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I have found that many people “doing their own research” are only searching for confirmation to their beliefs, and also seem to have a misunderstanding about what “research” actually entails.
If you’re a rational thinker and you believe you have a source that makes a good point, you’ll simply link that source directly, and maybe even explain how it supports the thing you believe. However, if you’re a conspiracy theorist who only has bad sources that can be easily disproven, you’ll become wary about linking to those sources directly or trying to explain what they mean to you, lest someone in the discussion completely blow your argument apart and laugh at you.
That’s why the imperative appeal to “do your own research” has developed - whether intentional or not, it’s a tailor-made strategy to protect bad sources (and bad thinking) from criticism. By telling people to do their own research rather than being up front about your sources and arguments, you try to push people into learning about the topic you want them to internalize while there are no dissenting voices present. It’s a tactic that separates discussion zones from “research” zones, so that “research” can’t be interrupted by reality.
People who actually have good points with good sources don’t need to do this. It’s only the people who are clinging onto bad, debunkable sources (or simple feelings) that need to vaguely tell people to “do their own research”. The actual scientific method is “help me disprove this theory. Only when we all fail can we consider this theory good enough for now, but we will continue looking for other theories that explain things better, and then try and disprove those too”.
No researcher tells another researcher on a level playing field to do their own research. They say, “What have you found? Let’s discuss it.” This is the way progress is made. There’s a reason we’re calling all this the culture wars and not the new renaissance.
Hell, even culture war is generous branding. It’s people living in reality against a loose coalition of people who just generally don’t like them because they’ve been trained to by the moneyed interests who have spent the last 30 years building a propaganda machine to weaponize them for political and financial gain.
The truly strange part is that the research you do as a civilian does not matter. If you somehow got a degree and ran an absolutely bulletproof years-long study in CURRENT THING, the people telling you to “do your own research” would be exactly the people who would not believe you because it would go against their preconceptions. They don’t care about research, they care about belief.
Looking things up online that conform to your viewpoint is not research, it is a means to entrench yourself.
Let’s Do An Experiment!
Right. So by your downvotes, I see that you don’t understand why the scientific method necessitates disregarding personal experience. Let’s show you an extremely simplified but basic example:
Let’s say that a person believes that cats simply do not exist.
Oh, they’ve seen cats before, but they think they’re just really small people covered in carpet and refuse to believe any evidence to the contrary.
Everyone else knows that cats exist; we know there is something wrong with this person.
Regardless, the person decides to do an “experiment” to prove it. They walk into their living room, glue carpet to their spouse, and then claim victory. They then document it stating that in their personal experience, they proved the one cat they found in the area was just a person with carpet glued to them. They gather support online, and publish it in a for-pay journal. The article is never peer-reviewed because the person refused to tell of their methodology, but people repost the “study”.
If science operated in a fashion that the “do your own research” people felt, then we should all believe this person.
Just because a single person has never seen a cat, or chooses not to acknowledge cats, doesn’t mean that factually cats do not exist. Even organizing a poor experiment and claiming they have done “research” does not make them correct. The burden of proof is still present, and a poor experiment is often blown apart in the scientific community or unrepeatable. This is why peer-review without an agenda is incredibly important.
If everything someone “saw with their own eyes” were true, then ghosts, aliens, demons, every God that has ever been worshipped (even though they preclude each other), mythical creatures, and countless other things are all true. All of them. That, or there is a flaw in the logic you are using.
Also, to most of the people here who will no doubt not read this as it may challenge your world view - plugging your ears and screaming as loud as you can to drown out the world does not make truth vanish.
Being insulting, blocking, or downvoting doesn’t mean that you’re correct.
I like to believe that people can be reached and the only outcome isn’t just shit-throwing matches and all-out war. However, if you’re not willing to debate in good faith, then there is no debate.
You have lost at the outset by not being willing to be incorrect.
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I would say as far as my genuine feelings I feel a bit torn about this one. I would say the people you describe definitely are a chunk of the people out there.
But just on principle alone it’s more interesting if I argue for a different angle:
Just as much as you get people saying “do your own research” you get people saying “trust the science,” usually people who themselves haven’t actually looked at the science and are just copy-pasting media headlines. (And as I’m sure you’ve heard, a lot of what makes it into the public conversation is the media twisting or exaggerating scientific findings beyond the certainty they actually show).
So in this context, “do your own research,” actually makes sense - for instance, when Corona started I got way ahea of the game by actually talking to my friend who was at the time doing his PhD in immunology, he recommended some videos on YouTube (which a paltry few thousand views) that were just lecture recordings of a professor talking about and breaking down to a class what had been discovered about Corona already.
From this I actually came to realize that the way the governments and media were portraying Corona in the beginning (we’re talking March-May 2020 sort of time period) was actually extremely misleading. Ex: We knew the half-life of Corona in the air was like, 3-4 hours, and that it was reasonably likely transmission was occuring that way, and that transmission by touch was very unlikely, yet we were still hearing a lot of “wash and sanitize” (and we still see sanitizing stations) which very likely do nothing at all.
Anyway for the love of God let’s please not have an extended Corona talk - the point that I wanted to get to here is that, compared to the information that was being publicly dessiminated by both governments and the media at the time, by doing my own (actual real) research, I got information I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Similarly, if there’s a topic that’s really contentious, or “the science” I’m seeing seems a little suspicious or incomplete I’ll suck it up and start looking at papers (which are linguistically and technically dreadfully inaccessible if you haven’t done a lot of research / you don’t know that field of science, but with persistence and a bit of extra learning you can get the gist of it). A lot of the time things in reality are at least a bit, if not a lot different than they’re being presented. After all, the sources that control public access to science themselves have biases and interests.
This is why, I think that people who say “trust the science” can be just as bad as those saying “do your own research” because usually those “trusting the science” aren’t closely taking a look at what they’re actually trusting (which often ends up being “trust how the government/media is talking about the science,” a far more precarious statement). To me, both groups smack of a lack of critical thinking - one group universally untrusting and the other the opposite.
Ultimately science is contingent on our rationality, and our ability to think critically - all the scientific instruments and research results in the world do no good in the hands of someone with poor reasoning or, for that matter, a lack of imagination (Einstein himself said it to be more important than a mastery of the rational side of the sciences - this is, after all, how we form hypothesis to test). That is to say, essentially, that if the way we reject, or accept science is in itself something resembling faith rather than considered critical thought, then we ourselves are not being scientific.
The last point I want to touch on is that I think, is that you can perfectly good science lead to bad policy. Not to beat it to death, but I think a lot of people feel governments overreacted / overreached with certain laws and policies, ostensibly based on good science, but without the science clearly pointing to that being a good practical way to handle people. (It’s essentially the age-old list a bunch of sound premises and then an unrelated conclusion - to many people that will seem like an argment that leads to a conclusion, especially people who are feeling afraid and panicked).
So, in situations like this you can have people who intuitively feel “This isn’t right,” but can’t put their finger on why, and then they get sucked into overtly incorrect conspiracies that confirm their feelings. (So their conclusion “This isn’t trustworthy/objective/reasonable,” is correct, but the theory they adopt to explain why is wrong). I think a lot of these things are fundamentally a little more complex than they initially seem, anyway, and most people at some level have a reasonable intuition that is correct that they’re going on, but where it’s leading them is not.
Personally, I have found that at least some “do your own research” people are people who genuinely doubt the public narrative (and with some good reason, ex: intuitively it lines up too conveniently with government/corporate interests) but they just don’t know how to look for good quality stuff/where it is. While you’re not going to get through to all of them, I think if you know someone who’s skeptical but reasonable it’s worth the time to sit down with them and show them a bit of what’s going on “under the hood” so to speak.
Overall, taking a less combattive approach when possible is something I’d always like to see more of, so even if people are being unreasonable, it’s important to extent grace and charity to them if you want to make things better. Be patient and find the people worth your time, and have a conversation about things, and be prepared to also be surprised that you might have not been totally right on some things you felt strongly about.
So, sure. “Trust the science” is said often. That’s because normal people going about their lives can’t test, verify, or disprove the science. Normal people who don’t carry out “the science” as their job can’t afford the time, education, experimentation, controls, or equipment to do anything except “trust the science.” They are simply not equipped to do so, and that’s okay.
At some point in every career, you need to trust experts, and as an expert in my field, I know nothing drives me nuts like someone with a casual understanding of my field telling me how wrong I am about something that I know inside and out.
“Do your own research” translated from Facebook commonly means “look some shit up, but only the shit that goes against the science, because if it didn’t, it would be the science.”
The people “doing their own research” have (for the most part) not done any research since high school science classes and feel that reading unsourced blogs is the same thing as actual research. This is not, and has never been, the case.
The stuff you mention about COVID was because they were being cautious at the outset. These variants hadn’t been studied yet, and as time went on, those who studied it changed what the recommendations were. That’s what you do, you learn and then adapt. That’s science. Corona viruses are one thing; COVID-19 was another. Even a detailed study on what came before can only get you so far.
Although I’m sure you’re correct about it, I was never told to clean my groceries when they got home by anyone. Recommendations around the world were a hot mess for a while and not every government was clear enough to say “do this for now” and corrected themselves along the way. Canada did pretty well on this front. The stations and other things were made available not because they were helpful later on, but simply because people wanted to feel like they were doing something. It was security theatre.
The stuff you mention about COVID was because they were being cautious at the outset.
Not bloody cautious enough! We knew here around March/April 2020 that COVID-19 was airborne. The CDC finally acknowledged that maybe COVID-19 might just possibly be airborne (but probably not) in 2021. Even now they won’t come out an unequivocally call it airborne. Which is why the pandemic isn’t over and why the current resurgences are happening.
Which brings us to the real problem with the “do your own research” and the “trust the science” crowds both: trust.
The problem is that between economic interests, political interest, click-bait “journalism” (itself exacerbated by 24-hour news cycles), and scientific arrogance there is very little trust left:
- A lot of health-related reportage (including COVID-19) “hurts” billionaires¹ so billionaire-owned hack rags (by which is meant the “free” press) distorts, misdirects, or otherwise squelches the actual science. No trust to be found there.
- A lot of governments, for one reason or another (in the west because of having to face the next election—or possibly because of being bought, in dictatorships because of “face”, etc.), don’t like to acknowledge policy failures that lead to deaths. The same applies to large bureaucratic institutions (like the aforementioned CDC). So once again, distortions, misdirections, and outright deceit come into play.
- Journalism, never a particularly noble institution, has degraded since 1980 when CNN introduced the 24-hour news cycle to the world. As everybody and their dog raced to match it, reporting became, to fill the many, many, many hours that had to be filled without ceasing, more speculation, opinion, rumour-mongering and otherwise ill-considered, badly-written, badly-delivered pabulum. The arrival of the WWW forcing even the last bastions of what was left of decent journalism—print journalism—to pander to ad-clicks just hammered the last nail into the coffin of what was once at best semi-respectable, turning all journalism into yellow journalism for all practical purposes. And this is a broad-band problem covering popular journalism as well as niche genre journalism like science reporting or even silly things like games. How is an average person supposed to “trust the science” if they have no accessible source of it? (Conversely, how is “doing your own research” supposed to help when there’s no accessible source of accurate information, just very strident misinformation?)
- And this leads us inexorably to the final problem: scientists are arrogant to the point of stupidity and self-harm. Scientists want to be believed, but aren’t willing to learn how to communicate to non-peers. Scientists publish half-results (like a recent one that linked tea to certain classes of harmful chemicals) that get duly, and badly, summarized in the science press for maximum doom-scrolling ad-clicking that completely misrepresent the study’s half-conclusions (in this case, the chemicals involved probably came from the packaging, not the tea, but the study didn’t bother to test or control for this!). They don’t do anything to make what’s actually said in the study easy for laypeople (including “science journalists”) to find, arrogantly believing it’s not their job, but neither do they push back against people who misrepresent their work because they’re secretly (or not-so-secretly in the cases of people like Tyson and his ilk) pleased as punch that they’re being quoted in the public press and don’t want to lose that.
So both “do your own research” and “trust the science” are flip sides of the same problem: it’s very difficult for lay people to be even slightly informed these days because there’s many active and passive forces both working to keep people ignorant and/or focused on irrelevancies/inaccuracies. “Do your own research” is the “fight” response and “trust the science” is the “flight” response, with neither being a good response, but humans beings will human.
¹I put “hurts” in “scare quotes” because if you have even “only” a billion dollars, not to mention multiples of it, it’s very difficult to even be mildly irritated by even seven-figure expenditures if you’re a sane person. It’s just that billionaires aren’t sane people.
I would actually say I’ve seen this go both ways too - I was in Japan in 2020 and there were very much in denial about COVID likely in part because it happened just before the Olympics were supposed to (economically disastrous for a country already struggling).
Conversely, once they started to actually have public policy on it, their restrictions were significantly more moderate than in most places in Canada - in my prefecture aside from an initial month of lockdown I never stopped working, as a teacher, in-person, teaching hundreds of students a week. I could still go eat food with colleagues most times, and our infection numbers rarely exceeded double digits in the whole prefecture. How did we do it?
Our prefecture took more of a laser-focused approach to things - when infections started upticking they would make rules like “no eating at restaurants open after 8pm” and had 5 levels of very oddly specific rules about things you could and couldn’t do in public. They often targeted shutting remotely resembling nightlife first because a lot of infections would come from anything that looked like that. Looking at some places in Canada which were being far more draconian (and doing worse) from a public policy end it felt that the Japanese “Don’t ask for more than people can do,” was more successful. (Of course this was less the case for places like Osaka, Tokyo, etc but even they were on the whole less strict than, say BC).
Would a more Japanese approach have worked in Canada? Hard to say, but I think there is a case to be made that some restrictions were asking for more than a lot of people were willing to give. Essentially, knowing people and good public policy isn’t necessary the same as understanding science, because you have to consider what people are willing to comply with, and what is asking too much, whether certain things will backfire, what downsides there are to policy, etc. and it’s reasonable for us as citizens to have objections (one way or the other) - I would even go so far as to say that’s part of our civic duty.
Japan did pretty well, yes, as did Korea and China. But to answer this question:
Would a more Japanese approach have worked in Canada?
No. Because Canadians are too selfish; lack any social cohesion. The artificial bifurcation of society into a “left” and a “right”—one of the worst imports from our southern neighbours—with literally everything filtered through that divide’s perceptions is not as strong as the USA … yet. It is there, however, and as a result people are more interested in scoring tribal points in the short term than keeping a deadly disease from killing fellow citizens in the long term.
While Canadians continue to let American “culture” (for want of a better term) to infect the country, things will get worse, not better, and when, not if, a serious disease pops up—a disease that isn’t as wimpy as COVID-19 was, all things considered—Canada will collapse into a diseased land of plague and misery.
Look toward so-called “Zombie Deer Disease” for a very frightening picture of the next potential pandemic. It has a long gestation period, can lie dormant in a variety of environments for months or more, and is almost impossible to destroy. (600°C isn’t enough to kill it. You have to heat it to 1000°C to destroy it.) Oh, and it’s 100% fatal in infected cases. If that thing jumps across species to hit humans, pretty much all of North America is gone. Places with stronger social bonds (like Japan, Korea, China, etc.) might have a chance of coming out the other side. Canada and the USA will be gone.
I think that’s probably the standard sentiment but I do think a “somewhat less strict approach in some cases,” might have been better.
There’s this sort of thing in leadership/negotiation where if you show that you feel people are untrustworthy and you’re too strict with them, a good portion will essentially tell you where to go and how to get there by completely ignoring your demands. I feel as though there were at least some areas where we could have borrowed at least a little from that idea.
That is very much a cultural issue. People in Wuhan, for example, in the Great Lockdown of 2020 largely went through it in relatively good humour. Do the same thing in New York City and you’d have riots and the city would be on fire. This is because the people of Wuhan understood they were doing short-term suffering to prevent large-scale death. New Yorkers would be saying “fuck that guy, I want my hair cut”.
I mean look at the incredible whining in the west at the gross inconvenience 🙄 of putting a few grams of paper over their mouths and noses. It’s literally the least you could do to cut the spread of the disease and they squealed like stuck pigs at the thought they might have to do this little triviality to save their fellow citizens.
About half the people in the metro every morning and evening when I go to and from work still wear masks here, by way of comparison.
I would agree that there were some things people were far too angry about that barely mattered. The excessive fighting over the mask thing was definitely the biggest.
That said, in BC rules were so strict at several points that you couldn’t see anyone outside of family living with you, regardless of how you did it (ex: meet up in a park and stand 2m apart? Not good enough. Realistically? Near-zero risk). Rules regarding parents in old folks homes were so draconian that parents passed away without their children being able to see them. Quite a few people offed themselves too.
Staying in Japan I was able to, short of bigger social events, avoiding travel to major centres (I did once to buy a car) and wearing a mask, live reasonably similarly to how I did pre-Corona (in a city of ~90,000). So the contrast was quite stark when I heard about how things were in the west.
Ok, but there are three main phases of research.
Phase 1 is what you are describing as “do your own research”. You formulate a hypothesis and you collect references that together seem to support it.
That’s an important step! And it comes easily to most humans. But it’s important to keep going. However, it’s also important to understand why most people don’t. Phase 1 research is as far as we teach in high school. “Write a paper and cite your sources, find sources that support your argument.” We don’t teach our population to engage in any further steps of research.
Phase 2 is engaging in an open discussion about the topic with other people who have researched it. This can happen through literature/publication (publication of phase 1 research was originally the purpose of publishing a “letter” instead of a “paper”, but now letters are used for basically everything), a journal club, a research group, a conference… Share your idea and its justifications with the broader community, who study other aspects of that topic. They may have a perspective that contradicts your hypothesis (scenario A) or that develops it (scenario B).
Phase 3A is to come up with experimental tests between the various hypotheses from various perspectives encountered in 2, and publish a paper to share the result.
Phase 3B is to then test the corollary hypotheses encountered in 2, and publish a paper to share the result.
We shouldn’t discourage phase 1 research. It’s super important, and it’s a good idea to encourage our populace to practice and engage with it. However, the nuance is that we also need to be clear that a phase 1 result is not to be given the same level of trust as a phase 3 result. Again, I think the problem comes back to our public education system. We only ever encounter phase 1.
I think the problem is also a matter of accessibility. The internet has made performing phase 1 research accessible to all! This has flooded the body of ideas accepted by the public with phase 1 results that have not been properly tested. It’s how we were all taught in high school.
The problem is that people don’t understand that there is a next phase. That next phase is also extremely inaccessible to most people, compared to using the internet for phase 1 research. Phase 2 is the communication phase. Phase 2 is inaccessible to most people who aren’t researchers in the field. Most of the conversation between scientists in phase 2 is considered private, and needs to stay that way for the system to work. Most people don’t have access to these private networks of social interaction, and therefore have never engaged in a phase 2 research interaction. The topics being discussed are also very jargony and technical and full of complex concepts that are difficult to traverse for a novice, adding another accessibility barrier.
We need to start getting our population to practice all three phases of research, not just phase 1 which they got practice at in high school. We need to first teach phase 2, which is writing, presenting, discussing, and collaboratively refining ideas.
I would argue that most people don’t even complete Step 1, and couldn’t complete the next steps even if they wished to. They find a source, but they don’t evaluate them beyond an initial “does it agree with me” sniff-test. This is what one major problem during COVID was.
Side story: I had people telling me that unsourced anti-vax blogs talking about a doctor (who worked there) who gave a speech in a small city where my brother was born were more valid than any study I could show stating that yes, masks functioned provided you didn’t use a dogshit one, and yes, COVID was real, and yes, it was killing people.
I recorded myself calling the hospital and had a conversation with the person who answered who laughed and said they’d had calls about that “speech” before, but there was nobody who had ever worked there by that name and that no speech ever happened. They asked where it came from, and I said it was from some dumb blog and told her what to search for to find it.
I posted the audio on the group with a transcript. They called it fake. I gave the number of the hospital and the name of the person I spoke to and told them to verify. I was called a government plant. These people are not logical in my experience. They do not carry out Step 1 because their Step 1 is “What do I feel is correct?”
