The problem with “doing your own research”

The basic message here seems to be "if you're not an expert, you're epistemically hopeless and any research you attempt to do will just entrench your own biases".

There is so much wrong here I don't know where to begin. I can't endorse such glib cynicism.

As a scientist, I couldn't stop laughing at "Evidence is collected and evaluated in an unbiased, objective manner, and those methods have to be available to other scientists for replication." If only. . .

> Conversely, when someone says they’re “doing their own research,” they mean using a search engine to find information that confirms what they already think is true.

Strawman, no? At least that's not how I do research.

Not to be rude, but this post just puts unwarranted faith in "science" and "experts".

For example, experts apparently collect evidence in "an unbiased, objective manner". What? Says who. Those "methods have to be available to other scientists for replication." Seems like an odd thing for an article with no author and two citations.

Frankly, there is no objective research, and fetishizing authority and "experts" (a group of people where, e.g., African Americans are underrepresented) is both harmful and dumb. There is a ton of literature on how science often does not follow it's systematic claims at all, check out Kuhn's work for an intro.

Her background seems legit

https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1188980

Center for Inquiry

Melanie Trecek-King is an Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts. With over twenty years’ experience in college and high school classrooms, she especially enjoys teaching students who don’t want to be scientists when they “grow up.” Several years ago, Trecek-King recognized the need for a general-education science course that focused less on facts and more on science as a way of knowing, so she created a novel course that uses pseudoscience, bad science, and science denial to engage students and teach science literacy, information literacy and critical thinking. The course, Science for Life, is now being taught at other institutions and is part of a new research effort attempting to revolutionize science education. Her passion for science education led her to create Thinking Is Power to provide accessible and engaging critical thinking information to the general public.

In addition to her work in the classroom, Prof. Trecek-King is the Founder and Chair of Massasoit’s Sustainable Landscaping Committee, which uses environmentally responsible landscaping practices to conserve natural resources, reduce and prevent pollution, benefit wildlife, and enhance ecosystem functioning. Under her leadership, the committee has replaced lawn with native gardens, edible gardens, rain gardens, and a wildflower meadow, transforming the campus into a wildlife habitat and providing food to the campus community. The changed landscape is now part of a thriving student research program that has found sustainable land-use practices to increase the diversity and abundance of native bees.

Trecek-King has a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Chemistry and a Master of Arts in Ecology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she studied prairie ecology, succession, the role of fire in ecosystems, and habitat restoration. In addition to her love of science, she is a mezzo soprano and a certified Choral Groupie, and has sung with some of the world’s greatest conductors and composers, including her fantastic husband Dr. Anthony Trecek-King.

> Evidence is collected and evaluated in an unbiased, objective manner, and those methods have to be available to other scientists for replication.

This is the ideal but its not common.

> Experts have advanced degrees, published research, and years of experience in their sub-field

Appeal to authority. Replication crisis. It's fairly clear at this point that getting published in scientific journals has little to do with expertise.

> Thinking one can “do their research” on scientific topics, such as climate change or mRNA vaccines, is to fool oneself.

Clear agenda.

> Their findings have to pass peer review, where other experts evaluate their work before it can be published.

Again, there is a known replication crisis.

> Most people seem to understand that science is trustworthy.

Science is not trustworthy, its not a monolith. Theories that have been tested and replicated are useful to better our understanding of the natural world.

> Unfortunately, the dangerous mixture of confirmation bias, misplaced trust, limited knowledge, and overconfidence is the perfect storm for being misled, and for many scientific issues the price of being wrong is just too high.

Completely glosses over the fact that so called scientists have been abusing their authority for monetary and political gain for decades.

This article goes into the issues of doing your own research but borderline handwaves the various issues with "trusting the experts". Unless you understand the research you're essentially trusting nothing more than the majority or the opinions of the establishment in an utterly blind way. You have no means to discern between an "expert" that is a total idiot and an "expert" that is a genius of great insight, you're basically just relying on social proof instead of scientific understanding.

This leads to MANY perverse situations. In cases where the truth is inconvenient to monied interests, monied interests can buy their way to a consensus by simply paying for a ton of scientists out of pocket to manufacture a consensus. Where this is insufficient, the same parties can use the media to promote certain scientific evidence over others. This article is filled with the presumption that somehow "trusting the experts" protects you from induction problems like searching only for evidence which only agrees with your opinion, but on the contrary it's actually pretty easy to find a meta-analysis which uses a neutral search strategy to get a relatively unbiased take on an issue, but if you get your scientific knowledge from the media and public bodies you're virtually always going to be getting more spin than is seen in a meta-analysis with a neutral search strategy.

Generally I think the entire article doesn't really appreciate the difficulties of having a neutral point of view simply by "trusting the experts". Early on with COVID the "Experts" were spouting the idea that masks didn't work, which I believe was premature to say, but they have the perverse incentive to bend the truth because they needed to secure the mask supply for medical professionals since they were more sure that masks did work for medical professionals so they hyped up the ineffectiveness of masks. This was a classic case of misalignment of incentives between the medical establishment, looking to clamp down on the pandemic, and individuals, looking to prevent THEMSELVES from getting disease. Yet it's sort of assumed by the article you just need to "trust the experts" as if they're going to give you advice that's true instead of advice that is useful for the purposes of protecting public health. I wisely ignored the experts, and trusted the evidence, and for that I was rewarded with additional protection against disease because I understood the experts didn't give a fuck about me as an individual.

yeah. any time i see that phrase I cringe... almost every single time its used in conjunction with conspiracy theories, or obviously biased preformed and stubbornly obstinately held views.

Lately I've noticed its become a dog whistle signal as well.

I want people to not follow one source of truth blindly, but that doesn't mean they should be finding their own sweet spot echo chamber and pitching a tent.

What about the personal growth that comes with doing my own research?

There's no timestamp with the article, so I can't verify when it was written. I must then conclude that it was written right before I read it.

Well a few weeks ago, Dunning-Kruger was invalidated as a statistical mistake, yet it is referenced here, in an article telling me to trust the experts. Irony upon irony.

Don't do your own research. Ignore the evidence of your lying eyes. Believe only my expert, whose statements are the official truth in all things. Anything but what my expert says is disinformation.

Although this topic is going to become a flame war, I would like to point out that the vast majority of people here are smarter in terms of raw IQ and skills than the people trying to "do their own research".

For example, as a scientist, you might scoff at,

> Evidence is collected and evaluated in an unbiased, objective manner, and those methods have to be available to other scientists for replication.

> Conversely, when someone says they’re “doing their own research,” they mean using a search engine to find information that confirms what they already think is true. We are all prone to confirmation bias, and the effect is especially powerful when we want (or don’t want) to accept a conclusion.

Because you know about p-hacking and shady research. But you have a sampling bias as an individual in the field. Everything that's wrong is often magnified and the good is minimized. (we do have a negativity bias in the kinds of news that spreads amongst us)

The state of science, for the most part, is healthy. As the replication crisis has shown, it's still possible to do good science, the crisis itself is proof of that. As is the fact that during the COVID-19 pandemic a lot of previously held assumptions of aerosols and transmission were overturned based on new evidence.

Yes, the sausage getting made is messy and it's filled with endless grad students, publish or perish, and arbitrary metrics. But when you compare this against the people this is aimed at, a person with barely a high school education unable to understand epistemology, you can see that you're comparing apples with motorcycles.

You have the ability and the mental toolkit available to you to sort through different claims, make simplified mental models and reason out the world. Most people do not.

The people on the other side of this comparison are the same groups of people who believe in "urine magic", https://old.reddit.com/r/h3h3productions/comments/qdmjcp/sne...

What's worse is that we have good reason to believe that such things aren't a sampling bias, they're endemic and a part of the background,

> In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory.

> With regard to the theory that childhood vaccines cause psychological disorders like autism and the government knows it, 69 percent had heard the idea, 20 percent agreed with it and 44 percent disagreed.

and

> 37% of the sample agreed that the Food and Drug Administration is intentionally suppressing natural cures for cancer because of drug company pressure; 20% agreed either that corporations were preventing public health officials from releasing data linking cell phones to cancer or that physicians still want to vaccinate children even though they know such vaccines to be dangerous

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

This was done in 2014, before the mass adoption of social media.

Maybe, when it comes to someone who doesn't have the tools nor the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality, it isn't such a good idea for them to "do their own research." And this is true for the majority of the public. Expertise and the differentiation of professions happened for a reason, the world is simply too complex for all of us to learn all of it and be proficient in the nitty gritty.

This absolutely places a lot of trust in experts and doctors, who've had an extremely disappointing past (to say the least). But it also signals and re-emphasizes their responsibility. And the importance for public-facing experts to make the best calls and to be held accountable to those calls; something that we can't do with Norman's great aunt and uncle on Facebook doing their own "research".

The knee jerk reaction to this article is painful to watch, although unsurprising.

Decent article. I would just add that there seems to be a common misunderstanding about the role of skepticism and falsification in science. A prevailing idea is that one only needs to identify a single flaw in a study or piece of research, conclude that the study is bunk, and throw the entire thing in the trash. We see it here on HN all of the time, but that's not how real science works. There is also the problem of selective skepticism, which is really just confirmation bias in disguise. One can remain skeptical of a result or claim for as long as one wishes, and this gives the appearance of scientific thought, but it is exactly the opposite. A more scientific approach is to look at everything in terms of strength of evidence; what are the strengths and the flaws of every study.

So this is a PSA: please don't be Fallacy Man [0] and throw out results based on flaws in a study unless they are critical. Moreover, it's true that you may not possess the requisite background to understand which flaws are critical and which are not. Skepticism is a necessary but not sufficient element in scientific methodology, and constantly refuting things does not a scientist make.

[0] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9