You need to make an actual effort.
You need to make an actual effort.
Doing your own research also means being open to the possibility that your hypothesis is incorrect.
If those people could read, they'd be very upset.
If they could actually understand what they would read, they’d nearly die in shame at the sudden realization…
And this is why in the age of search engines and LLMs we need to be teaching, both young and old, how to perform lateral reading.
It's not a full research skill set but it's better than nothing.
Remember the CRAAP test, everyone:
Currency (Is this information current? If not when was it updated?)
Relevance (Does it make sense to the topic you're working on? Does it not?)
Authority (Who wrote this article? What are their qualifications?)
Accuracy (Is this information accurate? Can you cross-reference with other articles or papers?)
Purpose (What was the author's purpose in writing this? Were they paid to write this piece?)
(Edit: formatting)
All of these things are only valuable if you do not have the technical expertise required to analyse the validity of the conclusions the authors draw from the methods.
Nobody who does that is going to read, let alone understand, this valid criticism of their methodology
If "your own research" never makes you change your opinions then you're not doing research, you're looking for confirmation.
You're always wrong about something. Figure out what it is.
Somewhen during my pregnancy I thought about DHA. The long chain omega 3 fatty acid actually reduces the inflammatory prostaglandins that are given for labor induction. So shortly before the due date I should probably stop taking DHA, right? This sounded so logical and bullet proof in my head, of course, reduce the series 2 prostaglandins deriving from omega-6-fatty acid residues in phospholipids during the pregnancy, but approaching labor date, this would inhibit going into labor!
Thank god I was still able to use pubmed despite pregnancy brain. I found nothing suggesting that I would have any beneficial outcomes if I stopped taking DHA (I was scared of passing the due date and needing an introduction). There was no evidence or research in that direction at all. If anything, DHA has proven over and over to protect from early onset of labor/premature births.
Think about that lucky dude at other side and of the bell curve who's just always been right...
That's them lol.
"Do your own research" is used to shut up people who are asking for evidence. It marks the end of any sort of productive discussion. Maybe a good response would be to ask "So you don't have any evidence?". If the other party doesn't respond, they look weak, but if they had evidence, they wouldn't have tried to pull the "Do your own research" bit. When they reply, presumably without any evidence, proceed to ridicule their lack of evidence.
I just say “You didn’t do any research, you watched some guy on YouTube and decided he was correct.”
To be fair, there are some people on YouTube who do fantastic research.
I hate people who say this as much as the people who say "do your own research" because they are saying the exact same thing in order to minimize any criticism. They also don't mention that it pertains to very specific types claims. On top of that, many scientific papers often make false claims because academics need funding.
I don't need to "do research" to express my own personal experiences. If a chemical company is saying that their chemicals "are harmless" I'm going to assume that there's a good chance that they're lying out of their ass. The military is currently trying to get out of cleaning up pfas from firefighting foam.
There's certain things that have been around a long time like fluoride in water, which is most likely fine, but nobody can really be sure that there's haven't been some kind of imesurable form of long term effects and people are right not to trust the government.
Another example is GMOs. There's nothing wrong with GMO crops. It's the herbicides and pesticides they use. They aren't just on the outside, the plants are absorbing that stuff. It might only be a small amount, but then again someone could spill a lot in one spot and then a few ears of corn could have a huge amount.
Oil and gas lobbyists spread misinformation about climate change and call it a conspiracy theory. Have you done any climate science to prove it isn't?
The author is dismissing people that don't agree with what they think is true without questioning their own beliefs because they are an academic and obviously accedemics are inherently superior to everyone else.
The problem with all of the things you mentioned is that people who are rational about them don't generally say, "do your own research," they say, "I defer to scientific experts who know a lot more than me."
So I don't have to do my own research on climate change. I just have to trust the educated specialists that have done the research. That's the whole point.
I've seen the claim that average temperatures went up when emissions went down, but this refutes that claim.
A more extreme example is the resistance to hand washing in the medical industry. Experts at the time refuted the claim that hand washing would prevent infection.
https://www.grunge.com/247211/the-tragic-story-of-the-doctor-who-pioneered-hand-washing/
That's totally going to make the conspiracy theory believers see the error of their ways.
Take each article one by one and look into the source
This is a page out of the conspiracy playbook. We commonly weigh material for bias with no evidence or reasonable justification. A paper confirming climate change seems more credible if it was funded by Exxon than if it were paid for by Green Peace.
This generates exactly the kind of "just so" reasoning that underpins all of conspiracy theory. It literally the belief that powerful forces are manipulating everything from the shadows.
Right, because professional researchers and academics have never been blinkered by biases or had financial motives to publish certain things or the fact that most published research is unreproducible horseshit. I don't need a meta-analyses and cross corroborated studies to know something works for me despite all the published reasons that say it shouldn't (or vice versa). Pathetic attempt at gatekeeping IMO completely forgetting that most research is in fact based on tinkering and trial & error. Professional researchers are not magically immune to human biases and fallacies, case in point thalidomide, trans fats, "heart healthy" seed oils etc etc.
I think you have this backwards. They aren't saying that professional research doesn't have any of these problems. They're just iterating what research is, and pointing out that the "do your own research" crowd are almost never actually doing any research.
I would agree that scientific practice is far from the ideal in the post, but it doesn't claim that researchers aren't susceptible to those biases. That is why there are processes in place like peer review.
Peer review isn't an infallible process, it has been shown to be super susceptible to cronyism for example, and even outside of it churns out a vast array of (mostly) useless unreproducible, or sometimes even entirely fraudulent, research. I don't even have a problem with the former part, research is actually a lot more tinkering and trial based than some set-in-stone endeavour and it certainly wouldn't hurt the good Ms Sparado to remember that.
I am paraphrasing the post from memory but it came across extremely gatekeepy and condescending with the "but have you conducted double blind trials like I have?" (or sentiments to that effect) as if those are the only valid ways of conducting research. Not even a slight sign of humility in how much researchers and academics have got wrong themselves and maybe to use that as an example in caution when doing your own research.
I think it's more complex than this. Yes, absolutely, if something works for you personally but it's not supported by scientific consensus, that makes sense to follow your own research. Health routines, diet, religion, whatever you do in your personal life, especially if you aren't concerned about whether your neighbors are doing it too. The sentiment of the post applies best to subjects that apply broadly to groups of people, like vaccines, or trans people, or climate change, or even creationism or flat earth. If you aren't following the scientific consensus, then you may be hurting yourself or others. Yes, science gets things wrong, but it also has drastically improved quality of life for everyone.
All those processes described there (and more, such as double blind experiments, peer reviews and so on) were invented and are used even though it would be less effort to not use them exactly because "professional researchers and academics are blinkered by biases or sometimes have financial motives to publish certain things" and those in that domain recognized it and concluded they had to do create tools to clean up their sources of those things as much as possible.
And, guess what, people who are NOT professional researchers and academics, also often "are blinkered by biases or sometimes have financial motives to publish certain things" (in fact certain groups of those people, such as politicians, are almost totally driven by money and biases in what they say and write) and those very same processes also work for filtering biased and money-driven writings and speeches of people who aren't in Science.
You seen, what you got in that post was a box of tools to enable you to validate your sources, any sources, and your response was raging against being given tools by going "whatabout scientists".
One can only conclude that you like your sources with "biases and published with financial motives".
Finding a thing that worked for you is great, but that does not make you an expert in that thing or qualified to give advice to other people about it.
All excellent points, but the word is jibed, not jived.