[renewiltord]

Classic principal-agent problem. It's why you can't usually trust experts who aren't aligned with you. One way is skin in the game.

But I suppose "if you aren't paying, you're not the customer" applies as well to nutrition and medicine as it does to free webmail.

[cempaka]

In light of this news, how should we reevaluate some of the recent admonishments to "trust the experts" and "don't do your own research"?

[marcosdumay]

Are you talking about doing your own research or sheepishly believing on what some random person you like preaches to you?

One of those work, the other is what people that say they "did their own research" usually do.

[cempaka]

The "trust the authorities" perspective currently en vogue is certainly not that "doing your own research works." It's that one needs an MD or PhD in a medical field in order to evaluate research, and hence should defer judgment on personal decisions to such qualified individuals (or more often, in practice, to institutions which purport to speak for them like the AMA, AAP, or American Diabetes Association).

[Dylan16807]

> "don't do your own research"

Does anybody say that? I see a lot of "some guy making a convincing-seeming argument on youtube is not doing your own research unless you fact check it by legitimately looking for omitted or incorrect statements, because there's a million crazy echo chambers out there".

"Do your own research" can be a red flag, but only because so many people are bad at research, not because research is bad. It's important to look for comprehensive information and not just search for what you already think is correct.

other comment> The "trust the authorities" perspective currently en vogue is certainly not that "doing your own research works." It's that one needs an MD or PhD in a medical field in order to evaluate research, and hence should defer judgment on personal decisions to such qualified individuals (or more often, in practice, to institutions which purport to speak for them like the AMA, AAP, or American Diabetes Association).

It's not that you need it, it's that you'd better put serious effort in to make up for it, and you need to take scientific consensus very seriously (Which is not the same as listening to the most prominent voices. But if almost every expert top to bottom is saying the same thing, they're almost certainly right.)

And for 95% of things, you're not going to put in enough research to understand from base principles. So if you're outsourcing, outsource to someone competent.

[renewiltord]

I trust my ability to perform research. For those who don't, they should probably just go along with whomever they trust.