“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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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.
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
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.
Communication isn't what you're saying. It's what the other person is understanding.
Anthrozoology MSc. We need to be kinder to animals.
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.
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.
I always see police cars near car accidents, so police cars must cause car accidents! 🤪
Yelling back at someone who is already agitated (crying, shaking, screaming) will not deescalate them. (My expertise is crisis)
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.
Humans and chimpanzees both evolved from Sahelanthropus tchadensis in Africa.
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”.
Travelling all over Australia, we all have different accents and Melbourne people can pick my qld accent so quick 😂
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.
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.
EVERYTHING has to be proofread, yes even if it's only a 3 word sentence
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.
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!
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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 ....
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.)
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"
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%.
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 :)
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.
Most dogs and cats are the way they are, because you are the way you are.
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.
Some people learn faster than others.
Some people are sponges and others are water repellant
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.
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.
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.
I'm a plumber, people don't understand what can and can't go down a toilet.
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.
And exponentials. 3E10 and 3E12 are not anywhere near close! One is 100 times larger than the other!
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."
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.
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
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!
True - my husband is a mixing engineer and he can spend three hours adjusting sounds I’m barely aware of. I like to annoy him now by popping into his studio and going ‘ooh, are you sure about that 4K?’ or ‘what’s going on with that snare, dude?’
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.
To explain: "Essential" means "having the essence of," not "critically important."
I work organ donation. We don't want to kill off your loved one. In fact, if I talk to you about donation, the first thing I'm going to tell you is we need to keep them alive for a bit (2-4 days) to make donation possible. If you insist we go faster, realistically all that'd be donated is kidneys.
psychologists, therapists, counsellors are not there to give you advice or opinions. They may sometimes do that, but they should do so very infrequently (not including psychoeducation, where evidence-based techniques or facts are shared to hopefully aid a client in feeling better in some relevant area). That's what your friends are for. *Therapists are there to help you talk to yourself* in a way that helps you discover, organize and understand your life and yourself better, so you can come to your own conclusions and your own decisions. Therapists are trained to be your mirror, to help you externalize what you have inside - emotions, experiences, beliefs, etc. That's part of why you hear sometimes that 'therapists hold space'; it's as though they hold up the walls of a 'space' for you to throw all your stuff up onto, have a real good look at, and hopefully get a new perspective on it, or at least, feel better afterwards due to the cathartic effect. Most people will never sit and truly talk to themselves, even in journalling, in a way that isn't just spiraling/reinforcing false beliefs and unhelpful blindspots. A therapist forces you to spend time with yourself and is trained to help you stay in that space and make real sense of what you choose to talk about in session.
Also, related: therapy is not for sick people, crazy people, disturbed people. It's for people
Color, typeface, placement, and general composition affect the human mind in so many ways.
Just because you take an ambulance to the hospital, doesn’t mean you’ll get seen/a room anytime soon.
Just because something is alleged in a lawsuit; doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Non-attorneys are very easily influenced by reports of allegations in a lawsuit. The reality is a lawsuit is just a series of allegations that may or may not be true.
The Republican House of Representatives needs to get this drilled into their heads.
When you teach a child to read and they are stuck on a word, it is perfectly acceptable to skip over that word and then go back to it. It's perfectly fine to let them choose a word with an appropriate contextual meaning. Then you can ask if the word they've chosen could match the letters and sounds with the word on the page. Ask them can they now think of the word that does (This is just one strategy; there are others).
The amount of times I've seen kids get stressed to tears because an adult is insisting they read a word at a time is too damn high!
I do the same with my adult second language learners - if I jumped on every mistake we’d never get anywhere, literally and figuratively.
Statistics
I work in Advertising/Marketing and you can present statistics, particularly on popularity, to make anything look No. 1.
I feel like a lot of people truly don't understand maths and can be swayed.
I'm constantly sceptical
If 20% of car accidents are caused by dui then 80% are caused by sober people; additionally, drunk people are more physically relaxed and don't tense up in accidents like sober people do therefore their injuries aren't as serious - conclusion drawn, it's safer to drive drunk.
You can't simply "enhance" an image to uncover more information. You're just stretching the same set of pixels. Knowing how something is filmed is almost as important as what was recorded.
There's a great bit in an episode of the Cold Case drama "Waking the Dead" where the lead detective says to their forensic expert "Can you enhance this image?" and she says "It's a VHS recording, all I can do is make those squares bigger". Refreshing to see on a TV show where ordinarily that sort of character would tap a key on her computer and produce a 4k image of the suspect.
The concept of ''putting things in their historical context''
To be fair, many historians seem to have hard time doing this as well.
History often tells us more about the person who wrote it and the time period in which it was written than it does about whatever they're supposedly telling us about. History is not about fact. It's a story, told by people, and is no more reliable than most stories children tell their parents when they're caught doing something wrong.
You can spend all day on Wall Street bets if you want. You can spend all day staring at charts if you want. You can read every piece of news about company X if you want. You could “buy” some dude’s strategy on day trading if you want. You could read every post and follow every trade on /r/realdaytrading if you want.
You aren’t going to make money. That isn’t how the stock market or securities work. You’re a gambler. You’re gambling.
This is an oversimplification that ultimately leads to the wrong conclusion. Sure, it’s gambling, but nobody is sabotaging you at every turn like casinos do.
I work in semiconductor industry. People don’t realize how small 5nm chip designs are. 5nm is approximately 20 atoms wide. Just 20!
And the world is full of anti-science people who depend on the internet, computers, and smartphones invented by scientists to spread their pseudo science nonsense.
The body needs safety for change. Pushing like you can rush through a process to quickly get it over with doesn’t work.
Body pain, trauma work, healing from anything, learning something new. All of it requires safety and pacing.
Most beef or meat in general you buy from a quality butchers shop will turn brown or discolor in some way. Its due to oxidation and doesnt effect the quality of the meat in the slightest. The bright red meat standard is due to dying and gassing meat during the packaging process.
My local butcher steaks look like s**t. But hoooow great they taste, that's amazing.
I work in communications and that every piece of work I produce has to be at a readable level for a 9 year old. It’s so time consuming taking over complicated information and trying to simplify it. So if you work with a comms team, keep it straight forward and easy. Flowery language and big words will get cut
Most newspaper content is written for the literacy competence of an average 8-9 year old reader (at least in English language countries - I can't comment on other languages). The same applies to mass market bestseller books - the writing will usually have a fairly simple sentence structure and restricted vocabulary. There's nothing wrong with that but, as a children's book specialist, I got tired of parents proudly telling me how their 10 year old was reading adult books by [insert name of popular author] as though it proved the kid was a genius. There are plenty of children's books that provide far more challenging reading (and appropriate content) for a 10 year old.
There isn't one global sign language. Just like there isn't one global spoken language. Signed languages have similar traits but they differ from country to country... Just like spoken languages!
Yes, and as an amateur linguist, I find that to be fascinating. I'd really like to try learning say, British Sign Language, or Spanish sign language. Languages, rather spoken, whistled or signed, endlessly fascinate me.
Your document/form/advertisement only needs 1, MAYBE 2 different fonts. That's it.
Information technology (IT) involves a lot of Googling. A very relevant skill requirement is simply that we know how to Google *efficiently* and aren't afraid to poke at things to see what they do.
Seriously, if you don't know, learn some basic browser search skills, like putting a word in "quotes" to make it required, using -dashes to exclude certain words, using after:DATE to filter by date, and so on.
Sorry, this is really misleading. Apparently written by someone who thinks IT equates to basic tech phone support. You can't design and implement complex systems, networks, processes with just a bit of googling. Oh, and many of the basic search skill you mention have largely been deprecated now - using a dash to exclude certain words does pretty much nothing at all nowadays in google and other major search engines.
Game Designer/Artist No, no you can’t just “add multiplayer”. It’s not that simple. No, increasing the texture resolution doesn’t necessarily mean the game looks better. Especially if your high res texture doesn’t match the rest of the game stylistically No, Bethesda can’t just switch engines. The problems with their games are development issues not engine issues. Also I hate to agree with a games exec but Todd Howard is right that losing all the specialised tools they’ve built for their engine would be madness. No, pixel art isn’t necessarily cheap if you want it to be good. No, that one random woman you’re harassing from one small specific part of the team didn’t make the game “woke” you dumb**s.
Translation and localization are related but not the same thing. If you need a technical document translated, you need a technical translator. If you need an ad from one country to be appealing in another, you need a marketing/localization translator.
Yes, sometimes there is overlap in skills, but that will cost you a lot more.
As translator (Dutch German), I confirm. My field is tourist information of all kind, from facts and advertisements in magazines up to descriptive guides. Occasionally a client asks me if I could do a legal text, e.g. rental agreements. I decline, the only thing I will provide is a summary with a disclaimer.
In order to produce the colour desired, one must first understand the relationships of colours and their contrasting components.
There’s nothing wrong with using prepared mixtures sold at stores, so long as you understand the limitations of each product and how to balance them.
That’s why you see brunettes with a green tint, and unnatural oranges. You cannot paint without a primer any more than you can slap a chemical on your hair and expect magic.
I would love to have someone sit and teach me more about that. Sounds fascinating!
Transportation planner here. The concept of induced demand, while gradually gaining broader recognition, is still unknown to most people. The idea is that if you build X miles of new car lanes (by widening a freeway, say), within a few years people will be driving approximately X more miles, so you can’t build your way out of traffic congestion. Many places have learned this the hard way, or in some cases have continued to fail/refuse to learn it, hence the “just one more lane bro” meme. But it’s quite simple and urgently important if we want to stop wasting money and land on approaches that just don’t help.
No matter how many roads you build, if they all try to get into the same city, you'll still have traffic jam
Astigmatism isn’t a disease or even really a condition. We’ve all got some amount from very little (insignificant) to a whole lot. It basically describes how your glasses or contacts need to be made. Or how your LASIK or lens implant needs to be oriented. It is very simply that you need more correction in some places and less in others. A lens that’s the same power 360 degrees around won’t do the trick.
Oh and everyone gets cataracts if you live long enough. 100%. It’s like gray hair.
I went to an optometrist recently, and apparently I am, in fact, very slightly near-sighted in one eye! However, glasses aren't likely to do anything for me, since my vision is already way better than most people in my city. (Like even my near-sighted eye is still better than 20/20)
If you see one rat/mouse near your house, you or one of your neighbors has a severe infestation or will have one soon. Same goes for roaches and bedbugs. People seem to think "oh, it's just one. What harm can it do?". You see a pest near your house, start inspecting or get your house inspected by a professional ASAP. Can't tell you how many times I showed up to a house and the owner tells me they started seeing them months or weeks ago and didn't pay it any mind, and it turns out they have a really bad infestation.
I use to have some field mice coming in my garden. I have cats now and not one mouse in sight. Best pest control ever.
The principle of superposition: layers of rock are laid down in sequence, with younger layers on top of older layers. Of course, tectonic forces often disrupt this, but that hurdle to interpreting geology is solved by the principle of original horizontality: rock layers are initially laid down flatly, even if the layers they are laid down on aren't flat at the time. Thirdly, the principle of uniformitarianism states that the processes we see occurring now are the same as occurred in the past. These three things in conjunction let you deconstruct landscapes and interpret the geologic history of areas of various sizes (outcrops, basins, continents).
You were targeted for an ad? We have all the data we need about you. But we're still throwing s**t at a wall to see what sticks.
Also: if any song is so simple an idiot could write it, start writing and surpass us. The simplest pop song is meticulously crafted. Every song I personally hate for being low brow: it still took incredible talent to boil down ANYTHING into that simple of a phrase.
Advertising and songwriting have a lot of weird overlaps actually
Linguist:
That "proper grammar" scientifically doesn't exist, and is entirely a political concept. Native Speakers of a language generally cannot make grammatical mistakes (except for like actually misspeaking or tripping over their tongue type stuff.)
To further explain; Grammar isn't a set of voted on draconic guidelines a bunch of Academics got together and decided on. Its a collection of malleable but hardwired rules acquired as second-nature to native speakers of a language. Rules that if broken, the transfer of information breaks down and the words become gibberish. These rules are not taught formally, because they do not have to be taught.
Most of what people consider "mistakes" or "bad grammar" is just a dialect that follows slightly different rules than the dialect preferred at schools. Yet neither dialect is going to be any more efficient at transmitting information than the other so long as both speakers speak the same dialect or have dialects closely related enough to understand each other.
Eventually the grammatical rules of each dialect will gradually grow further apart until they are no longer speaking the same language.
As what happened to Latin, and how languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Italian, Sicilian.... Etc were all born when they were all once just dialects of Latin.
Now they have dialects of their own and will one day shatter just as their mother did.
"Native speakers cannot make grammatical mistakes" Did this person never see americans use the wrong your/you're?
I've worked in multiple fields of writing.
A lot of the things people think make good writing are the opposite of good writing.
"A lot of the things people think make good writing are the opposite of good writing." What does that mean? Seems like I am not a good reader then.
Speech ≠ understanding language ≠ using language
Also, cochlear implants ≠ sudden perfect hearing
Always reminds me of a parrot. They can talk, but do they understand what they are saying?
Homeowner's insurance covers the following type of damage:
* A sudden and one-time occurrence
98% of all claims will come down to this simple concept. If your loss meets this description it's most likely covered. If your loss does not meet this description, it's most likely not covered.
There are some specific exceptions, but that's general guideline.
The wording on most is "sudden and accidental". That doesn't mean you can't have another of the same kind of claim. (I'm an insurance agent with 30 years' experience who works as a claims liaison.) This means if the damage is from deterioration (like rot), it won't be covered because it's not sudden. It also means you can't intentionally cause damage, which would make it not accidental. That's just a general rule, however, as there are often exclusions for things that would otherwise fit the "sudden & accidental" definition. Earthquakes fit that definition, as do floods, but they are specifically excluded on most policies without a rider or a separate policy.
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.
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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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.
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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