[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"