4 ms·

> you have already lost the debate from a long term point of view I don't get what this is alluding to - can you expand, specifically wrt the long term part?

by greggoB 8mo ago

Schmerika 8mo ago
Not OP but I would have hoped that it is self-evidently good if not great for a population to be capable and motivated to research things for themselves without solely relying on authorities and institutions. Especially when so many of those entities are wildly rotten and corrupt; but even if they weren't.
- igor47 8mo ago
  Capable -- yes. Having to actually do it -- no. I would prefer to live in a world where I can depend on my fellow humans instead of living out a fantasy of self-sufficiency. The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
  - Schmerika 8mo ago
    > The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it. Out of the 27 authors of Daszak's Lancet paper, used worldwide to claim that Coronavirus couldn't have come from a lab, how many had a conflict of interest? How many news outlets repeated their claims verbatim, rather than reading it themselves to find the obvious 'errors'? And how many academic institutions pointed out its flaws? ... Too old an example? Ok - how many institutions sat on the Epstein files, lied about them, kept them sealed, etc, for decades? How many political leaders and business owners worldwide had direct links themselves? How many media companies are giving adequate attention to climate change, and refusing to run ads from fossil fuel companies? How many institutions/countries dared to tell Biden that arming genocide and vetoing ceasefires isn't actually okay? How many countries have sanctioned the perpetrators? Read anything about EPA corruption lately? How about what ICE have been doing? Anyone in DOGE face any accountability for permanently compromising key government databases yet? Because again, if you're relying on media and institutions to get your news on these things you might think everything is fine. It really, really isn't though. You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid. ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough. Quite the opposite.
    - greggoB 8mo ago
      > You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid. So again, how do you propose one actually does this? Via crowdsourcing on FB? AI-generated news gathering? Consulting with a medium? Like what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences? Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, with an ideally healthy array of outlets having overlapping coverage of the same events. Within this framework, "do your own research" would be called "reading broadly". > ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough. I have been around long enough to know that the meme does fit for some non-negligible section of the population. It's not to say that the system hasn't given a lot of people good reason for doubt, but a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
      - Schmerika 8mo ago
        > what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences? There are lots of valid ways to research things for oneself. None of them involve making fun of people for doing it. > Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, Sure. Reading journalism can be part of doing one's own research. > a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy. Who primed them? Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story that recently unfolded: Did you know that the 4chan forum where the Pizzagate conspiracy - which used the same code words as Epstein's circle - opened the exact same day that Epstein met with its founder? That meant that when whistleblowers talked about real things that happened, or real emails leaked, some people were 'primed' to dismiss them because obviously Pizzagate was a hoax. Some journalists did report well on that scenario; people like Whitney Webb or Sarah Kendzior. They didn't get invited to mainstream media to talk about it though. ... There are a lot of people who believe one of the dumbest conspiracies possible - that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax. Why do they believe that? Could it be that the fossil fuel companies who knew climate change was real in the 70s helped to foster that? Could it be that the media who profits massively from running fossil fuel ads have been complicit? It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media. It's not okay to have <80 familes owning half the worlds wealth. You end up with all these terrible cognitive side effects in your population from the propaganda they use. Blaming all that on people doing their own research is essentially blaming the victim, at the worst possible time.
- JeremyNT 8mo ago
  There are a lot of people, including (but absolutely not limited to) RFK, who are mentally incapable of proper research on their own. He (and similarly poorly informed people) would be better served by delegating the research task to somebody who is more capable. We've got laymen Dunning-Krugering our health policy. This is bad.
  - Schmerika 8mo ago
    Sure. And how exactly does any of that make mocking people who research things for themselves cool and okay?
    - donkeybeer 8mo ago
      He's not mocking research, he's mocking "research".
- atmavatar 8mo ago
  Sources matter. It would be great if the general public were willing and capable of reading the scientific papers which represent the research in question. However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts. This absolutely deserves criticism and even derision.
  - Schmerika 8mo ago
    > However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts. Kinda hard to blame them for that when they were being lied to so obviously by official sources, about so many things; and when social and traditional media were censoring 'alternative' perspectives (many which later proved entirely correct) on a scale of hundreds of millions of posts. No, we didn't all have the biology savvy to read and understand Daszak's paper ... But lots of people did have that knowledge - and either didn't speak up, or were censored into oblivion, or had literal actual death threats levelled at them. Lots of institutions which had a duty to speak up didn't; not just about that, not just about the lableak theory, not just about the funding of GOF research [0], not just about how the virus behaved (animal reservoirs, natural immunity etc), and not just about the ways the vaccines were lied about. Many of the institutions which did speak up, again, were censored into oblivion [1]; rendered irrelevant by the 'requests' of a Biden admin which was simultaneously threatening every major social media company with monopoly investigations. That's documented fact now, but it was blindingly obvious at the time too. In context, any research was better than believing whatever you were told to believe; no matter how it changed from one week to the next. And I respect the people who tried, even if they didn't do it very well, better than the people who kept their mouths shut and did what they were told without any independent thought. And I even respect those people more than those who actively derided anyone who questioned authority even the slightest bit. 0 - https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/HHRG-117-GO24-20211201-SD004.pdf https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/... 1 - https://archive.li/FhtHM https://archive.li/FhtHM
- greggoB 8mo ago
  Yes, but what sources do they use for their research? Is it expected that everyone should get a PhD, a lab and do their own mRNA vaccine trials? That hardly seems feasible, no? Still doesn't explain the "long term point of view" part, btw.
- duckmysick 8mo ago
  How am I supposed to research things myself? Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself. I don't have resources to set up my own lab. I don't even know if the manufacturer will sell a dozen or so vaccines directly to me. So can't even do a basic stoichiometry on my own. And forget about me setting up a trial with actual people - I have no idea where I could begin to make it possible. If by research you mean reading already published papers, that's literature review and I wouldn't call that a research. But because doing my own experiments and trials is out of question, I'm willing to settle for that. Reviewing published papers comes with its own set of problems. A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. I suppose I can rely only on open journals and pre-prints but that's not all of them. Messaging the authors directly is also an option but it's doesn't scale well and takes time. Suppose I get my hands on a couple of relevant papers. How can I be sure what's written there is actually correct? It would be nice if I could double check against the raw data, but often that's not available. And at best all I can verify is that the paper's content matches the source data. I can't verify the data itself. At some point I have to trust the authors. Not to mention I don't have access to the data from research that wasn't published, for example because the experiments didn't show anything novel. But that's fine. Nothing is perfect and after hours (if not days) of reading and playing with data I came to a conclusion that I'm happy with. Of course I have to review it again in a few years. The new research will be published by then. Maybe they will discover something different and I have to review that too. Overall, I spent a lot of time and it was exhausting. Diligently reading and cross-referencing all that data is mentally taxing. I can't complain though because I've learned something. There's one problem though. All of that effort was about just a single vaccine. But there's more of them. For other diseases too. And there are other problems I'd love to research. Windmills. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Dozens of types of food. Economic theories. How can I research all of that in a timely fashion? I'm genuinely asking because I want to. I realize there will be trade-offs involved, but all of them are either relying on someone else (which we try to avoid) or won't be deep enough to form an informed opinion. And I'm not happy with either.
  - Schmerika 8mo ago
    > Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself. Sure. Let's say the manufacturer and the government claim that the vaccine is 100% effective, all of the time, with no side effects. But you happen to notice that lots of women are complaining online about, say, missing their periods for months at a time after taking it. And getting the flu anyway. Congratulations. You have done your own research, made your own observations, and thought for yourself. That's the kind of thing many people were talking about. What else could they be talking about, since as you point out, they didn't have any access to raw data. If you want to get hardcore into citizen science, that's really cool. You will have to pick a direction though; we can't do everything unfortunately. And funding is hard. > A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. There are ways around this these days, but yeah the paywalling and siloing of knowledge is really holding back our potential as a species. Did you know that it connects back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? Yeah, he was the guy most responsible for expanding the paywall model of academic research and maximising the profit from it. He could make or break scientific careers, keep certain discoveries to himself, hold leverage on academic institutions and professors...
kelipso 8mo ago
A person making fun of “do your own research” is implying in subtext that they and their political side are essentially incapable of thinking for themselves and they are philosophically tied to blindly trusting authority. The political side that has this subtext to them will lose support in the long term especially from younger people. Rhetorical question, what person who has any interest in thinking independently would want to be associated with a side that thinks like this?

> you have already lost the debate from a long term point of view I don't get what this is alluding to - can you expand, specifically wrt the long term part?

by greggoB 8mo ago

> you have already lost the debate from a long term point of view I don't get what this is alluding to - can you expand, specifically wrt the long term part?

Schmerika 8mo ago

Not OP but I would have hoped that it is self-evidently good if not great for a population to be capable and motivated to research things for themselves without solely relying on authorities and institutions. Especially when so many of those entities are wildly rotten and corrupt; but even if they weren't.

igor47 8mo ago
Capable -- yes. Having to actually do it -- no. I would prefer to live in a world where I can depend on my fellow humans instead of living out a fantasy of self-sufficiency. The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
- Schmerika 8mo ago
  > The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it. Out of the 27 authors of Daszak's Lancet paper, used worldwide to claim that Coronavirus couldn't have come from a lab, how many had a conflict of interest? How many news outlets repeated their claims verbatim, rather than reading it themselves to find the obvious 'errors'? And how many academic institutions pointed out its flaws? ... Too old an example? Ok - how many institutions sat on the Epstein files, lied about them, kept them sealed, etc, for decades? How many political leaders and business owners worldwide had direct links themselves? How many media companies are giving adequate attention to climate change, and refusing to run ads from fossil fuel companies? How many institutions/countries dared to tell Biden that arming genocide and vetoing ceasefires isn't actually okay? How many countries have sanctioned the perpetrators? Read anything about EPA corruption lately? How about what ICE have been doing? Anyone in DOGE face any accountability for permanently compromising key government databases yet? Because again, if you're relying on media and institutions to get your news on these things you might think everything is fine. It really, really isn't though. You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid. ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough. Quite the opposite.
  - greggoB 8mo ago
    > You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid. So again, how do you propose one actually does this? Via crowdsourcing on FB? AI-generated news gathering? Consulting with a medium? Like what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences? Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, with an ideally healthy array of outlets having overlapping coverage of the same events. Within this framework, "do your own research" would be called "reading broadly". > ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough. I have been around long enough to know that the meme does fit for some non-negligible section of the population. It's not to say that the system hasn't given a lot of people good reason for doubt, but a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
    - Schmerika 8mo ago
      > what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences? There are lots of valid ways to research things for oneself. None of them involve making fun of people for doing it. > Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, Sure. Reading journalism can be part of doing one's own research. > a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy. Who primed them? Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story that recently unfolded: Did you know that the 4chan forum where the Pizzagate conspiracy - which used the same code words as Epstein's circle - opened the exact same day that Epstein met with its founder? That meant that when whistleblowers talked about real things that happened, or real emails leaked, some people were 'primed' to dismiss them because obviously Pizzagate was a hoax. Some journalists did report well on that scenario; people like Whitney Webb or Sarah Kendzior. They didn't get invited to mainstream media to talk about it though. ... There are a lot of people who believe one of the dumbest conspiracies possible - that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax. Why do they believe that? Could it be that the fossil fuel companies who knew climate change was real in the 70s helped to foster that? Could it be that the media who profits massively from running fossil fuel ads have been complicit? It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media. It's not okay to have <80 familes owning half the worlds wealth. You end up with all these terrible cognitive side effects in your population from the propaganda they use. Blaming all that on people doing their own research is essentially blaming the victim, at the worst possible time.
JeremyNT 8mo ago
There are a lot of people, including (but absolutely not limited to) RFK, who are mentally incapable of proper research on their own. He (and similarly poorly informed people) would be better served by delegating the research task to somebody who is more capable. We've got laymen Dunning-Krugering our health policy. This is bad.
- Schmerika 8mo ago
  Sure. And how exactly does any of that make mocking people who research things for themselves cool and okay?
  - donkeybeer 8mo ago
    He's not mocking research, he's mocking "research".
atmavatar 8mo ago
Sources matter. It would be great if the general public were willing and capable of reading the scientific papers which represent the research in question. However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts. This absolutely deserves criticism and even derision.
- Schmerika 8mo ago
  > However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts. Kinda hard to blame them for that when they were being lied to so obviously by official sources, about so many things; and when social and traditional media were censoring 'alternative' perspectives (many which later proved entirely correct) on a scale of hundreds of millions of posts. No, we didn't all have the biology savvy to read and understand Daszak's paper ... But lots of people did have that knowledge - and either didn't speak up, or were censored into oblivion, or had literal actual death threats levelled at them. Lots of institutions which had a duty to speak up didn't; not just about that, not just about the lableak theory, not just about the funding of GOF research [0], not just about how the virus behaved (animal reservoirs, natural immunity etc), and not just about the ways the vaccines were lied about. Many of the institutions which did speak up, again, were censored into oblivion [1]; rendered irrelevant by the 'requests' of a Biden admin which was simultaneously threatening every major social media company with monopoly investigations. That's documented fact now, but it was blindingly obvious at the time too. In context, any research was better than believing whatever you were told to believe; no matter how it changed from one week to the next. And I respect the people who tried, even if they didn't do it very well, better than the people who kept their mouths shut and did what they were told without any independent thought. And I even respect those people more than those who actively derided anyone who questioned authority even the slightest bit. 0 - https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/HHRG-117-GO24-20211201-SD004.pdf https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/... 1 - https://archive.li/FhtHM https://archive.li/FhtHM
greggoB 8mo ago
Yes, but what sources do they use for their research? Is it expected that everyone should get a PhD, a lab and do their own mRNA vaccine trials? That hardly seems feasible, no? Still doesn't explain the "long term point of view" part, btw.
duckmysick 8mo ago
How am I supposed to research things myself? Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself. I don't have resources to set up my own lab. I don't even know if the manufacturer will sell a dozen or so vaccines directly to me. So can't even do a basic stoichiometry on my own. And forget about me setting up a trial with actual people - I have no idea where I could begin to make it possible. If by research you mean reading already published papers, that's literature review and I wouldn't call that a research. But because doing my own experiments and trials is out of question, I'm willing to settle for that. Reviewing published papers comes with its own set of problems. A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. I suppose I can rely only on open journals and pre-prints but that's not all of them. Messaging the authors directly is also an option but it's doesn't scale well and takes time. Suppose I get my hands on a couple of relevant papers. How can I be sure what's written there is actually correct? It would be nice if I could double check against the raw data, but often that's not available. And at best all I can verify is that the paper's content matches the source data. I can't verify the data itself. At some point I have to trust the authors. Not to mention I don't have access to the data from research that wasn't published, for example because the experiments didn't show anything novel. But that's fine. Nothing is perfect and after hours (if not days) of reading and playing with data I came to a conclusion that I'm happy with. Of course I have to review it again in a few years. The new research will be published by then. Maybe they will discover something different and I have to review that too. Overall, I spent a lot of time and it was exhausting. Diligently reading and cross-referencing all that data is mentally taxing. I can't complain though because I've learned something. There's one problem though. All of that effort was about just a single vaccine. But there's more of them. For other diseases too. And there are other problems I'd love to research. Windmills. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Dozens of types of food. Economic theories. How can I research all of that in a timely fashion? I'm genuinely asking because I want to. I realize there will be trade-offs involved, but all of them are either relying on someone else (which we try to avoid) or won't be deep enough to form an informed opinion. And I'm not happy with either.
- Schmerika 8mo ago
  > Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself. Sure. Let's say the manufacturer and the government claim that the vaccine is 100% effective, all of the time, with no side effects. But you happen to notice that lots of women are complaining online about, say, missing their periods for months at a time after taking it. And getting the flu anyway. Congratulations. You have done your own research, made your own observations, and thought for yourself. That's the kind of thing many people were talking about. What else could they be talking about, since as you point out, they didn't have any access to raw data. If you want to get hardcore into citizen science, that's really cool. You will have to pick a direction though; we can't do everything unfortunately. And funding is hard. > A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. There are ways around this these days, but yeah the paywalling and siloing of knowledge is really holding back our potential as a species. Did you know that it connects back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? Yeah, he was the guy most responsible for expanding the paywall model of academic research and maximising the profit from it. He could make or break scientific careers, keep certain discoveries to himself, hold leverage on academic institutions and professors...

kelipso 8mo ago

A person making fun of “do your own research” is implying in subtext that they and their political side are essentially incapable of thinking for themselves and they are philosophically tied to blindly trusting authority. The political side that has this subtext to them will lose support in the long term especially from younger people. Rhetorical question, what person who has any interest in thinking independently would want to be associated with a side that thinks like this?