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Comment by archarios | Hacker News Reader

What does "intermediate knowledge" mean in this context?

Like I have a bachelors degree in engineering. Is that intermediate or advanced? I feel like saying my science knowledge is anything beyond intermediate is a bit of an overstatement personally.

> I feel like saying my science knowledge is anything beyond intermediate is a bit of an overstatement personally

That's not overconfident, I'm lead to conclude that you have advanced science knowledge.

Absolutely advance. No question. At least in this context.

I didnt find out what standard they use, but personally I'd say intermediate sounds about right. I also have an engineering degree and while I know more than the average bear in many scientific disciplines I couldn't say that any of it is advanced.

I'm thinking of times where I went to the library to dig deeper on a topic and discovered a huge and complex topic just laying in wait.

I have one in physics, but I have also taken a rather a lot (given the degree) in biology, chemistry, civil engineering, and electrical engineering. Went some places also not usual in math. And I've worked in IT since forever. There's a lot of stuff where I take a glance at it and realize I'm just looking at a single hull plate on a battleship.

What I am getting at is that if you have just intermediate knowledge in a bunch of places, I think it lends itself to sensing that you're just a paramecium stuck to the side of some N-dimensional construct. There's so much. I had a professor who was the expert in the second excited state of Helium-3. That was his thing. Just a single needle in the whale-sized blowfish of physics.

> Like I have a bachelors degree in engineering

I do to and unquestionably I am beginner level.

Each scientific field has specialised and become so dense with knowledge that even new graduates in that field would barely be classed as intermediate.

In my view, bachelor's degree is beginner, especially if you haven't got any further knowledge than that from work experience or anything.

Like high-school level, a very basic familiarity with terms, experiment design, inference. The authors cite and link to the five surveys used in the 'Data availability' section: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01677-8#data-avai...

* Surveys EB, Pew and GSS are publicly available and data and details can be found in refs. [27],[28],[29], respectively.

  \* take the interactive Pew survey (11 questions) here: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/quiz/science-knowledge-quiz/

* The Fernbach study was published in ref. [9] and the authors made the data available.

* Lackner survey data are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7920776

[27]: Bauer, M. W., Shukla, R. & Kakkar, P. Public Understanding of Science in Europe 1989–2005—A Eurobarometer Trend File (GESIS, 2012); https://www.gesis.org/en/eurobarometer-data-service/search-d...

[28]: Smith, T. W., Davern, M., Freese, J. & Morgan, S. L. General Social Surveys, 1972–2018 (NORC, 2019); https://gss.norc.org/get-the-data

[29]: Funk, C., Kennedy, B., Johnson, C., Hefferon, M. & Thigpen, C. L. American Trends Panel Wave 42 (Pew Research Center, 2019); https://www.pewresearch.org/science/dataset/american-trends-...

[9]: Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y. & Rozin, P. Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 251–256 (2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3

(useful to note all those surveys are 2019 pre-pandemic, before there was severe partisanization of the phrase "trust in science". I wonder how hard it would be to construct a neutral methodology post-pandemic, now that even the basic vocabulary itself is loaded with associations.)

Even then, the 2019 Pew article is depressing reading: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/partisanship-...

If the abstract actually defined intermediate we wouldn't have comments talking so much about advanced education like PhDs and STEM majors...

Intermediate knowledge of what's being tested, everyone is the most overconfident on subjects they have intermediate knowledge about.

If you test high school concepts then if you are shaky about high school concepts that applies to you. People who have no clue about high school and people who understand high school well will be less overconfident on that test.

Or if you talk about college algorithms, then that is the basis for intermediate knowledge. An average comp sci grad will be the most overconfident, a person who never studied algorithms and a person who teaches algorithms for years will be less overconfident on that test.

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