm writing code, reading other people's implementations, or reading math books and blogs on the subjects. The people I know that research that have graduated also do a lot of similar things, just not at as high of a rate, and they have a healthier (but I'm not sure I'd call healthy) work life balance.
This inane kind of thinking only promotes the absurd armchair expertise we see where people think a few YouTube videos by communicators gives them sufficient knowledge to arrogantly argue with domain experts. I'll take pretentiousness over arrogance any day. The Internet is dominated with these armchair experts who group together in their bubbles and push out any who disagree with the "obvious" answers. They commonly criticize experts for not seeing something "obvious" which the experts actually accounted for but would require reading their actual publication rather than the telephone game that is science communicators.
No one is stopping you from getting domain expertise. No degree required. PhDs demonstrate self learning every day. But if you can't walk the walk then don't talk the talk. Shits a lot more complicated than you think. You're holding us back by trivializing things. It just encourages substaceless bickering between parties who are both severely misguided, instead of problem solving and working towards actual resolution.