I like doughnuts. That doesn't mean I like baking them or reading the recipe.

Relevant Cyanide & Happiness:

You can like science without being a degreed research scientist. There is plenty of good science content out there that's easy to understand.

I like it when other people do science and then tell me about the exciting parts.

PhD here.

Be interested in whatever you want. Someone else said speculative fiction. I'm not aware of a scientist who didn't grow up reading that. Just be curious and care about if you're correct.

Young people now just don't have easy access to popular science from people who are telling them the truth, and I don't know what to do about that. You need to learn how the basics of reality work before you can gain the proper level of skepticism.

No one starts with a peer reviewed journal article. Most, if not all people, start with a cool experiment or demo or see or handle a cool critter/plant.

Me: I love science

Me, trying to design an experimental with adequate controls: frustratedly curse-mumbling in a dark room filled with crumpled-up statistics papers

But that's the thing. The average person has no need to know the deep nuts and bolts of science. Being enthusiastic and engaged with it is far better than willingly being blind and ignorant.

For instance, you don't need to understand the exact mechanism of how anesthesia works in order to very much appreciate it when you're undergoing testicular surgery.

Me watching my silly little videos about silly little Ordovician fossils and how they may or may not be a sponge.

I love science. Half my feed is various types of science, the other half is politics, and a secret 3rd half is shitposting about both

Okay fine; I love TRIVIA!

People love to whine about the "credential class" but literally nobody is going to slog through gen-ed courses without some kind of short term incentive structure. Like we actually know what this looks like because of the Internet - without the academic ivory tower, everyone just cites wikipedia articles to each other until the last expert dies, at which point wikipedia itself slowly dissolves in Brawndo.

I miss my Jstore membership

Alternatively:

"I like science when it directly contributes to my quality of life or proves me right, but not when it proves me wrong or needs funding."

On the contrary, I do enjoy reading peer reviewed journal in a game I like to play "is that a Fourier transform or some arbitrary integral."

They like science fiction... Half of that is "science" i guess