The danger of doing your own research.

[Vince]

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson robbed two banks in Pittsburgh. They believed they wouldn't be caught because they had researched how to render themselves invisible to bank security cameras. They learned that lemon juice could be used to write an invisible message on paper that could only be made visible by heating up the paper. Could lemon juice make them invisible to bank cameras? They conducted an experiment: they rubbed lemon juice on their faces and took a Polaroid picture -- their faces did not show up on the Polaroid!

They rubbed lemon juice on their faces, wore no masks, and robbed the two banks at gunpoint. The Pittsburgh Police showed the security camera images on local TV, and they were soon apprehended. They were nonplussed and insisted the police had no evidence. It is unknown why the Polaroid failed to show their faces - perhaps defective film or perhaps they pointed the camera in the wrong direction.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

David Dunning read about the case. He hypothesized that if Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, he may have been too stupid to know that he was too stupid. Dunning and his grad student, Justin Kruger, wrote a paper titled "Unskilled and Unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Dunning and Kruger found that people who first start to learn about any subject have an inflated perception of how much they know. Paradoxically, when people learn a lot about a subject, they think they know less about it than they actually do know. As people start to learn about a subject, their confidence in their knowledge is never higher. If they learn more, they quickly learn how little they know about it. If they stick with it and learn even more, they slowly gain confidence in their knowledge. But they will never have as much confidence as they had initially - they have humility because they have learned how much they don't know, and perhaps can never know.

A 2022 study by Light et al. published in Science found that across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, individuals (n=3,249) who have the highest degree of opposition, have the lowest degree of objective knowledge and the highest degree of subjective knowledge (they feel strongly that they know more than the experts but fail on tests of established facts). They examined attitudes about anthropogenic climate change, genetically modified (GM) food safety, risk vs benefits of vaccination, importance of nuclear power, the lack of efficacy of homeopathic medicine, human evolution, the validity of the Big Bang Theory of cosmology, and Covid-19.

There are many other reasons: Socially-derived knowledge, Conspiracy Theories, Believing the Worst, difficulty understanding randomness and statistics, Inductive logic, and failure to understand "levels of evidence" and GRADE. Dr. Google and AI only serve to get us to the the peak of confidence in defective knowledge faster. The only solution is reliance on science and experts.

This is all explained at this link: The danger of doing your own research (or using AI)

 

[Seagal]

I get what you mean. Imo, some people say they did their own research on a topic and what they did is reading articles on websites, reddit, youtube etc. Reading literature, articles is not research. There is literature research and review articles which summarize and compare/analyze/evaluate existing research articles.

Wikipedia defines research:

Research is "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge".[1] It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to controlling sources of bias and error. These activities are characterized by accounting and controlling for biases. A research project may be an expansion of past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole.

Applied research deals with solving practical problems[8] and generally employs empirical methodologies. Because applied research resides in the messy real world, strict research protocols may need to be relaxed. For example, it may be impossible to use a random sample. Thus, transparency in the methodology is crucial.

 

[Phil Goodman]

I’d say the problem is not with people doing their own research. And sure being overconfident can be a problem, but that isn’t the main one. The biggest issue is lack of critical thinking skills. Once you get decent at that and try to get better at analysis then it can roll over to all types of issues, so you don’t have to be an expert in a field to arrive at a good conclusion.

The easiest example is with Covid vaccines. Critical thinking would’ve easily allowed someone to make a better decision than the countless doctors and other healthcare professionals who may be more knowledgeable about viruses or other health issues. All you had to do was consider a few key things.

1.) we’d never successfully created a vaccine for a coronavirus

2.) we’d never successfully created a vaccine using mRNA technology.


Those two things alone made it an extremely safe bet that they would be ineffective. When betting on whether something will happen for the first time, the safest bet is almost always no…since firsts only happen once.


And that’s before getting into the scare tactics, propaganda, big pharma’s history of terrible practices, and all the other indicators that would suggest they’d be a failure.



I think that’s where a lot of people mess up. They try to be experts in a field when a much better use of time would be to develop critical thinking skills that can apply to all types of different topics. Sure you need to know enough about a topic to know what types of questions to ask and have a basic understanding of different mechanisms, but no one had to be a virologist to see that Covid vaccines were not going to do what all the experts said they would. And that’s just the easiest example, though there are lots of others. Understanding analysis, critical thinking, and human nature can take a person a long way. And yes, there are plenty of people out there who are lacking in intelligence who probably won’t ever be all that good at predicting outcomes or making great decisions so maybe they won’t ever be able to do good research, but I’m also skeptical of people who try to discourage research(not directed at you Vince, just in general). For me it sounds suspiciously like “trust the science”.

 

[t_spacemonkey]

scientific consensus or as it called is complete B.S. - that is where decades of own research have led me.

 

[BadassBlues]

If I hadn't had so many clueless and potentially dangerous experiences with ill informed "professionals", I may be in a bit more of an agreement with this. To be clear, the content and the source of the research is extremely important and there are excellent sources available in our present time.

This is without a single ounce of ego or arrogance that I can say that in more than a few cases, I was the one who educated the one who was supposed to be the professional. This includes health professionals, electronics salespeople, auto mechanics and others.

Doing your own research can help to educate you and guide you to the proper sources. Of course you need to have some level of intelligence, or you will just end up in jail with lemon juice on your face.

 

[Fernando Almaguer]

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson robbed two banks in Pittsburgh. They believed they wouldn't be caught because they had researched how to render themselves invisible to bank security cameras. They learned that lemon juice could be used to write an invisible message on paper that could only be made visible by heating up the paper. Could lemon juice make them invisible to bank cameras? They conducted an experiment: they rubbed lemon juice on their faces and took a Polaroid picture -- their faces did not show up on the Polaroid!

They rubbed lemon juice on their faces, wore no masks, and robbed the two banks at gunpoint. The Pittsburgh Police showed the security camera images on local TV, and they were soon apprehended. They were nonplussed and insisted the police had no evidence. It is unknown why the Polaroid failed to show their faces - perhaps defective film or perhaps they pointed the camera in the wrong direction.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

David Dunning read about the case. He hypothesized that if Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, he may have been too stupid to know that he was too stupid. Dunning and his grad student, Justin Kruger, wrote a paper titled "Unskilled and Unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Dunning and Kruger found that people who first start to learn about any subject have an inflated perception of how much they know. Paradoxically, when people learn a lot about a subject, they think they know less about it than they actually do know. As people start to learn about a subject, their confidence in their knowledge is never higher. If they learn more, they quickly learn how little they know about it. If they stick with it and learn even more, they slowly gain confidence in their knowledge. But they will never have as much confidence as they had initially - they have humility because they have learned how much they don't know, and perhaps can never know.

A 2022 study by Light et al. published in Science found that across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, individuals (n=3,249) who have the highest degree of opposition, have the lowest degree of objective knowledge and the highest degree of subjective knowledge (they feel strongly that they know more than the experts but fail on tests of established facts). They examined attitudes about anthropogenic climate change, genetically modified (GM) food safety, risk vs benefits of vaccination, importance of nuclear power, the lack of efficacy of homeopathic medicine, human evolution, the validity of the Big Bang Theory of cosmology, and Covid-19.

There are many other reasons: Socially-derived knowledge, Conspiracy Theories, Believing the Worst, difficulty understanding randomness and statistics, Inductive logic, and failure to understand "levels of evidence" and GRADE. Dr. Google and AI only serve to get us to the the peak of confidence in defective knowledge faster. The only solution is reliance on science and experts.

This is all explained at this link: The danger of doing your own research (or using AI)

Perhaps a higher power played a trick on them lol. Nice post!