You Can’t Just “Do Your Own Research”

“Do Your Own Research.”

I’ve seen this phrase more times in the last couple of months than I have, probably, in my entire lifetime. It’s often posted in ALL CAPS and served with a healthy dose of exclamation points—or exclamation “marks” to our UK readers (not that we have any, or any readers, at all, for that matter).

Links to pop-science blogs about mask inefficacy, YouTube videos of medical professionals not afraid to “speak the truth”, and an unprecedented, inexplicable American love of Swedish public policy have inundated our social media feeds. And again, they’re often captioned with the exhortation to “do your own research.” An invitation to some new breed of “wokeness”, I guess.

 On its face, the sentiment expressed is a good one, right? We should want people to research and come to their own conclusions in a careful, well-reasoned manner. No doubt we should encourage open-mindedness, debate, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. Well, yes and no.

It depends on who’s doing the researching and challenging and how it’s done. You can’t just pick up a claim and assess it in a vacuum. For example:

“Most deodorants contain aluminum!”

Well, geez, that doesn’t sound good. Aluminum—or aluminium for our non-existent UK readers—is a metal. It’s what I wrap my hot pockets in, for Pete’s sake. I don’t want that in or even on my pores. Surely, that must be bad for me, right?

Clearly, this line of reasoning isn’t great. Deodorant isn’t wrapping your pits in foil and the mere fact that deodorant “contains metal” can’t be evaluated on the basis of our everyday, working knowledge of “metal”. So, assessing whether aluminum in deodorants is good or bad requires additional information. We need to correct our background assumptions.

For the record, no negative effects have been shown to be associated with aluminum in deodorant. 

Doing your “own research” is either impossible, at worst, or incredibly unreliable, at best. Take another example:

What is it? A piece of Impressionist art? An x-ray of two slabs of ribeye steak? Or perhaps the pelvis? Looks a bit like the pelvis, right? Certain pieces of knowledge cannot be acquired without some kind of expert sense. Is it lung cancer? You can’t just do your own research. You’d have no idea where to even begin.

The point is that you as a non-expert simply don’t have the relevant set of background assumptions for interpreting the evidence immediately accessible to you—empirical evidence, in particular. This is why we need bodies of experts. In other words, without steeping yourself in the assumptions and relevant literature of the discipline you’re investigating you have no way of knowing whether a claim is outrageous or reasonable—and you certainly won’t be able to draw out the correct inferences, either. Take the following example:

“There are between 400,000 and 500,000 manuscript variants in the New Testament text.”

That means there are almost half a million places in the New Testament text where manuscripts disagree—these are known as variants. What follows from this claim? Well, the claim isn’t very illuminative on its own—we need to have a sense of how other ancient texts fare in their manuscript traditions. We also need a sense of what counts as a variant that significantly affects the meaning of a phrase versus a variant that merely misspells or rearranges subject-verb order. We need a better sense of how Greek grammar works—because it is a declined language, you can write the same sentence using the same words a dozen different ways simply by rearranging the words and declining them accordingly. We also need a sense of how the number of variants depends on the number of manuscripts available—this many variants is largely due to there being ~25,000 extant manuscripts.

Evaluating the reasonableness of a claim or trying to draw out reasonable inferences from it can’t be done well in a “vacuum”. Our assumptions influence the conclusions that we draw. If I had concluded from the 500,000 variants claim that therefore that the modern English NT is simply one of 500,000 possible arrangements, then it’s because I am assuming that “all variants are significant” or “Greek grammar is sufficiently similar to English” or “the number of extant manuscripts is small” or any number of combinations of these and others.

The big takeaway is that for a lot of empirical claims, you cannot appropriately evaluate them without having steeped yourself in the relevant assumptions. Thus, “doing your own research” can lead you to accept strange, and often incorrect, views. Let’s take another example that’s been causing a fuss on the interwebs:

“Only 6% of corona virus deaths in the US have COVID-19 listed as the only cause of death.”

If you find this claim or what it entails outrageous, then it’s because you’re operating on one or more problematic assumptions that stem from a failure to understand how medical statistics work. Just because 94% of coronavirus deaths mentioned other causes of death—comorbidities—that doesn’t mean that COVID-19 was not the cause of death. If I push an old woman down the stairs and she dies, I can’t cite the fact that she was old, frail, possessing a weak heart, etc. as evidence that the fall down the stairs did not kill her. I cannot cite the fact that “had she not been old the fall would not have killed her” as evidence to exonerate myself from the charge of killing her. In the case of comorbidities, they can be caused by a COVID-19 infection or they can exist prior to the infection and complicate the body’s physiological response to the infection. In no way does this mean that the virus did not kill them.

Evidence can only be interpreted in a framework or set of assumptions. To interpret evidence properly requires access to the relevant set of assumptions whether they be about ancient manuscripts, lung nodules suggestive of cancer, or medical statistics. Without the relevant set of assumptions, your “own research” will probably lead you way off base.

This is why we need experts.

If you made it this far then you probably already agree. If not, then you should.