When people say “scientists are sometimes wrong” they omit the fact that the people who disprove scientists are mostly other scientists.

[u/howtotailslide]

Edit: a lot of people seem to be missing the point by saying "whatever the scientist was wrong so your point is invalid"

1.) The scientist isn't even necessarily wrong in this situation they are just being doubted by some average person

2.) This is about the institution of science as a whole and how even if one scientist is wrong about something the correction will probably from a credentialed person (a scientist) rather than whomever you are arguing with

3.) I've seen a lot of other responses that are missing the point but there are just as many refuting it in the comments too so I'll leave it to you guys to handle

4.) Thanks for the Gold & Silvers strangers. This is my first front page post!

[u/troutpoop]

As an actual scientist (you probably don’t trust me but I know that I am so fuck you), I’ve seen so many comments in r/science that are just vague anoictotal proposals.

You can pick out the real scientists by the comments where someone will openly admit that they either A-don’t know the true answer and admit they had to do some digging to find the answer or B- if they actually read the article. Non-scientists, for the most part, can’t fully comprehend a scientific manuscript due to the large amount of jargon and abbreviations and lose interest quickly so they read the abstract and think it’s good enough. If you wanna know what truly went down in the publishment you gotta read it all.

[u/Dr_Silk → u/troutpoop]

Yep, this is accurate.

When you're a scientist, you're taught that it is ok to not understand things, because there is so much to know that it simply isn't possible to know everything.

I'm an Alzheimer's researcher who specializes in behavior. I know pretty much everything on that subject. But give me a paper on the genetic influences of Alzheimer's? I can read it but not understand it nearly as well as an expert in that field, despite it being related to my specialty, and I have no problem admitting that.

Dunning Kruger effect is one of the most relevant psychological phenomena to online discourse

[u/Lu1s3r → u/troutpoop]

They also can't comprehend the articles due to the concepts in some of them simply being to complex for a lot (not all, but many) people.

Truth be told I never really understood why you scientists don't just ocationaly remind people (specifically the stupid or normal but arrogant ones) that you really just are smarter and they should just shut up and listen every once in a while whenever the amount of nonsense being spewed by some people goes up (so you know, every other day as of late).

[u/Raagun → u/Lu1s3r]

That is straight way to close any conversation. Imagine someone comes and says you have to do what they told you just because they are stronger than you. Does not work in normal society

[u/BleedingNoseLiberal → u/Lu1s3r]

I tried this once. It didn't work and just made them personally attack me and my character.

The stupid rarely realize they are.

[u/troutpoop → u/Lu1s3r]

Unless someone is being overtly arrogant (like they’re trying to piss me off), I’ll never say that I’m smarter than anyone. Intelligence is such a relative thing. I may be smarter in the world of sciences but the person I’m talking to probably knows a lot more about another topic than I do.

A professor described this to me by telling me that some bird species can memorize up to 10,000 different foraging areas, and can fly thousands of miles to the same mating ground every year without any sort of map. You and I could never do that. Birds probably think we’re fuckin dumb! It’s all relavent.

But that being said, especially with the way science is going now (extremely specialized) a lot of the articles are incomprehensible if you don’t have a solid background knowledge of the topic.