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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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
Every time I hear westerners complain about how rough they had it during their cosplay COVID-19 lockdowns, I grind my bicuspids to a fine powder.
All y’all got nowhere near a real lockdown. It’s why your results were such utter shit.