[FeepingCreature]

We may be inundated with too much data, and more information may not improve our situation, but appointing any person or institution to limit our information inflow will certainly worsen things.

I fully stand with thezvi's points over at https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/on-investigating-con... ; especially 1 to 3:

1. Think for yourself, shmuck!

2. When it seems worthwhile, do your own research.

3. The ones telling you not to ‘do your own research’ are probably the baddies.

[WJW]

Maybe this is my personal bubble, but the group of people who most loudly tells other people to "do your own research" seems to consist mostly of conspiracy theorists and scam artists. Not seldom their own research is of the "go outside and you can see for yourself that the earth is flat" type, too.

[FeepingCreature]

Yes, which is exactly the problem. Thinking for yourself, a vital skill, has been surrendered to scam artists. This doesn't just harm misinformed people, it also harms science as a field.

[pixl97]

"Has been"???

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.

[temphypercube]

Thinking for yourself doesn't mean blurting out things that'll get you clubbed. Think for yourself, construct the most accurate view of the world and the people in it you can, run little trials and experiments if you have to, and then say the string of words that will get the leader clubbed.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Thinking for yourself also means knowing your limits. It's OK to defer to experts such as the CDC.

[bmelton]

Knowing your limits is good advice. Equally good is knowing the limits (and motives) of those you might defer to.

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.

[somenameforme]

I think you and GP may be speaking of different types of people and motivations. Somebody who makes an outrageous claim and follows up to criticism or questions with "do your own research" is almost certainly full of poo.

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.

[yesenadam]

That reminds me that I have a book from about 2000 by a Australian author, called "Ideas Generation". A few years after it came out, she was in the news from getting caught plagiarising magazine articles. Which seemed ironic. I can't find any trace of that scandal online now. As if it never happened...

[msla]

That isn't just your bubble, certainly: "Do your own research" is a pretty reliable marker for people with unreliable information.

[CaptWillard]

How does that even work, though?

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?

[dsfyu404ed]

It really depends on context.

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.

[ifyoubuildit]

> 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 [...]

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.

[ifyoubuildit]

What were the steps that got you to this conclusion?

[ruszki]

Random searches for this phrase on Twitter seems to back this up somewhat. From the first about 100 which I was made, about 2/3rd was about some obvious misinformation, and a deeper analysis would probably take it higher. However, there is definitely a bias here, because I’ve only encountered with this phrase before from people “backing” obvious COVID, vaccine or Trump misinformation.

[ifyoubuildit]

Sounds like you just did your own research, no? And you sort of cited your source.

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.

[msla]

> Sounds like you just did your own research, no?

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.

[thomastjeffery]

When someone tells you, "Do your own research", where are they coming from? Having done their own research. Because they believe in their conclusions, they have built for themselves an expectation that when you do your own research, you will reach the same conclusions they have.

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".

[CaptWillard]

In 2023, labeling people as "conspiracy theorists" is a much bigger red flag for the (deliberately or not) misinformed than urging someone 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?

[colpabar]

I'll give an example that I'm sure the gp did not have in mind, but it's one that I see somewhat often. If you ever ask a question online about trans ideology, such as a basic question about biology like "do trans woman menstrate?", a lot of people will say things like "it's not my job to educate you."

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."

[dTal]

Why are you even asking "basic questions about biology"?

"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.

[m_reiko]

> If you ever ask a question online about trans ideology, such as a basic question about biology like "do trans woman menstrate?", a lot of people will say things like "it's not my job to educate you."

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.

[colpabar]

> it is impossible for transwomen to menstruate, because they are male

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

[ruszki]

My own research tells me that your question cannot be in good faith. Google tells pretty clearly, that menstruation means a different thing with similar aspects. If you had asked that in good faith you would have definitely used the expression “menstruation symptoms”.

[stronglikedan]

Definitely a bubble, if you think it's limited to a few groups of people. But seeing as how the "conspiracy theorists" have an outstandingly good track record, maybe there's something to it when they say it.

[jl6]

Doing your own research is a great idea and more people should do it!

Reading the existing literature and keeping up to date with new publications; studying the general subject area for, say, 3 years to get to at least an undergraduate level of understanding; studying statistics and experimental design; planning experiments and analysis and obtaining critical feedback from peers to mitigate the chance of errors; attempting to reproduce the results of others working in this area…

[FeepingCreature]

See, the problem is, you get people who have studied for a lot more than three years, and then you get the replication crisis. Do you think that could be avoided by requiring more education? And I see people correctly calling out problems with papers that have done a lot less than three years of effort: sometimes the issues are a lot more basic than that. As usual, verification is cheaper than computation; studying gives you (hopefully!) a better chance to get things right but it doesn't immunize you from getting things wrong. And peer review didn't stop blatant photoshopping [1]; though the person who found them is a scientist, one cannot imagine that her coursework included "spotting rotated or mirrored pictures in a paper".

So no, it doesn't even take an undergraduate level of understanding to contribute, and you don't need a degree to beat the experts (sometimes). I think you're envisioning a world where science is "mostly okay" and at any rate mostly inexploitable: chess computers may make mistakes, but you certainly can't catch them in one. Whereas I think people have been espousing this view of science for so long, and marginalizing citizen science for so long, that there are now many opportunities for personally invested individuals to spot things that people with degrees missed.

So sure, some people will fall for conspiracy theories. Some people will fall for fraud. Some people will simply believe wrong things. But "science" as an institution (ie. excepting the sense that any such study is science) does not deserve any sort of monopoly on finding out true things, and claiming otherwise does both the scientific community and the populace at large a disservice.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien...

[marginalia_nu]

I think this is a big part of the problem. It also means trusting the experts difficult, as it's really hard as a layman to know who is an expert. Most conspiracy theories in fact have their own experts they call upon.

I keep seeing discussions that go like preprint/abstract pokemon battles where everyone's just throwing out papers they don't understand that seem to corroborate their point as though that was enough.

If you can't read the papers, and don't understand their context in the field, then you really shouldn't be drawing conclusions from them. In science, you always start with "I don't know". If you see evidence that you don't understand, then you still don't know.

[the_snooze]

>I keep seeing discussions that go like preprint/abstract pokemon battles where everyone's just throwing out papers they don't understand that seem to corroborate their point as though that was enough.

It's the same phenomenon among people who learn logical fallacies for the first time. Instead of using that knowledge to improve their own framing and arguments, they instead use it as insta-kill magic spells to "win" arguments without actually bothering to understand the opposition.

Intellectual humility and curiosity are in short supply, especially in online spaces where you're rewarded for combat and engagement.

[marginalia_nu]

I think that's part of it, but I think it's mostly an artifact of a generation being taught that "reputable sources" is be-all end-all evidence, and critical thinking is the same as checking the existence of these sources.

That was possibly sound advice in the past, but it's definitely severely incomplete advice in the modern information ecosystem.

The pseudoscience people aren't eschewing science in favor of the emerald tablet of hermes trismegistus and drawing conclusions from seances and divining rods. More often than not, they draw on published articles too.

[geysersam]

You make a very important point!

But I interpreted the comment you answered to as saying that doing your own research is time consuming/costly. And requiring people to "do their own research" is often infeasible.

[mihaic]

Ditto, all this is exactly what I do when I want to try some new type of chocolate bar from the supermarket, and want to understand the nutritional, economic and moral implications of what I'm doing.

[chrisco255]

Come now, there are certainly heuristics with which you move about and make decisions in the world every day without investing 3 years a piece on. And even when you desire to seek the advice of some trusted expert, you rely on heuristics and biases to inform your decision on which one to trust.

[jl6]

Sure, but I don’t call it research.

[hutzlibu]

Yes, but in the common language this is what it is called. And researching the existing literature is proper scientific research btw. so you can do scientific research, without going all in, like you seemed to imply.

[rafabulsing]

"Do your own meta-analysis"

[UncleOxidant]

> do your own research

Sure, yes do that, but that doesn't address the issues brought up in the article ( "3. We are all conspiracy theorists now." and "4. Actually, we’re all cultists now.") how to ensure you're not just being sucked into an info-cult, an echo-chamber?

The answer in the article seems to be more "analog" friendship - I'm assuming he means actual in-person interaction. And while that's important, I also like _why the lucky stiff's recommendation: "when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.” Make stuff.

In addition, given the firehose of information we face daily, doing your own research easily could become a full time job.

[lapcat]

I wish that people thought for themselves and did their own research. In that case, we'd get countless different, nuanced opinions.

Instead, we mostly get a tiny number of stereotypical opinions that people passively acquire from their favored forms of media. As if listening to Joe Rogan for example were "doing research".

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

The "do you own research" line is often abused to dismiss experts or send you on a wild goose chase.