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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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Is that what’s going on here? I was wondering because this post had originally accrued a whole bunch of downvotes initially and I figured this was one of the “safe” opinions to have around left-leaning people and I became very confused.
The downvotes now make more sense, but the opinion makes no sense at all.
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Interesting if you look at the beginning of the pandemic the Democrats and Republican positions were reversed, (ex: on masks) but COVID hit democratic states hardest first (being by the ocean) and that changed pretty quickly.
Had Trump still been president when the vaccine rolled out (he was highly in favour of a “light speed” recovery) I highly suspect that we would have seen a lot of left-wing people suddenly being far more skeptical (if not conspiratorial) - not because of anything to do with the science, but because of the person telling them to get vaccinated.
And because Americans just like to be partisan and contrary (I apologize to reasonable Americans in the audience).
If you’re actually looking for feedback: I admire your intent behind this community, but I think your approach could be improved which would lead to more participation in this community.
To facilitate discussion, more succinct and organized posts would greatly help. And remove that patronizing statement that you begin each of your posts with:
Remember: Up / Downvoting in this community is not an agree / disagree button. We upvote good or constructive conversation and downvote off-topic posts or badly-voiced opinions. If you disagree, you respond like a human in good faith and prove out your position.
I am definitely looking for feedback!
The initial disclaimer isn’t meant to be patronizing (and does not read as such to me), it is a reminder that we operate differently than the rest of Lemmy does for anyone that may wander in here from browsing All. Yes, we have the rules in the sidebar, but nobody reads the sidebar on mobile.
Our goal is not to bury unpopular opinions, but to discuss those opinions with the holder.
And you’re right that I have seen the open-ended topics to do better than the opinion pieces, but I always felt that the opinion pieces were a good start for people to work from. I welcome my mind being changed and new evidence being shown to me on any of those topics. The problem is is that we get an influx of angry downvotes anyway (often within seconds of posting, which means that it is not being read) and no comments.
Another problem we see are people coming in, commenting once to attack something stated, and then don’t show up when replied to with evidence.
Do you have a suggestion for an initial disclaimer that you wouldn’t see his condescending but still gets the message across?
I half understand how you feel but with how a lot of people are with anything even remotely controversial the downvote button really has become “This is an opinion I don’t like intuitively.”
Ex: On that other platform I can say something perfectly reasonable one place, get a ton of upvotes, in another, a ton of downvotes, and that can make for really samethink “only say safe things,” kinds of communities which frankly is extremely boring. I can get why it’s a thing.
Maybe the wording could be tweaked a little if it’s coming off as talking down to…but there are a lot people who could at least use a reminder to think about things a little more charitably even when they disagree with them.
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?”
I’m sorry, but even in scientific spaces, that’s pretty common for phase 1. That’s why the communication and refinement phase is so important. Biased humans produced biased results. The best way to mitigate is to test it against differently-biased humans. That’s why diversity of thought and ideas is so important in any scientific subfield.
Teaching the public to engage in phase 2 research means teaching the public to engage in constructive discussion and consensus building, as well as to challenge their own ideas and the ideas of people around them. I don’t think it will be easy, but I do believe that educating on phase 2 research is the ideal solution.
The model that I learned in High School is here. You’re correct in that it’s how a scientist or an analytical mind would do things. I also agree that we should teach how to do these better to the general population; they were taught to me in class and I remember them well, and I’m 40.
The people I was speaking about (antivaxxers, Facebook Moms, or deeply religious people) don’t operate with this model. They do get to your Step 1, but in the wrong order. Having grown up around these people nearly exclusively, the “Anti-Scientific Method” goes something like this:
Step 1: Feel a certain way (and be terrified of the opposite)
Step 2: Ask a (leading) question
Step 3: Look up unsourced, untested “evidence” (but only reinforcing evidence, anything to the contrary is to be discarded immediately)
Step 4: Test (by confirming with peers who feel the same as I do)
Step 5: Be satisfied that I was correct all along
You’re right that it should be the way laid out in the Scientific Method, but it isn’t. Some people just aren’t built that way.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I’ll keep it simple and say that I’m in general a fair bit more skeptical about authority, politicians and overreach (particularly during emergency situations) than you are. I don’t think the conclusions that authorities/media come to about science or how they choose to portray it should be accepted without question, nor should those who didn’t be silenced (and this was the case even among some professionals). They have self-interests which don’t necessarily at all times align with the public good.
I think people are right to have felt that some things were off, even if they were wrong to wholesale believe some particularly questionable explanations. I believe the average person has reasonably good intuitions but often gets the details wrong when the underlying factors that need to be understood are more complex and that’s where they end up making themselves look foolish.
I can agree that some of the governmental pushes worldwide weren’t terribly agile or well thought through, but what I was following at the time was what the current scientific consensus was.
The way the “silencing” worked that I witnessed was some discredited doctor who had lost their license would say he’d studied something, but wouldn’t submit to peer-review or data review. Then people who had studied things would roll their eyes and tell him to shut up because there was no science done by the dissenter in the first place.
That level of “science” is equivalent of getting a doctorate in “trust me bro.”
A skeptic seeks the truth regardless of their feelings. A conspiracy theorist follows their feelings regardless of the truth.
I often don’t have much time and the correct links at hand that’s why I sometimes say it.
