"the jackass researchers and the internet expert"

Where do you need a Masters to attain a PhD? Honest question, I just never heard of it before.

My wife attained her MD/PhD from the University of Chicago/Pritzker and does not have a Masters. She's on the MD/PhD committee for her university and they do not require anything other than a BS in the field of study.

With that said, it probably isn't much of a stretch to just get a Masters in the way to a PhD.

Me? I'm depriving some poor village of its idiot. I have a BS and that's it.

They are 5-6 in my neck of the woods. You can go straight to a PhD from a bachelor's though

I'm a microbiologist in the US, it's at least eight years for us.

Even as a Brit that'd be fast. Here you're funded for 3.5y with 6mo unfunded "writing up time".

True. Until 70+ million of them decide to vote in a fascist dictatorship.

All my literal this

https://xkcd.com/552/

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

Doesn't even take direct pressure from others. Getting published is one of the best ways to gain access to funds/resources, and just as with every other profession many will succumb to the temptation to take shortcuts or fudge the truth in the pursuit of money and/or prestige. I knew one woman who gave up on pursuing a career in cultural anthropology because she had come to believe that getting published was more of an exercise in creative writing than in actual science.

This, but to some degree, unironically. If studies aren't reproducible (or deemed worthy of reproduction) then there's definitely a disconnect between the folks handing out research assignments and the folks engineering applicable solutions to scientific problems.

That goes two ways. You could be a guy who successfully formulates a mathematical model to support the existence of Neutrinos and face a funding board that has no interest in building a LHC. That's arguably a problem of malinvestment within the scientific community. Or you could be a guy who successfully formulates a mathematical model for a new kind of mouse trap that's 10% less efficient than traditional mouse traps. That's more of a university research assignment problem. Or you could have a researcher who claims he's the only one who can do a particular thing, because he's got the magic touch. If the research is unfalsifiable by design, that's an entirely new kind of problem.

Don't think it's exactly Dunning Kruger. We all think about the curve of gathered knowledge and perceived knowledge.

But they didn't even start to gather knowledge, they just respond with something that sounds truthful and fits their world view in order to feel better without doing anything.

But hey maybe that's just my Dunning Kruger talking.

Yup. They forgot that sometimes what's actually happening in that one line is-

• Go to School for a Bachelor's Degree
• Get 10 years working experience in specific field
• Watch researcher whose never stepped outside of a lab make assertion counter to real life.
• Call Shenanigans
• Watch the findings go nowhere

Are you the token boomer, or a toking boomer?

I saw a clip on how kids out of uni don't believe anything not peer reviewed; even intuitive observations in nature that otherwise undocumented or site specific observations that went against the grain.

Science is a way of thinking and observing, rather than papers, but papers are a good way to refine your thinking