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.

[3] Somewhat related https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/

[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.

> 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.

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.

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.