edit: Not a data scientists myself obviously
edit: Not a data scientists myself obviously
A university education teaches you something.
I assume that epidemiology is like the other university fields — when lay people come and show that the epidemiologists are wrong about epidemiology, they're about as likely to be right as the people who write to maths professors claiming to have found a method of trisecting an angle. And the people with the novel claim and the missing education bear the burden of proof.
edit: Not saying studying Math qualifies you to design and run studies in Psychology. But once you break down tasks enough you will often find them to be the area of expertise of another discipline. Often its very easy to tell when the Professor that taught you something in university is from another department.