Turns out nobody in my department actually knows what they're doing half the time
Spent the last six months convinced I was about to get fired from my postdoc. Every lab meeting had me sweating through my clothes, listening to people talk about methodology like it was sacred geometry. I honestly thought I was the only fraud who didn't instinctively understand every nuance of our grant proposals.
Then yesterday happened. Our principal investigator—a guy who literally wrote the textbook we use, has an h-index higher than my phone number, and terrifies everyone by just walking into a room—spent twenty minutes aggressively arguing a basic statistical principle during a departmental review. Except he was completely, fundamentally wrong. Not a subtle nuance either. He was mixing up independent and dependent variables on a standard baseline graph.
The entire room went dead silent. A couple of senior grad students exchanged glances. Nobody wanted to say anything because we're all conditioned to treat his word like gospel. Finally, someone meekly raised their hand and pointed out the error.
He just blinked, stared at the board for five seconds, and went, 'Oh. Right. Wow, I need more coffee.' And moved on like nothing happened.
Ngl, a massive weight just lifted off my chest. We're all just winging it with fancy vocabulary.