and I'm much more likely to encounter people being overly insecure about their intellects and not even trying to go straight to the data/papers, rather than people who "do their own research" but really shouldn't.
Conversation
(and no, I don't think every "crank" who believes a false thing is on balance better off "listening to experts"; I know several anti-vax types who are pretty sound on other issues.)
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The condescension and noble lies seem to come mostly from bureaucrats not researchers. I can’t think of any active researcher who has the “one of the elect” posture. Mostly they just seem to struggle to communicate at all with laypeople.
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There are researchers whose attitude is condescending and don't act in good faith. For example, the ones who conducted the PACE trial. me-pedia.org/wiki/PACE_trial
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There's another group that tends to be condescending - practitioners. Doctors, or nurses, or contractors, and so on. If you can trust whatever default auto-pilot script they follow to be good enough for your situation, that's one thing, but that category excludes many people.
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For example, many medical devices are not tested on women at all. If you happen to be a woman, there's a high probability that your medical care will be impacted by several such things. Caroline Criado Perez wrote a book about it. carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible
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I think experts, not just bureaucrats, but researchers and practitioners too, have earned a lot of the distrust and skepticism. I would prefer a world where "do your own research" was not needed as a counterweight to the sheer amount of shoddy practices and perverse incentives.
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This seems orthogonal. It’s great when incentives and aptitude to solve a problem line up neatly. They rarely do. My point is “do your own research” is not a general solution in either case. The world is too complex for everyone to be an expert on everything that affects them.
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And the line is rarely trotted out around highly individual conditions. The phrase is usually deployed alongside crackpot theories of shared problems, advanced where trust has eroded. “They lied about masks so vaccines contain 5G chips” type leaps.
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I get frustrated with the 5G chip style crackpot theories too. But, they have a point that the bureaucrats lied about masks. If I had only trusted, say, the WHO official guidelines, I would have done much worse than I did following individual aerosol researchers on Twitter.
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Not sure why the opposite of diy is blind trust. Mostly it’s common sense least effort for me. When I don’t follow expert advice it’s never because I’ve done my own research. It’s because I half-ass an alt way.
I think the smart thing to do, if you’re in a low-trust world and not able to do your own research, is to follow “common sense” as best you can. You’ll be wrong a lot, but just at the rate sane humans are wrong, without the added pathologies of cultishness & submission.
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