A man who represents himself as a lawyer has a fool for a client. A man who "does his own research" has a fool for a researcher.

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gus_massa 7 hours ago | parent [-]

But science is about doing your own research! The idea is that science results are based on evidence that is published in serious [1] peer review [2] journals.

At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much.

* Big pharma wants to sell drugs and get money.

* The FDA wants to cover they ass and get money.

* Journalist want to publish bleeding stories and get money.

[There is also an optimistic version where all of them want the best for humanity.]

All of them together are making a quite good job, and you can go to the pharmacy at the corner and be quite confident that you will get the cure for a lot of illness with a low risk. In some threads people ask for most tests, in some threads people ask for faster approval. It's a hard trade off, and I'm happy I don't have to make the decision [3].

In 2020 there was a lot of misinformation in both directions. From politicians to youtubers, form individual crackpots to professors in the university. In many cases you realize they may not even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria, in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.

Science is about doing your own research, but doing your own research is super hard. As a rule of thumb, if the FDA and the European equivalent agree, it's probably ok [4], but cross your fingers just in case.

[1] Whatever "serious" mean. It's a hard question.

[2] And real "peer review", not a comment section in a web page.

[4] Do you trust the contractor+regulations that installed the elevator at your building? It's another trade off of as cheap as possible and enough regulations to avoid appearing in the front page of all newspapers everyday.

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mapontosevenths 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> But science is about doing your own research!

Not for the average adult human on planet Earth, no.

Fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence. Of the 50% that remain only a fraction have access to the equipment necessary to replicate any given experiment, of that fraction only a small percentage will have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to accurately replicate any given experiment, of that tiny fraction only a much tinier fraction will have the KSA's to interpret those results in a meaningful way.

Science should replicate. That does not automatically imply that YOU should be the one replicating it.

For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they are and listening to them, or at least listening to the general consensus of those who are more qualified when such a consensus exists.

Yes, other peoples goals don't always align perfectly with yours, but the simple truth is that you aren't qualified or even capable of understanding everything in the world. When it comes to those subjects you must be adult enough to understand and work within your limitations.

Honestly, do you really believe that people who sacrificed large parts of their lives to become researchers are in it for the money, or out to get you? These are brilliant people who choose to take a career path that doesn't really pay well. When 99% of them tell you something is safe, Occam will tell that it's a pretty safe bet the weirdos on the fringe are just plain wrong.

	▲	sarchertech 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There’s nothing wrong with doing your own experiments as long as you understand your limitations. But that’s not what people mean when they say they “did their own research”. They mean that they went online and found blogs and YouTube videos that agree with whatever crackpot view they already held. The issue with picking people and organizations to trust (which you absolutely should do) is that the average person isn’t even able to evaluate what qualified means. And RFK jr. is the guy appointing the “qualified people” who run things. On paper many of them are qualified, but in reality they’re crackpots. You have to dig a level deeper and understand that this set of qualified people are actually just nuts who essentially performed the scientific equivalent of a coup because their ideas couldn’t win on merit.
	▲	gus_massa 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> For the average person science should mean knowing how to determine if someone is more qualified than they I agree. But how do you that without researching? Who makes the list of trustful institutions? Let's pick homeopathy. The pharmacy in the corner of my home sells homeopathy too. There are even some curses in some universities [in Germany?] [I searched in MY university. Apparently there is no curse for human medicine, but there is a curse for veterinary https://www.fvet.uba.ar/?q=homeopatia .] Can we agree homeopathy is not real? How do you know?

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estearum 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is all a very fun thought experiment and whatnot but the reality is the COVID vaccines went through gigantic randomized controlled trials, our absolute best known method (by a gigantic margin) to figure out what is true.

Those trials unequivocally showed extremely high effectiveness and extremely high safety.

The people who say otherwise are simply wrong in this case. No matter how much philosophizing you or they want to do on epistemology. If they want to demonstrate otherwise, they need to conduct their own trials, ideally large, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials.

> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.

This is not how trials work and you should go "do your own research" on the basics of the methodology before you opine on higher-order things like vaccines etc.

	▲	gus_massa 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>> in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city. If you want to ruin your day, take a look at the hydroxychloroquine [retracted] paper by Raoult. Who is the control group? Why was it reported in the press as a 100% cure if the only death was in the trial group? I agree that the trial to prove the effectiveness and safety of the covid-19 vaccines were much better designed. One of the reasons is that to get the approval of the FDA they must dot the i and j and cross the t and f.

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sarchertech 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair, when the Covid vaccine was being rushed to be approved, I didn’t 100% trust that Trump wouldn’t pressure the FDA to approve without being confident it was safe.

So my standard at the time was that I’d take it if the FDA and at least one other developed country approved it.

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gus_massa 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Here in Argentina we approved the Sputnik vaccine. It was approved only here and in Russia. And here it was approved not by the standard office (ANMAT), but by a special resolution of the Health Ministry.

	▲	gnabgib 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We could find it in Canada too (due to distribution it wasn't super common)