Even if one assumes them to be relatively honest brokers, the guidance issued by a government agency is (at its best) guidance intended to minimize the possibility of societal collapse, which may or may not also correlate with your attempts to maximize prevention of contracting an infectious disease that may kill you.
Thinking for yourself has never been a skill near as important as many people think it is. When looking at human endeavors the field of science and the scientific method is pretty damned new. I mean, maybe if you're the village leader thinking for yourself worked out, but if you were the lower on the organizational structure you might find yourself clubbed to death for questioning the boss too much.
By contrast people who do genuinely "do their own research" on topics tend to be pretty happy to share what they found, where, and why they think its significant. And they would love to be corrected if provably wrong, because its more of a lust for knowledge than anything else. And I think this is the sort of people our GP was talking about, whereas it seems you were talking about the aforementioned type.
Now someone can look at what you said and decide how confident they are with what you claim. From my perspective, I can take what you wrote as someone's honest opinion based on stuff that comes across their social feeds. I wouldn't treat it as ground truth, but I can feel confident that at least one person in the world has had that experience.
If someone makes a claim and points to a few studies that I can cross check, even if I'm not qualified to evaluate the studies, I can have some confidence that some domain experts have given evidence for the claim. I can also look for studies that contradict the claim, and in their absence, I can know that some experts believe xyz and I can't find any experts that disagree.
That's about the best I can do as a layman, and I think it's a lot better than nothing.
People doing their own research isn't what we're talking about.
People saying "Do your research!" and what it correlates with is what we're talking about.
If so, I can't imagine thats very effective. You're probably better off just assuming strangers don't know what they're talking about unless you have some good reason to believe otherwise.
If they had good information, they'd have good sources.
On HN I trust someone who's inviting nit-picking by saying "this is SOP, google it your damn self" a lot more than I trust someone citing their sources because there are a fair number prolific commenters who form an opinion and then back it up with cherry picked links as a debate tactic (moves the debate from one of their opinion to one of source credibility).
In synchronous communication or another context where I can't reasonably "just google it" the suggestion to do one's own research is a lot more suspect.
There's the old "trust but verify" saying that's relevant here. The person that cited their sources at least did some of that work for you, whereas the other person might have based their claim on random shit they overheard on the subway.
I don't understand this idea that showing less of your work is somehow more convincing.
Ultimately, if two people are at odds over something and I'm coming in blind, the one trying to keep me from hearing the other side has already discredited themselves.
How is that even debatable, barring an appeal to authority or something equally as tiresome and/or fallacious?
But this is circular reasoning: the very expectation that a conclusion will be reached through arbitrary research is equivalent to treating that conclusion as given fact.
This pattern leaves us open to define "research" in whatever arbitrary fashion we choose.
It's worth recognizing that research itself, at its core - before you even get to science, logic, academics, or any other strict behavior - is backstory. It's the context that defines a claim.
When we give the title "research" to a backstory, we classify it as a true story. But every story is invented! Very few stories are provably true from beginning to end. The ones that are exist in mathematics, and are called theorems.
So despite expressing confidence in the truthiness of a story, we are still in the weeds.
The way I see it, there are two expectations for how "your own research" is to be done. The first is true scientific and logical study. The second is religious repetition. The admonition itself cannot tell us which one we are dealing with. Ironically, the only way to know is to "do your own research".
In fact, I struggle to see how "do your own research" would be a reliable way to spread misinformation.
Can you provide an example of how that works? Even a hypothetical?
I personally hate that response. If you truly believe something is true, and you believe that you have evidence to back it up, you would show that evidence every chance you get.
Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should have some understanding of why they think the things they do, which should require "doing your own research" to some extent. But people who make bold claims and defer to telling people to do your own research without any kind of source for their claims is probably doing so because said claims don't have great evidence to back them up.
I do agree that the people that tell you not to do your own research and just appeal to authority shouldn't are the bad guys. "Do your own research" should be like saying "I am not a lawyer, but" - it should be used as a disclaimer of sorts after presenting an explanation of why you think your claim is true. "Here's what I think, here's why, but I could be wrong, so you should look into it yourself too."
That surely can't be a question asked in good faith though? Both the asker and the answerer will know that it is impossible for transwomen to menstruate, because they are male. So such a hostile response must be a slighter politer version of telling the asker to quit with the bullshit questions and piss off.
I hate to break it to you, but what you just said is transphobic. You're probably confused and don't believe me, and wish I would produce evidence. I don't want to get too off topic, so I will just say - wouldn't it be really annoying if all I said was "please educate yourself / do your own research"? That was my point.
also nice throwaway lol
So I think this must be a question used to point out to transwomen that they are not female. Which I expect many would get annoyed about and give a snappy answer to, as they want to be female and probably don't want to be reminded that they never really can be.
"It's not my job to educate you" is a response borne of extreme frustration with being repeatedly asked the same basic questions (that can easily be answered with Google), to the point of being suspicious that the questioner is acting in good faith. A common pattern is someone "playing innocent" in order to bait a Socratic dialogue out of someone. If you get this line often, it would be worth some self-reflection.
>If you truly believe something is true, and you believe that you have evidence to back it up, you would show that evidence every chance you get.
Meh. After being asked why I think the Earth is round for the hundredth time, with the most carefully considered answers invariably failing to convince my interlocutors, I'm now inclined to tell them to bugger off instead of wasting my energy. It's basically the fail2ban mitigation to DoS attacks.