Where is MN and what is a spood please? As Sedgequeen says, communication skills are important in science.
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So I ask the question: how can one conduct serious and valuable scientific research in medicine, chemistry, biology, or physics without formal education? I donāt know of any such case. Letās be serious, no kiddingā¦
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There are paths to education that donāt involve expensive university degrees. Apprenticeships used to be a thing, still are in some fields, and there are realms for that sort of education in niche fields.
Do non traditonal paths work for everything? Of course not - medical sciences are a big example - but for a field biologist, experience in nature may be as important as a textbook education.
Look at the fungi sequencing projects - many people involved are very much contributing in meaningful ways to science without having a traditional biology degree.
Thereās a thread I saw in one of the facebook groups; someone was inquiring after mushroom edibility, and demanding someone with a mycology PHD answer their question because they would only trust the judgment of someone with that education. The actual PhDs all just pointed out that field mycologists are usually way better at that sort of thing, and got mad that the OP was insulting their colleagues that they respect for insinuating that lack of degree = lack of knowledge.
Edit: i literally work as a field biologist for a parks system and Iāve talked with my boss about if I should pursue a degree and he doesnāt necessarily think it would be worthwhile in my case.
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MN postal abbreviation for Minnesota
Spood Internet lingo for spider
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Sorry, MN = Minnesota in the US.
Spood is an informal word for spider.
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My masterās focused on ecology ā our lab looked at questions regarding processes more than organisms. For instance, my thesis project focused on priority effects as a process; the tadpoles were chosen, not in themselves, but because we considered them to be the most suitable taxon for the question. (Thatās not how I normally think. Normally, I take an interest in a particular organism.)
So, as an example answer to your question:
It sure would be nice to be able to whittle down that list, but wouldnāt this require a larger scale survey than one hobbyist can do?
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What strikes me here is that this is an example in the past tense. I did not ask what you did when you were in academia. I asked what you feel would be worthwhile (looking forward, not back). I do not get the impression from this that your past work is necessarily what you would want to do if you could choose anything.
I have been persistent about asking this because if you canāt articulate what sort of questions interest you or what sort of outcome would allow you to feel that your activities are meaningful, it is going to be difficult for any of us to suggest what options are available to you as someone not working in academia or how you might address concrete obstacles.
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University degrees do not have to be expensive. Mine was free (if you donāt count the lost income from not working those years).
The question is what you call science. Many of these things are not considered interesting science by career scientists (I am one, but in a different field). I know many field biologists in the nature conservation sector or in museums. Those in nature conservation often do not do anything even I would call science. Those in museums do sometimes do interesting studies, but most do not produce anything publishable in international journals with an impact factor. Usually just some regional journals (often studies of the type already mentioned by spiphany as floristics or faunistics, sometimes also some ecology, e.g., phytocenology).
An exception, and something that can be recommended as an example to the OP, is describing new species in groups that are still not perfectly known, as as the genus Rubus (another possibility would be Taraxacum). Even non-academics can find new species and describe them, although probably with the help of someone experienced in that, if they learn the already known species very well and look around. That might be publishable in better journals, but wherever it is published, it is certainly worthy science.
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I guess itās up to each person what they would deem interesting science?
I donāt make life choices over what other people think is interesting. I make life choices based on what I find interesting.
Edit: and Iām on published papers with more coming out soooo idk Iām content with my career
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And my second paragraph addressed that.
And I can think of others, although you are correct that they can be hard to articulate clearly. I even hinted at it in my OP:
There was a thread some time ago called Bird Behaviors that you would like to see/hear in-person. I didnāt say so in that thread, but I would like to see/hear some that havenāt been documented yet. Honestly, it sometimes feels like I was born too late. @jokkomarat provided a list of non-academics who became well-known in science; but note that they span from 1791 to 1943. None within the last 82 years. There was more ālow-hanging fruitā to be picked back then, so itās no surprise that, for instance, someone like Jean-Henri Fabre could make groundbreaking discoveries by watching insects in his backyard.
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I have never questioned your life choices.
BTW, it is quite unlikely that whatever I do in biology will ever lead to a paper with my name on it (I do not count short notes about finding something somewhere. And I helped with stuff that leads to a paper (non-IF), but I was just helping with some measurements or observations, but nothing deserving an authorship.) And I do not care and I fine with that. I still do a lot of observations, bring pressed specimen to the herbarium and similar. It is what I like to do and I think it is useful. Just not hard science.
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You might enjoy Charley Eisemanās blog - https://bugtracks.wordpress.com/ Charley lives a couple of towns away from me in western Massachusetts and, while Iām pretty sure he has a masterās degree in biology, is not an academic. I heard him speak once; let me summarize (probably not quite correctly): āI went out to get the mail one afternoon. A few hours later, I came back in, having found several mines in leaves and a couple of plant galls. Now, four years later, I can say the insects I reared from those mines and galls turned out to be three species new to the state, one species on a host itās never been seen on before, and two species that are new to science. My collaborators and I just published the descriptions of the new species ā¦ etc., etc.ā Fascinating stuff, with beautiful photos to boot. Heās @ceiseman on iNat.
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I misunderstood your intent then I suppose. From my perspective though, thereās as much value to be found in small incremental improvements to science and knowledge as there is in big splashy visible things.
Maybe the greater world wonāt remember me, but I believe my small contributions could still be of great value to someone someday.
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Yes, I often feel that. But if I had been born 100 years earlier, I still probably wouldnāt have made the discoveries, even if you ignore the fact I would have died at birth. I think imagination is a great help for a scientist. Not to produce imaginary results, but imagination to go beyond the obvious and draw an insightful conclusion.
There is a book called Curious Naturalists by Niko Tinbergen describing studies of insect behaviour. I have read it a couple of times though not for a few decades. It describes simple experiments that produced big conclusions, and as far as I can remember there was no expensive equipment involved, mainly plasticine and string. There are so many unstudied insects, even if you just repeat his experiments with different species, it is going to produce new information. I guess top academic behavioural studies these days are full of statistics but there must be room in the journals for clear descriptive studies.
Someone above suggested instead of studying a problem, fix it. How about try to fix it in different ways and study which works best?
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I suspect that the premise both of these comments share is that the āseriousnessā or āvalueā of scientific work is measured by how well it fits into the (academic) framework for publishing in elite (academic) journals. From that assumption, it seems to me like a foregone conclusion that there is no āworthwhile science outside academia.ā
I am an academic, though with a PhD in a field outside of science (pure mathematics). It is probably impossible for someone to make a meaningful contribution (as in prove any new result) in my field (algebraic geometry) without formal training (likely at the graduate level). So I do appreciate that some pursuits really do require intense specialization and training by the academic system. That said, part of the reason a hobbyist isnāt going to do worthwhile algebraic geometry is because the objects of study in algebraic geometry (e.g. complex projective varieties) are not objects that you will encounter outside of a textbook or publication. The same is not at all true for botany, because we all know what a plant is and can all start observing new phenomena in the plants around us with a reasonable amount of real-world practice.
The expert on Platanthera praeclara in MN (Minnesota, just to be clear 
) doesnāt have formal training in botany, but the state has contracted her for years to carry out phenology research on the species, and her research is used to schedule plant surveys for peak bloom time. To me, that is meaningful science, and the value is that it has a real impact in our ability to track conservation of a critically endangered species.
The floristics research mentioned several times above in this thread has a fundamentally different flavor from what you see in top-tier journals. Itās reasonable (in my opinion) to regard it as less impressive, but totally unreasonable to discount it as unserious or lacking in value.
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If youāve ever seen a tower for Chimney Swifts, you can thank Althea Sherman, an art teacher who began observing the birds in her yard. She was never an academic. At that time, a lot of research was focused on studying taxonomy, not behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althea_Sherman
For a more recent example, I myself am responsible for 4 out of 37 observations of Hexatoma alibtarsus: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1400894-Hexatoma-albitarsis - which I photographed, not because it was rare, but because it was cute. On a recent visit to the bog, though, I met the leading observer (29 observations). Somebody is going to study this species eventually, and she is going to be really really helpful to that effort. (I hope my much more humble contributions will also be of some use.)
Another example is that thereās a local science writer, Diana Steele, who got curious about ornithologist Lynds Jones, and now sheās the leading expert on him (because nobody else has done the research). Sheās meaningfully contributing to science history, not as an academic, but because she is interested!
So, I donāt think the era of non-academics contributing to meaningful science is over. Weāre just scratching the surface of everything there is to know. There is tons of stuff to stumble across, or do a deep dive in.
But if I had been born 100 years earlier, I still probably wouldnāt have made the discoveries, even if you ignore the fact I would have died at birth.
ā¦and if I had been born 100 years earlier, I would also have died at birth, but if some miracle had occurred and I survived, I would have been unable to see very much wildlife by the time I turned 20. 
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There are a couple blogs I enjoy which celebrate amateur scientific projects. Hereās one, arguing with the idea that itās getting harder to discover things:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/ideas-arent-getting-harder-to-find
I once found this idea seductive. Now I find it outrageous. Itās not just because itās wrong; itās an affront to the human spirit. People only discover stuff when they think itās worth trying, and there have been entire eras of human history where people didnāt think it was worth trying. A meme like āideas are getting harder to findā could drive the desire to discover back into hiding again, fulfilling its own abominable prophecy.
I feel like I agree both with the argument that itās getting harder and that believing that makes you less likely to discover anything. The other, arguing that good scientists (by the blog authorsā definition) need to have the right level of arrogance to think that they can still discover stuff after everything thatās already been done:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/02/10/the-scientific-virtues/
Being stupid is all about recognizing that you know nothing about everything, and in fact you have little chance of ever understanding much about anything. Having accepted such complete ignorance, you must then be extraordinarily arrogant to think that you could ever make an original discovery, let alone solve a problem that has baffled people for generations.
I could quibble with the specific words chosen, but it seems roughly right to me. But then the argument is that you need to be kind of crazy to discover new things, and if people think youāre kind of crazy then communicating that youāve discovered anything might be tougher haha.
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Great article posted by @upupa-epops, which directly addresses the subject of this thread:
What jumped out to me was this quote:
"As fields formalize, they can get very good at ignoring and suppressing problems, delaying revolutions indefinitely.
One way professional science does this is by preventing divergent thinkers from entering in the first place. The usual way of becoming a scientist is to become a professor, ideally at a wealthy institution that can furnish you with lots of science gizmos and attractive letterhead for your grant applications.
The path to that prestigious professorship has become ludicrously competitive. Harvard, the ideal first step in an academic career, accepted just 3.19% of undergraduate applicants last year, down from 7.1% in 2012. Harvard doesnāt publish overall PhD acceptance ratesāthe next step on the academic ladderābut the engineering school does and itās a mere 7%. Only 15%-30% of PhDs who make it through this gauntlet and still want a permanent academic job will actually get one, and very few will be at the fancy places.
To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break. (I occasionally get emails from high schoolers begging to work in my lab so they can get their name on a paper.) Professors who got their jobs decades ago tell us it wasnāt like this. In this hypercompetitive environment, the most fervent careerists will outcompete everybody else. And fervent careerists donāt produce revolutionary science."
[I added the bold and the italics]
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what a fascinating article. Thank you for that link. Itās fascinating to me, becuase Sanger is so huge in molecular biology and a lot of what Iām personally working with is some of the minutiae of molecular biology - not Sanger sequencing, but third generation sequencing, nanopore - and so much of what we do is funded by either donated money or shoestring grants, and so many of the people I work with are barely paid or volunteering their time.
And yet, I feel like I can call what weāre doing science. New species are being published, old holotypes are being sequenced despite the difficulties caused by age and harsh storage techniques, weāre writing papers to publish our findings and techniques, and almost all of it is being put in very cheap or free journals that are open access. Small time stuff right, things that might not get on the radar of places like Harvard but I have friends with the traditional degrees that are happy to work with me (and as I said above, Iām happy for my small contributions to have beneficial effects that may only be important to a few people. Charles Horton Peck or Alexander Smith may not be known that well in the greater scientific world, but goodness they were pillars in American mycology.)
Iāve definitely talked before about mycology being underfunded and neglected though, Iām absolutely positive that this helps with my ability to contribute - whatās the point in gatekeeping when no one has funding to fight over?
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Yes, I have an MS from the University of Vermontās Field Naturalist program, which is a non-thesis program housed in the botany department. I have no formal education in entomology (apart from one undergraduate-level course I took while in grad school) and have published 80+ papers about insects (and a couple of spiders) in peer-reviewed journals. My papers are often collaborations, but the coauthors who know more about insects than I do are generally taxonomists who work at museums; no academics are coming to mind. Just this year Iāve started describing some new species on my own, without the involvement of ārealā taxonomists. Anyone who wants to make scientific discoveries involving North American leaf-mining insects can check my spreadsheet of 1000+ mystery leaf mines and try some rearing to figure out what bugs are responsible for them. Basically all of my papers these days cite lots of iNat observations, and some of them have fellow non-academic iNat folks as coauthors (see my most recent blog post for one example).
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