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“Not 30% Chance Of It Raining”: Simple Concepts Unknown To People Outside These Fields Of Study
When you study or work in a certain field, everything about it starts becoming clearer and clearer each day, until it becomes somewhat obvious. (A popular theory says it takes roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.) However, for those who have nothing to do with it, even the simplest of concepts might seem all Greek.
Redditor ‘StaleTheBread’ recently started a discussion about it, when they asked fellow netizens what are some simple concepts from their field of study that an average person doesn’t seem to understand. The question was answered by people from all sorts of backgrounds, who covered everything from communication to meteorology; so if you’re interested in learning more about different fields of study, scroll down to find more of their answers on the list below.
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#1
Vaccines don’t cause autism.
Vaccines don’t put a protective bubble around you guaranteeing you will never fall ill again.
Vaccines don’t contain microchips and nanobots.
Vaccines DO lessen the severity of infectious disease and shorten the length of illness.
Vaccines prime your immune system to fight the disease using its natural functions.
Vaccines require over 95% coverage in the population to protect vulnerable people who can’t be vaccinated.
Vaccines save lives.
Get your flu shot.
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#2
Most of what we call mental disorders in the DSM 5 would disappear from the adult population if we somehow magically eliminated early childhood trauma, neglect, and abuse
#3
Freedom of speech only protects you from government, not private, action and is always subject to “time, place and manner” restrictions. It also doesn’t protect you from the social or economic consequences of saying mean, crazy or racist s**t.
#4
Communication isn't what you're saying. It's what the other person is understanding.
#5
Anthrozoology MSc. We need to be kinder to animals.
Tabitha 10 months ago (edited)
The majority of us truly try to do exactly that. It’s the minority of callous, cold, and cruel m***********s who need to be taken out back and beaten black and blue who are the perpetrators of animal abuse. I’m usually a pretty laid back, live and let live person, but cruelty to the smaller and weaker just makes me see red and want to exact eye for an eye type revenge on people like that. Everyone has their trigger for anger and desire to exact Old Testament style biblical revenge (and I’m not even religious), and cruelty is mine.
#6
Correlation is not causation.
Just because 2 things change together doesn't mean one causes the other. For example ice creams sales and drowning deaths are correlated. It could mean possibly 1) eating ice cream cause people to drown 2) when people drown the survivors eat ice cream to make themselves feel better 3) both happen more often in the summer time 4+)...other possibilities.
This is used ALL the time when trying to push anti-science agendas.
Red PANda (she/they) 10 months ago
I always see police cars near car accidents, so police cars must cause car accidents! 🤪
#7
Yelling back at someone who is already agitated (crying, shaking, screaming) will not deescalate them. (My expertise is crisis)
#8
Humans didn't evolve from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are our nearest living relative species. Humans and chimpanzees both evolved from the same ancient species, which no longer exists in that form but does still exist in the form of humans and chimpanzees. The fact that chimpanzees still exist does not disprove that humans evolved from other apes.
David Paterson 10 months ago
Humans and chimpanzees both evolved from Sahelanthropus tchadensis in Africa.
#9
There is no such thing as not having an accent. Every human who speaks has an accent. And there is no such thing as a “neutral accent”.
PeepPeep the duck 10 months ago
Travelling all over Australia, we all have different accents and Melbourne people can pick my qld accent so quick 😂
#10
Many people use drugs due to trauma. The culture surrounding drugs perpetuates the trauma. Even if someone did not start out using drugs due to trauma, they most often will acquire it due to the nature of drug use, the circumstances surrounding it, and how people who use drugs are often targets of violence, especially youth and women.
This is not to excuse behavior or actions, this is just a gentle reminder that your sister/brother/cousin whatever who says they were "hurt" by a relative, and they are dismissed and called a liar, only because they are a drug user? It's most likely they are a drug user specifically because they were hurt.
It is a natural human reaction to want to avoid pain or minimize it, even emotional pain. Yes watching fentanyl zombies sucks a*s, yes having meth addicts screaming at demons is weird AF but it is never as easy as someone just stopping using. To successfully do that they need not only to want it, but to deal with lived trauma, and to have support systems in place to be successful.
And even what I am saying here is a gross oversimplification.
Georgia Ireland 10 months ago
Very true. I struggled with addiction, and through having great support, and being stubborn, I made it through those dark days and into the sun. It was hard, but very much worth the effort.
#11
EVERYTHING has to be proofread, yes even if it's only a 3 word sentence
#12
911 dispatch, when you call me and I ask you questions, I don’t need a life story for each one. A simple yes or no will suffice. If it doesn’t, I will ask you to clarify.
Georgia Ireland 10 months ago
Thank you for doing what you do. I've had to call 9-1-1 a few times, and I'm very grateful for folks like you. Good luck and blessed be!
#13
Blind people having vision. Only something like 10% see nothing (not black—*nothing.*) The rest all have varying degrees of vision impairment, all for different reasons. A lot of our students have light perception at the very least. People are always surprised by that.
Kobe (she) 10 months ago
Wondering how nothing looks when it is not black. Though "looks" is of course the wrong term... Just asking. When there is some light perception, I can imagine, one noticing some dark and light. Yet, when there is no perception of light... just dark.. how does thet not translate to black ?
#14
People are not made to live forever and modern medicine, while amazing, cannot make miracles happen. So many times we have a patient who is on a ventilator and unable to be taken off. Plus their kidneys are shot and they are requiring continuous bedside dialysis. Plus their heart is failing and they are on 2-4 continuous infusions of medication to make it function properly and prevent circulatory collapse. That is multi-system organ failure. Even if we can get one system back, the chances of a meaningful recovery are very slim. If Iturn off any of my machines or a bag of one of their meds runs dry they’re gonna die….because they are on a huge amount of life support, but the family still will be thinking they’re gonna walk and talk out of the hospital.
And, even if they do live, a lot of them are going to get a trach and feeding tube and then go on to live the rest of their lives in a facility where they still need 24hr care. Where they may or may not still be ventilator dependent. Where they likely cannot speak and definitely cannot eat or drink anything by mouth. Some will never, for the rest of their lives be able to safely eat or drink by mouth again. Many will be incontinent and bedbound and likely never regain their strength back. If you ever have a family member in the ICU on life support think long and hard about it because a lot of what we do to sustain life is literal torture.
Debbie 10 months ago (edited)
The vow of doctors to always try to save a life and do everything in their power (or whatever it is), is sooo outdated. An animal in pain is being put out of its misery. Yet for humans, in many places there are no standards for insufferable misery and wanting to put an end to it is criminal.
#15
Orthodontist here. Making braces “tighter” DOES NOT make the teeth move faster. Have patients daily asking me to make the brace even tighter because they can “take it” and finish faster as a result.
Teeth move quickest and most efficiently with very low, sustained force application.
It’s like trying to get yourself out of quicksand - yanking with all your might leaves you in exactly the same place but slow, continuous gently force gets you to where you want to go.
Usually after explaining this, they shrug as if I’m trying to pull one over on them and proceed to ask me to make it tighter next time.
Michael P (Perthaussieguy) 10 months ago
I have heard of some people overdosing on simple Panadol thinking if 2 tablets start working in 30mins then 4 tablets would start working in 15 mins... and 8 tablets ....
#16
Librarian here - if you want your library to have new books, you must be prepared to get rid of the same amount of old books.
Because I have to dispose of books secretly, as the public just don't seem to realise that we can't house a collection that grows by 10s or 100s of thousands of books every year.
(For the pedantic, I said "amount" rather than "number" for a reason - books and archives are commonly measured in linear meters or kilometers, as that tells us how much storage space is required.)
#17
My patients are 95% "why would you call an ambulance for this" and 5% "why the f**k didn't you call an ambulance for this sooner"
Donkeywheel 10 months ago
And the reason why these 5% waited so long may have something to do with being told repeatedly about the 95%. Not a good idea to publicly shame the 95%.
#18
I studied experimental psychology:
1) your memory is very unreliable and it is very easy to 'remember' things that never happened.
2) eye witnesses are also very unreliable because of the memory thing but also because our senses are not reliable.
In essence people are not computers :)
Michael P (Perthaussieguy) 10 months ago
And that is scary if you are in court and have eye witnesses swear you were at the scene of the crime when you know you weren't.
#19
Most dogs and cats are the way they are, because you are the way you are.
#20
There's two main reasons that when you cook a restaurant favorite at home it doesn't taste as good:
1. The person who made the dish used all of the things your doctor told you to avoid. It's full of butter and salt and all that good stuff. When you substitute healthy options it doesn't taste as good. Or at least it doesn't taste the same.
2. The people who made your dish have done it hundreds of times. Or thousands of times. You can get very good at a dish cooking it at home for yourself, but mastering a dish takes a kind of repetition that is rarely seen outside of a professional kitchen.
#21
Some people learn faster than others.
Michael P (Perthaussieguy) 10 months ago
Some people are sponges and others are water repellant
#22
A deep breath presses the diaphragm onto the intestines. Timing meals is important in opera because proper breath support can push out turds. You have to perfectly time your meals because diaphragmatic breathing will sometimes push out a turd mid performance.
#23
How GMOs are not different from any other plants/animals. And what you "know" about them is 95% green propaganda: either a straight lie or some half-truth so distorted and taken out of context, that it is misinformation at best.
Cathy Mcgee 10 months ago (edited)
GMOs bad reputation is largely because it is mainly chosen / used / forced on us by Monsanto/capitalism purely for gross profit & not for any ecological considerations. This also results in using GMO that is not sufficiently tested for long-term effects on the environment. Again it's not the tool its the way it's been used, aggressively for excessive profit.
#24
I'm a plumber, people don't understand what can and can't go down a toilet.
#25
Physics teacher: Scientific literacy is pretty poor in general.
* Lots of people struggle to interpret a graph correctly
* Lots of people struggle to distinguish between variables (like velocity vs acceleration). This is perhaps more niche for science education than the real world, but you'd be amazed how many people think skydivers stop completely or even shoot upwards when they open their chutes!
* Lots of people don't appreciate the difference between an absolute change (+10) and a proportional change (+10%). This has huge repercussions for all sorts of real world problems, like their savings for retirement, house price or debt.
The Idaho Potato 10 months ago
And exponentials. 3E10 and 3E12 are not anywhere near close! One is 100 times larger than the other!
#26
This is a little high level but I will try to explain.
When you call me for help, I ask you 'are you already logged into your account' and you are sitting on the website front page having forgotten your password, the answer is *not* "yes."
#27
The fact that something is a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't exist, doesn't matter, or doesn't have an impact, nor does it mean that it can be changed w***y nilly.
#28
In meteorology: A 30% chance of rain. We are 100% confident that 30% of the area will see rain on that day.
Not 30% chance of it raining
#29
People who work with sound , use their ears! You don't see their ears working. Sound engineers don't do much physically during shows because they are listening...intently. Which brings me onto listening. People who work in music listen to music in a far deeper and technical way than the average Jo!
The Original Bruno 10 months ago
Ah yes, but then there's this: sound engineering is terrible for your hearing. There are a few lines of work where doing your job makes you worse at doing your job: sound engineering, and politics being two of them.
#30
Essential oils are not important oils
Breakthroughs achieved in laboratorium doesn't mean that it can be mass produced the next day. More often than not, things fail in scaling up
No, we can't live 100% oil free. You need polymers for, well, everything. You can choose to get those from oil drilling or from rainforest. Pick your poison.
Biodegradable doesn't mean it will completely degrade the next day. Things will still pile up before it degrades. Use less instead.
What do you think ?
BookFanatic 10 months ago
As a librarian, I have to explain on a regular basis that just because you really liked that book does not mean you can buy it from us.
Krd 10 months ago (edited)
Although that wouldn't be a bad revenue stream. Think about it, you read a good book, then if you really like it the library can either sell it to you (and replace the book immediately) or order a new book for you to buy. Even with a slight markup they would still be cheaper than a traditional bookstore. Plus it would attract people who skip the library and go right to book stores (since the price would be slightly less, and they'd be supporting their local library).
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BookFanatic 10 months ago
As a librarian, I have to explain on a regular basis that just because you really liked that book does not mean you can buy it from us.
Krd 10 months ago (edited)
Although that wouldn't be a bad revenue stream. Think about it, you read a good book, then if you really like it the library can either sell it to you (and replace the book immediately) or order a new book for you to buy. Even with a slight markup they would still be cheaper than a traditional bookstore. Plus it would attract people who skip the library and go right to book stores (since the price would be slightly less, and they'd be supporting their local library).
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