this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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You're correct. Anyone can find out something new. But it's kind of like winning the lottery. You have to spot something that all the many professional researchers missed. Researchers who spent their entire life studying the subject. Also, you have to beat any of the 6 billion people on the planet from figuring it out.
So yes I agree it's possible, but it would be like winning the most challenging lottery ever. It's a very unlikely thing to occur.
A lot of people think they've done it too. So many experts have to debunk so many things. And it's really frustrating because some people who think they've discovered something lack the capability to understand why they actually haven't. How their Discovery is actually already been taken in to account in some other model. Or how their Discovery is just their brain being biased.
That's why this meme is really on point in my opinion. It's not that no Non-Expert can make a discovery. It's just the probability that they can is so infinitesimally small, and we've had so many false positives, that it's worth making a meme about.
I'm not saying non-experts should stop trying. Before you can become an expert researcher, you need to be a novice researcher. And while the chance is small, I still think it's worth trying to discover something anyway. If you're a novice, just keep in mind it may not be as straightforward as you think it is. Every failure is a growth opportunity.
That is exactly how most research works and has always worked. Most major discoveries were not the direct result of tackling a problem head on but in fact a side effect of unrelated tinkering or discovering new uses for older research gathering dust. No one has a monopoly on the unpredictable nature of it and I find the sneering, gate keeping attitudes (portrayed in op) nauseating.
Which time period Are we talking about? In the modern day way, way more discoveries are made by professionals than hobbyists. Not all of them get big flashy news stories. Some people work all of their lives to discover something that increases solar efficiency by 2%. The days of Newton and Einstein are gone and done with. We have thousands of researchers at the same or more intelligent as those guys. The problem is that we've discovered all the easy answers already. All that's left is the super hard ones. Again, it's not impossible that some random person stumbles upon it. But it is highly unlikely.
Your feelings are valid. It sucks to be in a world where you're probably not going to be a Newton or Einstein and modern academics and research is not without its problems.