Skeptics Say, ‘Do Your Own Research.’ It’s Not That Simple

nytimes.com

4 points·2OEH8eoCRo0··5 comments

"Do your own research" has become so cliche among antivaxers that it seems to mean "I think what I want and no amount of evidence will convince me otherwise", which is, sadly, the opposite of research.

No article relying on references to Dunning Krueger is complete without a comment pointing out the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...

To wit, a newspaper, telling people to trust experts, whose words are indelibly communicated by... Expert reporters of course!

Really need to stop even bothering to read the Times. Tends to do nothing but ruin my day.

David Dunning is one of the authors of the article.

I expected far more depth out of them than "I wrote this paper on e, and found that people in general adapt their behavior to a particular curve based on their habitual exposure to the unknown.

And I've not seen follow up work of the Dunning-Krueger curve taking into account prior knowledge of Dinning-Krueger either. So no points there.

Thirdly, I'm pretty sure everybody doing self-assessment a du jour at workplaces can be in some way attributed to this fellow's work. This does not currently get you points in my book.

Hmmm. Real research on a vaccine would require at least 30,000 subjects, several months, millions of dollars, and a bio lab. Getting a double blind research result would likely earn a PhD.

No, "do your own research is NOT that simple".

Research is hard. It is time and life consuming. It is also more fun than, as the saying goes, a "barrel (lab-full?) of monkeys".

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