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.
#1
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
Image credits: whatdidyousay509
#2
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.
Image credits: Actually_zoohiggle
#3
Communication isn’t what you’re saying. It’s what the other person is understanding.
Image credits: _pkthunder
#4
Yelling back at someone who is already agitated (crying, shaking, screaming) will not deescalate them. (My expertise is crisis)
Image credits: OptmstcExstntlst
#5
Anthrozoology MSc. We need to be kinder to animals.
Image credits: MISTXRick
#6
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.
Image credits: BookGirl67
#7
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.
Image credits: 2074red2074
#8
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”.
Image credits: Christompaman
#9
EVERYTHING has to be proofread, yes even if it’s only a 3 word sentence
Image credits: chinchenping
#10
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 🙂
Image credits: Eggggsterminate
#11
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.
Image credits: ba_cam
#12
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.
Image credits: Former-Finish4653
#13
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.
Image credits: Canadian47
#14
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.
Image credits: Marlowe_Cayce
#15
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.
Image credits: Usual-Editor6848
#16
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.
Image credits: Gladysfartz
#17
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.
Image credits: tenehemia
#18
Most dogs and cats are the way they are, because you are the way you are.
Image credits: Teh_Hammerer
#19
Some people learn faster than others.
Image credits: KokonutMonkey
#20
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”
Image credits: Gned11
#21
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.
Image credits: Frequent_Influence48
#22
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.)
Image credits: SuperordinateYam
#23
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.”
Image credits: Photomancer
#24
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.
Image credits: Durumbuzafeju
#25
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.
#26
I’m a plumber, people don’t understand what can and can’t go down a toilet.
Image credits: lurcherzzz
#27
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
Image credits: radiopelican
#28
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.
Image credits: lalala253
#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!
Image credits: daiwilly
#30
Just because you take an ambulance to the hospital, doesn’t mean you’ll get seen/a room anytime soon.
Image credits: KingChives
#31
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.
#32
Color, typeface, placement, and general composition affect the human mind in so many ways.
Image credits: Karnezar
#33
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.
Image credits: cyperdunk
#34
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
#35
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!
#36
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.
#37
I work in semiconductor industry. People don’t realize how small 5nm chip designs are. 5nm is approximately 20 atoms wide. Just 20!
Image credits: Puzzleheaded_Ball952
#38
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.
Image credits: Evening-Stroll606
#39
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
#40
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
#41
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.
#42
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.
#43
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.
Image credits: oikorapunk
#44
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!
Image credits: max_ATK
#45
The concept of ”putting things in their historical context”
To be fair, many historians seem to have hard time doing this as well.
#46
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.
#47
Wood expands and contracts due to moisture!
#48
Your document/form/advertisement only needs 1, MAYBE 2 different fonts. That’s it.
#49
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.
#50
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.
Image credits: IgnorethisIamstupid
#51
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.
#52
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.
#53
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).
#54
I’ve worked in multiple fields of writing.
A lot of the things people think make good writing are the opposite of good writing.
#55
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.
#56
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.
#57
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
#58
Speech ≠ understanding language ≠ using language
Also, cochlear implants ≠ sudden perfect hearing
#59
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.
#60
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.