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I have found that many people “doing their own research” are only searching for confirmation to their beliefs, and also seem to have a misunderstanding about what “research” actually entails.
If you’re a rational thinker and you believe you have a source that makes a good point, you’ll simply link that source directly, and maybe even explain how it supports the thing you believe. However, if you’re a conspiracy theorist who only has bad sources that can be easily disproven, you’ll become wary about linking to those sources directly or trying to explain what they mean to you, lest someone in the discussion completely blow your argument apart and laugh at you.
That’s why the imperative appeal to “do your own research” has developed - whether intentional or not, it’s a tailor-made strategy to protect bad sources (and bad thinking) from criticism. By telling people to do their own research rather than being up front about your sources and arguments, you try to push people into learning about the topic you want them to internalize while there are no dissenting voices present. It’s a tactic that separates discussion zones from “research” zones, so that “research” can’t be interrupted by reality.
People who actually have good points with good sources don’t need to do this. It’s only the people who are clinging onto bad, debunkable sources (or simple feelings) that need to vaguely tell people to “do their own research”. The actual scientific method is “help me disprove this theory. Only when we all fail can we consider this theory good enough for now, but we will continue looking for other theories that explain things better, and then try and disprove those too”.
No researcher tells another researcher on a level playing field to do their own research. They say, “What have you found? Let’s discuss it.” This is the way progress is made. There’s a reason we’re calling all this the culture wars and not the new renaissance.
Hell, even culture war is generous branding. It’s people living in reality against a loose coalition of people who just generally don’t like them because they’ve been trained to by the moneyed interests who have spent the last 30 years building a propaganda machine to weaponize them for political and financial gain.
The truly strange part is that the research you do as a civilian does not matter. If you somehow got a degree and ran an absolutely bulletproof years-long study in CURRENT THING, the people telling you to “do your own research” would be exactly the people who would not believe you because it would go against their preconceptions. They don’t care about research, they care about belief.
Looking things up online that conform to your viewpoint is not research, it is a means to entrench yourself.
Let’s Do An Experiment!
Right. So by your downvotes, I see that you don’t understand why the scientific method necessitates disregarding personal experience. Let’s show you an extremely simplified but basic example:
Let’s say that a person believes that cats simply do not exist.
Oh, they’ve seen cats before, but they think they’re just really small people covered in carpet and refuse to believe any evidence to the contrary.
Everyone else knows that cats exist; we know there is something wrong with this person.
Regardless, the person decides to do an “experiment” to prove it. They walk into their living room, glue carpet to their spouse, and then claim victory. They then document it stating that in their personal experience, they proved the one cat they found in the area was just a person with carpet glued to them. They gather support online, and publish it in a for-pay journal. The article is never peer-reviewed because the person refused to tell of their methodology, but people repost the “study”.
If science operated in a fashion that the “do your own research” people felt, then we should all believe this person.
Just because a single person has never seen a cat, or chooses not to acknowledge cats, doesn’t mean that factually cats do not exist. Even organizing a poor experiment and claiming they have done “research” does not make them correct. The burden of proof is still present, and a poor experiment is often blown apart in the scientific community or unrepeatable. This is why peer-review without an agenda is incredibly important.
If everything someone “saw with their own eyes” were true, then ghosts, aliens, demons, every God that has ever been worshipped (even though they preclude each other), mythical creatures, and countless other things are all true. All of them. That, or there is a flaw in the logic you are using.
Also, to most of the people here who will no doubt not read this as it may challenge your world view - plugging your ears and screaming as loud as you can to drown out the world does not make truth vanish.
Being insulting, blocking, or downvoting doesn’t mean that you’re correct.
I like to believe that people can be reached and the only outcome isn’t just shit-throwing matches and all-out war. However, if you’re not willing to debate in good faith, then there is no debate.
You have lost at the outset by not being willing to be incorrect.
Ok, but there are three main phases of research.
Phase 1 is what you are describing as “do your own research”. You formulate a hypothesis and you collect references that together seem to support it.
That’s an important step! And it comes easily to most humans. But it’s important to keep going. However, it’s also important to understand why most people don’t. Phase 1 research is as far as we teach in high school. “Write a paper and cite your sources, find sources that support your argument.” We don’t teach our population to engage in any further steps of research.
Phase 2 is engaging in an open discussion about the topic with other people who have researched it. This can happen through literature/publication (publication of phase 1 research was originally the purpose of publishing a “letter” instead of a “paper”, but now letters are used for basically everything), a journal club, a research group, a conference… Share your idea and its justifications with the broader community, who study other aspects of that topic. They may have a perspective that contradicts your hypothesis (scenario A) or that develops it (scenario B).
Phase 3A is to come up with experimental tests between the various hypotheses from various perspectives encountered in 2, and publish a paper to share the result.
Phase 3B is to then test the corollary hypotheses encountered in 2, and publish a paper to share the result.
We shouldn’t discourage phase 1 research. It’s super important, and it’s a good idea to encourage our populace to practice and engage with it. However, the nuance is that we also need to be clear that a phase 1 result is not to be given the same level of trust as a phase 3 result. Again, I think the problem comes back to our public education system. We only ever encounter phase 1.
I think the problem is also a matter of accessibility. The internet has made performing phase 1 research accessible to all! This has flooded the body of ideas accepted by the public with phase 1 results that have not been properly tested. It’s how we were all taught in high school.
The problem is that people don’t understand that there is a next phase. That next phase is also extremely inaccessible to most people, compared to using the internet for phase 1 research. Phase 2 is the communication phase. Phase 2 is inaccessible to most people who aren’t researchers in the field. Most of the conversation between scientists in phase 2 is considered private, and needs to stay that way for the system to work. Most people don’t have access to these private networks of social interaction, and therefore have never engaged in a phase 2 research interaction. The topics being discussed are also very jargony and technical and full of complex concepts that are difficult to traverse for a novice, adding another accessibility barrier.
We need to start getting our population to practice all three phases of research, not just phase 1 which they got practice at in high school. We need to first teach phase 2, which is writing, presenting, discussing, and collaboratively refining ideas.
I would argue that most people don’t even complete Step 1, and couldn’t complete the next steps even if they wished to. They find a source, but they don’t evaluate them beyond an initial “does it agree with me” sniff-test. This is what one major problem during COVID was.
Side story: I had people telling me that unsourced anti-vax blogs talking about a doctor (who worked there) who gave a speech in a small city where my brother was born were more valid than any study I could show stating that yes, masks functioned provided you didn’t use a dogshit one, and yes, COVID was real, and yes, it was killing people.
I recorded myself calling the hospital and had a conversation with the person who answered who laughed and said they’d had calls about that “speech” before, but there was nobody who had ever worked there by that name and that no speech ever happened. They asked where it came from, and I said it was from some dumb blog and told her what to search for to find it.
I posted the audio on the group with a transcript. They called it fake. I gave the number of the hospital and the name of the person I spoke to and told them to verify. I was called a government plant. These people are not logical in my experience. They do not carry out Step 1 because their Step 1 is “What do I feel is correct?”
I’m sorry, but even in scientific spaces, that’s pretty common for phase 1. That’s why the communication and refinement phase is so important. Biased humans produced biased results. The best way to mitigate is to test it against differently-biased humans. That’s why diversity of thought and ideas is so important in any scientific subfield.
Teaching the public to engage in phase 2 research means teaching the public to engage in constructive discussion and consensus building, as well as to challenge their own ideas and the ideas of people around them. I don’t think it will be easy, but I do believe that educating on phase 2 research is the ideal solution.
The model that I learned in High School is here. You’re correct in that it’s how a scientist or an analytical mind would do things. I also agree that we should teach how to do these better to the general population; they were taught to me in class and I remember them well, and I’m 40.
The people I was speaking about (antivaxxers, Facebook Moms, or deeply religious people) don’t operate with this model. They do get to your Step 1, but in the wrong order. Having grown up around these people nearly exclusively, the “Anti-Scientific Method” goes something like this:
Step 1: Feel a certain way (and be terrified of the opposite)
Step 2: Ask a (leading) question
Step 3: Look up unsourced, untested “evidence” (but only reinforcing evidence, anything to the contrary is to be discarded immediately)
Step 4: Test (by confirming with peers who feel the same as I do)
Step 5: Be satisfied that I was correct all along
You’re right that it should be the way laid out in the Scientific Method, but it isn’t. Some people just aren’t built that way.