AnIndefiniteArticle

Such as sata cables for quickly hot plugging hard drives you are testing/inspecting/cataloguing and don’t want to open the whole case between each drive, or leave the case open.

http://sds.staples.com/msds/24420590.pdf

Obligatory boomer song

Gotta keep going to the grocery store. Food doesn’t just grow on trees, you know? Not like it can just be out in the environment with us where we live and work.

Some community and state colleges can be pretty cheap, and most schools offer night classes for those who work all day. A gen-ed like geology is likely to have such hours available for this community of night students, especially if you live in an area where geology is related to employment. Usually pretty cheap to take one class at a time through something like an Adult and Continuing Education program.

I’m sorry, but even in scientific spaces, that’s pretty common for phase 1. That’s why the communication and refinement phase is so important. Biased humans produced biased results. The best way to mitigate is to test it against differently-biased humans. That’s why diversity of thought and ideas is so important in any scientific subfield.

Teaching the public to engage in phase 2 research means teaching the public to engage in constructive discussion and consensus building, as well as to challenge their own ideas and the ideas of people around them. I don’t think it will be easy, but I do believe that educating on phase 2 research is the ideal solution.

Ok, but there are three main phases of research.

Phase 1 is what you are describing as “do your own research”. You formulate a hypothesis and you collect references that together seem to support it.

That’s an important step! And it comes easily to most humans. But it’s important to keep going. However, it’s also important to understand why most people don’t. Phase 1 research is as far as we teach in high school. “Write a paper and cite your sources, find sources that support your argument.” We don’t teach our population to engage in any further steps of research.

Phase 2 is engaging in an open discussion about the topic with other people who have researched it. This can happen through literature/publication (publication of phase 1 research was originally the purpose of publishing a “letter” instead of a “paper”, but now letters are used for basically everything), a journal club, a research group, a conference… Share your idea and its justifications with the broader community, who study other aspects of that topic. They may have a perspective that contradicts your hypothesis (scenario A) or that develops it (scenario B).

Phase 3A is to come up with experimental tests between the various hypotheses from various perspectives encountered in 2, and publish a paper to share the result.

Phase 3B is to then test the corollary hypotheses encountered in 2, and publish a paper to share the result.

We shouldn’t discourage phase 1 research. It’s super important, and it’s a good idea to encourage our populace to practice and engage with it. However, the nuance is that we also need to be clear that a phase 1 result is not to be given the same level of trust as a phase 3 result. Again, I think the problem comes back to our public education system. We only ever encounter phase 1.

I think the problem is also a matter of accessibility. The internet has made performing phase 1 research accessible to all! This has flooded the body of ideas accepted by the public with phase 1 results that have not been properly tested. It’s how we were all taught in high school.

The problem is that people don’t understand that there is a next phase. That next phase is also extremely inaccessible to most people, compared to using the internet for phase 1 research. Phase 2 is the communication phase. Phase 2 is inaccessible to most people who aren’t researchers in the field. Most of the conversation between scientists in phase 2 is considered private, and needs to stay that way for the system to work. Most people don’t have access to these private networks of social interaction, and therefore have never engaged in a phase 2 research interaction. The topics being discussed are also very jargony and technical and full of complex concepts that are difficult to traverse for a novice, adding another accessibility barrier.

We need to start getting our population to practice all three phases of research, not just phase 1 which they got practice at in high school. We need to first teach phase 2, which is writing, presenting, discussing, and collaboratively refining ideas.