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
Conversation
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.
1
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
1
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.
1
1
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.
2
1
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.
1
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.
2
2
In that sense, I am trusting experts, the aerosol researchers. But, I had to sort through info and decide which inputs to accept into my mental model of what's going on. The people who are supposed to be "expert" at predigesting info eg. the media, public health, did badly.
1
2
I think I may actually agree with you. "Do your own research" is not a good or reasonable expectation to have on the individual person, even if they are skilled at research. It is time-consuming. But at the moment, so much else is screwed up that it can be the best option.
1
Criticizing crackpots is not the path to resolving the trust issues with the medical system, or scientific and bureaucratic systems. There are actions that could be taken to address those issues, but they are not being done. Status quo has a lot of inertia.
1
1
It’s a separate problem. There are 2 problems here: containing crackpottery and restoring trust in expertise.

