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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 th

• mihaic 4y ago
  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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• chrisco255 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Sure, but I don’t call it research.
    • hutzlibu 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      "Do your own meta-analysis"
• FeepingCreature 4y ago
  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/science-fraud-image-manipulation-photoshop.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien...
  • geysersam 4y ago
    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.
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    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.