this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Your paragraph about reputation is wrong: the thesis statement of this paragraph is: half of science is your methodology. And that's not really gatekeepy, it's what's needed to be recorded to actually verify what was observed. So we don't have another Piltdown man or microraptor.
Have you looked into citizen science projects? There are many many projects set up so the average joe can contribute in some way. They may not be discovering a new species like some Edwardian British Naturalist, but they are helping contribute in significant ways.
Thank you for meeting their argument. Sometimes I just don't have the energy to and what people say, erroneously, goes uncontested.
I have actually already contributed a decent amount to iNaturalist over the years: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=zarobi
But that's kind of the extent of "citizen science", in my area at least — some variant of taking photos and dumping them into a public database. Which is still helpful of course, but I was talking about working more intimately with specific research, or even being employed to do certain tasks.
Right now you have to be "in" to be "involved", which has it's pros and cons. In this thread we were mostly discussing the cons. You might call it quality assurance and preventing micro-raptors, but at the end of the day there is still a gate being built and maintained there.