Yeah, I love this kind of thing. It’s called an Epimenides paradox. This type of logical paradox is the same kind of thing Gödel used to show that mathematics will always be incomplete. And yet despite the statement being clear nonsense, people seem to be saying it a lot these days. Well, one guy did anyway so lets make fun of him. Lets go over how it makes no sense.
For starters, you are already doing your own research by reading this article. In fact, you were doing your own research every time you read somebody saying that you shouldn’t do your own research. So it’s kind of funny that the only way you can hear his advice is to have actively contradicted it.
Don’t read this! Reading this sentence could be dangerous to your health.
Gotcha! If you like these kind of self-referential sentences, go read some more of them.
To be fair, the quite reasonable idea that Ethan Siegel (author of above linked article) and others are trying to convey is that we aren’t capable of figuring certain important things out, and so therefore we would be better served by letting experts tell us how those things work. Well yeah, sure. So far so good. The question is, who are the experts we should trust on whichever issue? Well the procedure for vetting them might be called “research” and so the only way to proceed and follow the advice of the “don’t do your own research” crowd is to, wait for it: do your own research.
So lets correct the error shall we? The only way to actively not do your own research appears to be to simply go into a coma and let whatever is gonna happen happen. Otherwise, you are doing your own research. Imagine, using your own eyes to research what is going on in the world around you! Sounds dangerous. But are you doing it well? Did you turn the lights on? Are you trusting the right folks and finding the right things to read? Probably not, and neither am I. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and improve our methods with experience.
So what the article is really saying is, don’t research things badly, as in (quoting):
- formulating an initial opinion the first time we hear about something,
- evaluating everything we encounter after that through that lens of our gut instinct,
- finding reasons to think positively about the portions of the narrative that support or justify our initial opinion,
- and finding reasons to discount or otherwise dismiss the portions that detract from it.
Yeah, that doesn’t sound like the scientific method as I learned it. Nor a good use of bullet points but hey, in terms of reasons the editor should have rejected this piece that lies way on the bottom.
He provides a useful example of doing these things with his exposé on fluoridation, where he tries to put forward a case that fluoridation is a slam dunk provable win for dental health ignoring all other opinions and statistics such as Sweden’s no fluoridation and very low dental caries rate compared to e.g. France, which does fluoridate. Of course I’m not here to argue for and against fluoridation, just to point out that the author’s examples of why we shouldn’t do our own research seem to exhibit precisely the behavior of research he is trying to avoid: “finding reasons to discount or otherwise dismiss” whatever reasoning e.g. Germany uses to decide against it. This example again leads us to the same conclusion: do you own research!
So yeah, do your motherfucking own research. It’s the only way, period the end, to have any hope. Sure, we suck at it (as amply demonstrated by the author of the Forbes piece), and depending on our level of confidence this is mostly going to be about finding people we can trust on certain issues (like hmm I don’t know, maybe our doctors?) but one thing is for damn sure: asking your doctor is in fact doing research. Acknowledging that you are going to have to do your own research is step one. Step two is figuring out what kind of research you are going to do. Etcetera. Mainly etcetera.
Preach.