Comment on People listen to others more than they listen to themselves.

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squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Research is listening to other people, unless you decide to bootstrap science from scratch, which puts you back into the crazy category.

To be able to do somewhat decent research, you first need to have a lot of education (=listening to people). Then you need to gather research that was already done in the field (=listening to people) to figure out what’s the scientific consensus (=listening to a lot of people). Only when you really understand what came before you do you have a chance to do meaningful research.

Without listening to people, you are just one of these lunatics who still think the earth is flat because they listen to themselves instead of building on the things we learned over the last few millenia.

The main reason why research has advanced like crazy over the last few centuries while it was mostly stagnant for the 10 millenia before that is because we figured out how to pool knowledge and research globally. If you invented something 10 000 years ago, your invention would likely just stay in your village, maybe die out, maybe spread super slowly over hundreds of years to the areas around and likely never make it off the continent.

With the advent of cheap permanent records and fast global communication, a discarded research idea from an american oil company can make it into the hands of an UK scientist and a japanese researcher, who together with some helpful ideas from a german chemist manage to create the Lithium Ion battery.

Without listening to other people, this battery would have never happened. None of them would have been able to create it on their own.

There’s a reason every somewhat decent scientific paper has dozens of references. It’s because proper research is, to a large extent, listening to other people.

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