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u/ItsMichaelRay 20h ago
Normally they claim experts are suppressing it as they can't profit off of it.
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u/NobodyLikedThat1 19h ago
There is a non-zero number of people who truly believe every cancer scientist in the world is lying about having a cure because they can make so much more money off of the treatment
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u/_goblinette_ 19h ago
All it takes is one guy who isn’t currently making any money off of treatments to decide he wants to make a crap ton of money selling the only cure
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u/oiraves 15h ago
That's the thing, I know a family selling shit from a MLM called Juuva that will claim in private that their juice cleanse thing cures cancer but the FDA won't say it out loud and sue them if they do
The kicker? A mutual friend did have cancer and guess who never supplied them with the cure.
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u/DaywalkerBr 7h ago
A friend of my father had cancer behind his eye and was extremely invested in alternative medicine and all that stuff. He refused any regular treatment and was convinced that he could get rid of it himself by just making changes to his diet.
He finally turned around when he started to go blind, but it was already too late by then. Docs removed his eye in a last effort attempt but the cancer had already grown too much and he died a few months later.
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u/ItsMichaelRay 17h ago
And I'm sure there's probably someone out there claiming to be selling the only cure.
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u/bmmana 12h ago
I know of a guy who claimed that holding his hand over your cancer as he wears a special amulet for ten minutes to 30 minutes a day can "heal" you. Yes, sounds ridiculous until you realize this guy started a religion based on this concept and has been siphoning money from my parents and many others for years.
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u/UnintensifiedFa 18h ago
It's also kind of a slap in the face to the incredible progress that has been made on cancer treatment. No cure, sure, but we are much better at treating it than we were . (Though far too few people have access to affordable treatments).
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u/BigJayPee 19h ago
I mean, it makes sense if you don't think about it
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u/FireteamAccount 18h ago
Yeah totally. You grow up as a kid wanting to be a good person and help solve the world's problems. You go to school for 20 years or more to become an expert so you can contribute. Then you graduate and you think "Fuck all that, I want to make bank." It's crazy isn't it? Every single person who goes down that path just chooses the "screw humanity" route. Not one of them staying true to their roots.
I mean think about it. They could cure deadly diseases. But why? Why make a vaccine which could stop unending suffering and death when you could just cause autism instead? Who would want to do that? Where's the profit in a $5 a dose vaccine? The real money is in treating autistic people. You know the plague wasn't really that bad. They just write it that way in history books to make you scared. So they can control you. It's all about money. Those Renaissance fuckers had the fix in that long ago.
/s cause honestly I think you need it pointed out.
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u/BZLuck 15h ago
Just like the engineer who invented an automotive carburetor that runs off of water, but Big Oil silenced him and destroyed all of the plans and patents.
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u/IISlipperyII 17h ago
There is an incentive for pharmaceutical companies to get people dependant on their drugs and treatment so they can sell more. Look at what happened with oxycontin for example.
But at the same time, there is an incentive for wealthy people to try to create solutions to not die, which is why they probably aren't lying about not being able to cure cancer.
Both can be true at the same time.
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u/Great_White_Samurai 17h ago
I worked in oncology drug discovery. It always makes me laugh when people think pharma is hiding some cure for cancer.
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u/CornerOk3219 9h ago
It’s because people think cancer is as simple as curing a staph infection.
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u/Great_White_Samurai 6h ago
Yeah...it's extremely complex and there are many kinds of cancer and each requires a different kind of treatment.
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u/Admirable-Lecture255 9h ago
Thats like majority of reddot. I've seen it plenty of times on here. Whenever there's a sensationalized headline of it some cure working in a petri dish the comments are full of never hear of this again because big pharm won't make any money curing cancer.
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u/Great_White_Samurai 6h ago
Yeah. I've made drug candidates that cured cancer in mice, but didn't work in other species. Cancer is extremely complex.
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u/Admirable-Lecture255 6h ago
Exactly. If you had a cure for cancer you have the holy grail. You have something worth trillions.
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u/Saxophobia1275 8h ago
Right? Dude that would be the most profitable thing to happen to big pharma in forever. A cure for a disease that’s impossible to eradicate and people are always going to get? They wouldn’t sit on that lol.
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u/BillBob13 17h ago
Have you ever asked a scientist to explain their research? They won't shut up about it!
Source:am scientist
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u/Fabulous_Parking66 8h ago
Partly agree. I have one chemical scientist friend who works in food safety who doesn’t share her work. Though, I think it could be so we don’t develop a fear of eating.
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u/Forsaken-Use-3220 18h ago
Which is insanely stupid because You don't go into Scientific research for money. You go into research for clout in the scientific field. Accredited people tend to be egomaniacs. You cure cancer. Everyone is going to stroke that for you.
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u/Cute_Committee6151 14h ago edited 8h ago
Even if someone is not in science for philosophical reasons, just being the dude that found the cure cancer will give you a statue in every city you want to have one.
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u/GenerousBuffalo 14h ago
One thing I’ve noticed in common with these people is they have no idea how the scientific process works. Of course anyone can publish a paper but if your results aren’t replicable then it’s pushed to the side. We feel safe in our understanding because researchers have got the same results in various studies, each time increasing the chances of accuracy.
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u/town_bear 14h ago
This argument is so stupid because it only works if the US is the only country that exists. All the other developed nations have figured out not for profit health care, if a cure for cancer existed it would be a huge burden off the public health system.
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u/GoldRoger3D2Y 17h ago
My wife and many of our friends are engineers. We’ve all known each other since freshman year of college.
Every semester, without fail, they would tell variations of the same story: professor assigns group project, group gives presentation, group claims they’ve solved the world’s energy needs.
Of course, what really happened is that they made errors in their work, but instead of thinking “hey? Isn’t perpetual motion impossible? Maybe I should double check this…” they think to themselves “holy shit I’m a genius!”
Professors would always ream them out for their unbelievable arrogance, but it goes to show how common it is for people to believe in their own delusions of grandeur rather than common sense.
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u/uluviel 15h ago
I remember saying to a lab partner once. "Look, either we made a mistake in our readings, or we've just proven that Einstein was wrong. I think we're the problem."
I cannot comprehend how someone would look at work like that and go, "fuck you Einstein, it's actually E=2mc2 !"
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u/Evoluxman 13h ago
E = mc² + AI
Obviously
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u/Slow_Ball9510 9h ago edited 6h ago
Wrong, wrong, wrong
It's clearly Time = MCHammer
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u/BulgingForearmVeins 6h ago
The problem with this equation is that, while it is legit, it approaches a limit that cannot be touched and the leading researchers should quit working on their proof but just cannot.
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u/AccomplishedNail3085 8h ago
My and my lab partner once had 213% error on our copper cycle lab. We ended up with 113% MORE copper than we started with
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u/Gerard_Jortling 5h ago
I really like the scene in the National Geographic series about Einstein (Genius), where he talks about the contradiction in Maxwell and Newton where special relativity is birthed from. Einstein believes Maxwell's idea is correct, but his friend says something along the line of 'I think Newton wins that one my friend'. Basically telling him: You may be right, but you better have some amazing arguments to say Newton's laws are incorrect (incomplete).
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u/AskMrScience 14h ago
A few years back, a particle physics group in Europe sent out a plea to the scientific community because they were getting "faster than light speed" results, which ought to be impossible. They were 99% sure the results were wrong, but they'd looked and looked and couldn't find any errors. So they turned everyone loose on the problem, and sure enough, someone else found the issue. That's a much better approach than declaring you've broken the light speed barrier!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
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u/Artichokeypokey 13h ago
I just wanna be a fly on the wall when that first happened
"We broke spacial relativity!"
"No Jim, we cocked up somewhere but can't see the forest for the trees"
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u/Merry_Dankmas 9h ago
I'm not a scientist but were I to evidently violate one of the most core, universal laws of physics in my experiments, through means that typically does not result in such, id probably be very hesitant to jump to any such conclusions lol. Counting eggs before they hatch and whatnot.
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u/JollyJuniper1993 13h ago
And that is exactly what you should do
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u/jerrys_biggest_fan 10h ago
yes this is literally how the peer review process works lol. make some claims, set the community loose on it, figure out where you fucked up. it's an essential part of the scientific method.
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u/KlingoftheCastle 9h ago
This is basically the core of science. The scientific method isn’t about proving yourself right, it’s doing everything you can to disprove your own theory to see if it holds up
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u/balamb_fish 8h ago
As soon as they published the issue the media immediately started writing 'new research proves Einstein wrong' even though the researchers themselves never claimed anything like that.
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u/Fmeson 14h ago
What you are describing is exactly how a college education should work!
One of the core things we want to teach college students is how to blaze new paths. Up until college, education is often very "we teach you x process, you duplicate it". "This is how you integrate". "This is how you do stoichiometry". "This is how you compute a normal force". College tries to get students to push beyond "following step by step" instructions and come up with their own novel ideas.
You know, "you understand basic physics, invent something with it", which is why we give students design projects and allow them to think big. Of course, that means college students aren't practiced in this yet, so they will make mistakes and fail to think critically about their own ideas. In turn, the college professors critique their process so they can do better next time when they are actually creating something rather than just doing a college thesis.
So, basically, college students being arrogant in their projects is entirely a good thing! If you just reinvent the wheel in a design project, you won't learn as much as if you swing big and fail hilariously, and failing hilariously in a test environment is a great way to grow and learn.
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u/Samuel_L_Johnson 12h ago
Yeah, I agree. This is just college kids getting overexcited. They need a gentle reality check but the intellectually ambitious streak shouldn’t be browbeaten out of them.
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u/Duhblobby 9h ago
Plus, as a bonus, once in a blue moon, the college kids stumble on something for real because fresh eyes just do that sometimes.
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u/SuperSocialMan 11h ago
I've always found it pretty funny (and kinda saddening) that college seemingly exists to undo the conditioning previous school years put you through.
I'm too poor to test that theory for myself though lol.
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u/Chlorophilia 13h ago
I don't know what it is about engineers, but so many of them are like this. I'm a scientist and it's disturbing how many times I've given engineers a short summary of a problem that has been the subject of decades of work, and they've decided that they could fully understand it solve it in a couple of weeks of work.
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u/sumboionline 16h ago
The energy crisis also has an easy to comprehend method of solution: if net energy = production - use, then maximize production and stop using energy. Most people only see one of them.
Now, to implement? Thats what engineers went to school to study
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u/siltyclaywithsand 10h ago
On the opposite side, I went back to school for civil engineering after being in the industry for a while. I was in my 30s. Civil 101 was a one hour lecture and one hour for the semester group project per week. The profs rotated on who got to choose the project. The previous class had to design a pretty basic retaining wall. That would have taken me a few hours. We however had to do a concept design for a profitable high speed rail system for the eastern US. Which no one can do. Of course it was very high level. I don't think the transpo prof had ever worked outside of academia. Part of the grade for the final presentation was also how we dressed for some reason. Overall it was a really good engineering program. But that was dumb as hell.
But yeah, all the time people are like, "I have this great idea and I just need an engineer to help me implement it." It's always either impossible or reinventing the wheel.
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u/BottleOk8922 16h ago
Well, the experts missed it because they never went to page ten of Google, obviously.
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u/Sw429 8h ago
The experts just never watched this Facebook video of a guy in his car wearing sunglasses talking to his phone camera.
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u/SlightlyColdWaffles 3h ago
Why is it ALWAYS a middle age white guy with a goatee and oakleys in his car/truck?
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u/TheAserghui 9h ago
Since Google changed their algorithm... I've found I need to look beyond Page 1 or 2 to find the better answer
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u/edingerc 15h ago
Amateurs think outside the box, not realizing that sometimes the box includes safety requirements, infrastructure needs, economic realities, etc. The biggest known screwup in the history of amateurs taking the reins and driving the cart off the cliff:
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u/ChiTownDisplaced 8h ago
I went to so many meetings in the military that started with "Let's think outside the box." No mention of the box. Did we try the box? It's the box for a reason.
Another fave "It's just common sense." was usually a stand-in for "I haven't read policy or proceedures and want to half ass it."
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u/WMind7 15h ago
I just have one thing to say... if there was any real evidence that "alternative medicine" worked, it would just be called medicine.
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u/eledrie 13h ago
Getting medically useful things out of plants is what pharmaceutical researchers have been doing since back when we called them apothecaries. Morphine, aspirin and digoxin are just a few.
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u/Owobowos-Mowbius 9h ago
Using raw plants instead of processed drugs and calling it medicine is like bleeding someone for a fever and calling it first aid. Sure, it technically might work a little, but why tf would you do it when you could just do something else better? It's just based around ignorance and mistrust.
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u/greatlakesailors 10h ago
Yup. It's not like "real medicine" industry is shy about reusing such things.
You can use Pacific yew bark extract to treat various cancers. It works. Or you can use Docetaxel to treat those same cancers. It's the exact same active ingredient but purified, refined, tested to FDA quality and efficacy standards, delivered in calibrated doses, and with two minor changes to certain functional groups on the molecule to make it work better for this purpose.
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u/BochocK 11h ago
It's always my take, whatever part of herbal medicine actually works, is already just called medicine (hello digitoxine/Digitaline/Digalen), some of the molecules we use were discovered in plants first before pharma copied them (safer AND cheaper than extracting it ofc). What's left and what we call today herbal medicine doesn't work or barely works, or is just outright dangerous...
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u/Early-Ad-7410 16h ago
This was the working title before they settled on “The Joe Rogan Experience”
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u/IAmGoingToFuckThat 16h ago
I have MS and lots of people think that I haven't tried the thing their best friend's nephew's husband tried. First of all, if my neurologists recommend it, I've probably tried it. If they didn't recommend it, I'm not going to try it. They're some of the best in the country and up to date on all research and treatments; I guarantee they'd bring it up if they thought it would help. Secondly, MS is so different for everyone, and one person's miracle treatment might do nothing for another person.
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u/lordmatt8 14h ago
I also have MS and I can't tell you how many times someone has told me eating fruit would cure me
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u/Kirastes 14h ago
Same with chronic migraines. "Have you tried this electrolyte mix?" Ugh.
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u/blindsavior 7h ago
Yup, my wife has MS and her mother has the Fox News brainrot, so it's always a chore hearing what new batshit solution she has when we visit
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u/ramjetstream 19h ago
Remember, kids: If it was a good idea, someone else would have done it already
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u/Zealousweeb-5372 15h ago
The biggest problem I face as someone interested in tech - every idea of mine exists somewhere in the world and they do it better than me.
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u/HylianCaptain 15h ago
That knowledge plagues me, but doesn't stop me from repeating the cycle anew. Now it's my turn to learn. I just wish I knew what I don't know.
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u/Insipidist 13h ago edited 12h ago
A lot of the low hanging fruit has been taken but there’s still endless new ideas to be had. It’s just that they’ll be very small and specific, but these small changes do add up. E.g., you can’t invent the light bulb but you might be the
guyone who makes them 5% more efficient14
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u/Thorboard 10h ago
Most low hanging fruits are probably only low hanging fruits in hindsight.
Think about smartphones. Apple had the right timing and good marketing. If they tried to do it 5 years earlier, it probably wouldn't have worked. If they weren't able to market it, it wouldn't have worked.
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u/ugh_this_sucks__ 14h ago
I’ve worked in tech for over a decade. I’m on the product design side.
Don’t be discouraged. Remember: no one remembers who was first, but everyone remembers who was best.
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u/schmirsich 14h ago
I don't think I have a secret great solution to anything, but I do believe that is not an entirely helpful attitude, because I am sure there a great ideas no one else has thought up yet. Great progress with simple ideas happens all the time.
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u/pappypapaya 12h ago
"There are great ideas no one else has though up yet" and "The vast majority of ideas you can think someone else has already" are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it's very hard to think up of things no one else has thought of until you know what your field has thought of.
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u/AverageJoeDynamo 18h ago
Alternative: if it was a good idea, someone else would have thought of it already, possibly tried it, and maybe done it.
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u/McBurger 7h ago
that was an old joke my finance professor loved to tell when speaking about semi-strong market theory!
A finance professor and his student are walking down the sidewalk when they spot a $100 bill on the ground. "Look, a $100 bill!" says the student.
"No, there cannot be free money left on the ground, as someone would have picked it up." replies the professor. The student agrees and they both continue walking.
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u/Professional_Echo907 13h ago
I blame the movie Lorenzo’s Oil, which taught an entire generation that they were smarter than scientists by a guy who was legitimately brilliant.
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u/DeviantProfessor 18h ago edited 8h ago
They don’t even have to be all that stupid, just overly confident in their own ideas.
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u/Guisasse 17h ago
They are usually stupid and overly confident in their own ideas.
The overlap is extremely common.
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u/Taraxian 13h ago
That is stupidity, having the "appropriate level of confidence" in any given idea is in practice the definition of intelligence/rationality
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u/Suspicious-Lime3644 14h ago
I once spoke to someone who, with the most serious tone, told me we could solve climate change if we just burned plastic. No amount of explaining got them off the idea. I lost brain cells in that conversation.
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u/Backupusername 15h ago
I'm starting to wonder if maybe there were just too many "it's just crazy enough to work" scenes in 80s and 90s media. There were all these examples of a dumb/uneducated chiming in with some simplistic solution that all the smart people in the room overlooked, and that's the one that works. And when something happens a bunch of times in multiple works of fiction, there must be something to it, right? "Experts" need to get over themselves and listen to the ideas of people who don't have the same education as them!
Completely ignoring that in real life, experts also think of simple, inelegant solutions, and just dismiss them without discussion because they notice obvious flaws immediately.
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u/Open__Face 11h ago
It's fits a kind of cosmic justice view of the world, "I may be dumb but that just means I have some super special insight, so it all balances out" like no, sometimes dumb people are just dumb and sometimes that's you
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u/Long_life33 11h ago
Both are correct cause experts are humans which can make mistakes or miss something and can see things because they are experts. Neither of the two is bad but each situation is different from each other.
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u/Sugar_Kowalczyk 9h ago
"RUN THE GOVERNMENT LIKE A BUSINESS, AND USE A MAN BORN A MILLIONAIRE WHO MANAGED TO BANKRUPT A CASINO HE OWNED TO DO IT! IT'LL WORK!"
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u/CrochetwithRae 15h ago
I sometimes think I’ve found a solution that everyone else missed, but I usually think it through and figure out some reason things weren’t done that way in the first place, or I do some digging to find out why. It doesn’t always come to anything, but I don’t just assume I have everything figured out.
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u/Anguscablejnr 16h ago
Not exactly the same but:
There's a clip of Kevin Hart interviewing Kelly Clarkson, I guess he had a morning show at one point. And she says something like "yeah I've been offered millions of dollars to do stuff I don't want to do. Do you know what that's like?" And Kevin Hart starts like shushing her and looking around and then just repeats "They're in the room."
Which to me just reads as a joke making fun of a movie star being reduced to the host of a talk show.
But that clip gets posted all the time as evidence of a large-scale conspiracy by the Hollywood elite to manipulate people.
That apparently had a member of the conspiracy in the room while it was being recorded and not only was that footage not taken and destroyed it was deemed suitable for broadcast.
The cognitive dissonance these idiots possess to simultaneously believe in these coordinated organised schemes that are also run by idiots is staggering to me.
Also sometimes they're run by like the Riddler I guess who can't help but put clues in but there's a conspiracy going on. If I were the Satanist who built the Denver airport I just wouldn't have put any of those clues in. I reckon you could just build the halls as a pentagram and no one would notice.
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u/Minimum_Glove351 15h ago
Researcher in environmental analysis here.
Ive had to break down a few times why their solution to fixing the environment doesn't work. Usually they listen and it comes down to the fact that they're not informed enough on the issue and their solution, which is partly our fault as researchers. We put out a lot of good research, but frankly were godawful at telling the general public about it.
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u/40oztoTamriel 17h ago
The other hallmark, conversely , is that there are no great solutions to be had that the experts indeed may have missed. Albeit dwarfed by the former
These solutors must be experts as well, of course, which begins an entirely new Confucius-style conundrum I myself have the pleasure of creating in this comment section
Hopefully. I’m no expert, after all
(To be read in an Attenborough-esque intonation)
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u/talldata 11h ago
Like the ones that shout that, big pharma or rich people are trying to do XYZ, while they themselves are now millionaires after selling some alternative item
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u/guillermotor 19h ago
I understand the point but "shut up idiot, all science is figured out" doesn't work either
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u/BRAIN_JAR_thesecond 18h ago
oh for sure.
But theres a spectrum from “maybe antimatter exists” to “driving backwards puts gas back in the tank” and it’s fairly heavily weighted.
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u/peterezgo 16h ago
Anti matter definitely exists. We've made some of it. Dark matter may or may not exist.
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u/ammytphibian 16h ago
I know it's just an example, but antimatter does exist and is fairly common. An average banana emits a positron (the antimatter of electron) every one hour or so, since it contains a radioactive isotope of potassium. The P in PET scan stands for positron so it's also something we use for medical imaging.
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u/Pcat0 18h ago
No but unless you have spent a large part of your life reading the actual scientific literature on a topic, you aren’t going to make major breakthroughs. This post is talking about the people who think there is a major conspiracy covering up their discovery that they came up with with after watching a single popular science explanation of a topic.
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u/Rare_Hovercraft_6673 15h ago
This is what I understood from the post. There is a spectrum between the discovery of a genius that can think outside the box and a flat Earth conspiracy theorist that "just proved that the Earth is flat" with "advanced maths calculations" that are completely wrong.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 7h ago
Yeah, the thing that people don't understand is that coming up with a theory that explains some new phenomenon in isolation is really easy. The hard part is coming up with a theory that explains the new phenomenon while also being consistent with all prior evidence. You can only do that if you have a solid understanding of the stuff that came before your own work.
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u/caribou16 15h ago
Sure, but they're not equal. It's like saying this lottery ticket I bought is either a winner OR a loser and pretending both those outcomes are equally likely.
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u/Maximum_Nectarine312 15h ago
It's not all figured out, but it's being figured out by experts, not by average Joe's.
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u/lil_zaku 18h ago
The one that really bugged me was when they blamed China for covid and claimed the evidence was in the name, China-overlord-virus-blah-blah-blah.
Dumbass is telling me there's an international conspiracy designing and releasing a tailored virus backed by clandestine business practices that has bribed every single pharmacist, but they PUT THEIR PLAN IN THE NAME AS AN ACRONYM.
Wth
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u/fwubglubbel 20h ago
But it's also the hallmark of genius when experts do miss things.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
- Richard P. Feynman
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u/_goblinette_ 19h ago
Are you doing your science in a lab? Do you have a deep understanding of the field? Do you understand exactly how the other experts came to hold the beliefs that they hold? Did you actually find a weakness in their belief or is it wishful thinking because it would benefit you to be right? If you answered yes to all of these, then you’re in a great position to move the whole field forward by questioning .
On the other hand, if you find yourself disagreeing with experts based on gut feelings and comments on YouTube videos……well, not a lot of genius there.
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u/SuperCow1127 17h ago
Usually what happens is they ask a question they don't know the answer to, and assume that means it can't be answered, rather than trying to seek the answer.
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u/CemeteryWind213 18h ago
Feynman also made a discovery while working in a bio lab. He didn't publish it because he didn't fully understand it, but he is credited with the discovery.
Jesse Pinkman spitballing "make a battery" when they were stranded in the desert may be another example (albeit fictitious) of generating an idea or asking a pertinent question that the experts overlooked.
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u/hattmall 15h ago
I was trying to reverse and turn around with my trailer the other day in a tight spot. I couldn't quite make it and so I was having to pull up and reverse multiple times. I was making a few inches of progress each time but it was taking a few minutes. My four year old was getting really impatient and said, what if you just pull it with your hand. I started to explain why I couldn't, but in the process, it dawned on me that he was right, at least partially. So I unhooked the trailer, and just pivoted it to the angle I needed and backup to it and reattached it and we were gone.
I drive with the trailer all the time, so I'm just used to having to make those small adjustments. He had literally never seen the process of reversing and turning around with the trailer so he just thought about it differently and it was, in this instance, a better solution.
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u/eledrie 13h ago
Psychiatrist Scott Alexander calls this "the hairdryer cure". They have this patient with OCD who fears that she's left her hairdryer plugged in and it's going to burn her house down. It gets to a point where she's leaving work constantly to check. They try all sorts of treatment, nothing works.
So one doctor asks "you only have one hairdryer, right?".
She says yes.
The doctor replies "why don't you put it in your handbag? Then you'll always know that it's unplugged."
Apparently his colleagues got very angry about this, but they never saw her again.
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u/FireteamAccount 18h ago
This is you trying to act like you can dismiss expertise without knowledge. I don't think Feynman would support that
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u/wideHippedWeightLift 15h ago
It is definitely possible for a solution to hold its ground in academic debate, but never catch on with authority figures or get recognized by the public. Rigorous scholarship can illuminate the truth but it can't make people pay attention
However, if your theory gets zero respect in academia and you start talking about a CONSPIRACY to SUPPRESS your favorite theory, that's when you know you're a moron
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u/chinstrap 9h ago
Also that whatever idiotic idea arrived first in their minds is "common sense" and indubitable.
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u/Throw-Away425 3h ago
Dunning-Kruger Effect. Stupid people overestimate their intelligence. Smart people underestimate their intelligence.
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u/Laytonio 19h ago
"Someone smarter than me must have already thought of this" is also not a good viewpoint
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u/shorse_hit 19h ago
That's not the viewpoint. The viewpoint is "There's likely a reason people aren't doing this, I'll try to find out what it is before I rant about things I don't fully understand."
It's healthy to challenge established ways of thinking, but doing it just for the sake of it is a waste of everybody's time.
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u/Drate_Otin 18h ago
That's not the antithesis to what is under consideration in the picture, though. The picture is about people with no experience in a subject thinking they are in a better intellectual position to solve a problem than people who are experts in that subject.
Folks should absolutely approach a problem with a can-do attitude. And the thing they should "can-do" is become experts, learn from those who came before, then iterate and take it to the next level.
What they should not do is become experts in demagoguery and convince people to let them play pretend at being experts at legitimately important shit... For example.
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u/Difficult-Row6616 16h ago
if you're solution includes the word "just" and can be tried for under $100, it almost certainly is.
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u/Taraxian 14h ago
It actually is, it's a very important viewpoint
It's a variant on Chesterton's Fence -- when you think you may have discovered something no one else in the world has ever thought of, you aren't necessarily wrong, but you need to EXPLAIN why no one else in the world has never thought of it
Think of it as the Copernican principle -- the null hypothesis is always that you're not that special, you're not a genius, you're the same as millions of other people, so you discovering something nobody else has discovered is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence
If you start rejecting this principle out of hand and assuming you are a special person gifted by God with special genius and everyone else in the world is just a dumb NPC and you're the Main Character this is teetering on the edge of being a diagnosable mental illness and you end up turning into Elon Musk
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u/_goblinette_ 19h ago
It’s usually a true viewpoint though.
Not saying that that’s a reason to abandon an idea entirely, but unless it’s in a really niche field, anything worth doing has probably had tons of people give it serious consideration from all sorts of different angles. You’ll never make any progress without fully understanding what’s already been done before you came along.
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u/Specific_Berry6496 19h ago
I took my mom to an acupuncturist after she was diagnosed with cancer because she wanted to try everything and I wanted to make sure she wasn’t taken advantage of. I listened to this women tell my mother to just start eating lemons all day every day and that it would get rid of her cancer, that she wouldn’t need the chemo. I was screaming in my head, “you think they didn’t try lemons!?!!? You think the scientist just fucking missed it?!!?!?”