- “Doing your own research” mostly leads to false conclusions, unless you’ve done your “homework” — i.e. have an education in the subject matter;
- Example of a claim about Sodom and Gomorrah and an asteroid or comet airburst;
- How simpletons think they can cut costs to “overhead” without realizing what overhead costs do;
- A philosophy graduate explains why it’s better to doubt than to know;
- With thoughts about whether philosophy is useless, as some scientists say, and how religions establish arbitrary certainty, despite the evidence of the real world.
Variation on another recurring theme of this blog: the world is more complex than most people think; and most people know less than they think they do. And so draw wrong conclusions.
Big Think, Ethan Siegel, 24 Jun 2025: You can’t do your own research without doing your homework first, subtitled “Here in 2025, many of us claim to come to our own conclusions by doing our own research. Here’s why we’re mostly deluding ourselves.”
Key Takeaways
• Many of us frequently embrace conclusions that are contrary to the scientific consensus, instead preferring to find out what the facts are for ourselves and draw our conclusions based on what we find. • Yet this strategy is usually doomed to failure, as nearly all of us aren’t even competently equipped to do the homework, or accurately understanding the foundational background, necessary to even comprehend the issue at stake. • What most of us call “doing our own research” is wholly unrelated to research of any type, and instead exemplifies what happens when you haven’t even done your homework correctly: we get it wrong when it counts the most.
This isn’t a political essay per se, but it does discuss government agencies that do the work to make sure we (i.e. Americans) don’t have to personally worry about every little thing. EPA, FDA, departments for agriculture, highway safety, weather, disease control.
Yet much of this (and similar) work — work conducted by bona fide experts over many decades — is being or has already been undone, in favor of allowing individuals to fend for themselves, make their own decisions, and do their own research about life-and-death matters like public health, public safety, and issues that affect the long-term future of the planet. The truth is not that consensus undermines science, but rather that our modern rejection of expertise, and our newfound embracing of the “do your own research” ideology, is a recipe for societal disaster. In truth, most of us aren’t even well-enough equipped to do our own homework, much less research, on these and other issues. Here’s what that’s all about.
The key is understanding that we “inhabit a reality that obeys rules and that those rules can be, at least in principle, understood.”
- that we have a real, physical, material-based (e.g., made of atoms) system,
- that there are underlying rules that govern the behavior of that system,
- that we can observe, measure, control the conditions of, and experiment on those systems,
- gathering results about what happens to those systems in a repeatable, replicable fashion,
- and then that we can draw conclusions about how that system will perform under the real-world conditions we’re likely to encounter.
It goes on with the idea of “doing your homework” and examples of claims made by people who haven’t. “Chemicals,” vaccines, fluoride in water, climate change. Then there’s the denialist playbook, as we’ve read about in two or three different books lately.
As biologist Sean B. Carroll noted, there’s a six-step denialist playbook that seems to work to sway public opinion every time:
- Doubt the Science.
- Question Scientists’ Motives and Integrity.
- Magnify Disagreements Among Scientists and Cite Gadflies as Authorities.
- Exaggerate Potential Harm.
- Appeal to Personal Freedom.
- Reject Whatever Would Repudiate a Key Philosophy.
And concluding:
The path back to reality is instead to value actual expertise, and those who have devoted their lives to the betterment of humanity through discovering scientific truths about reality. This isn’t to say that the notion of a scientific consensus should never be challenged; only that those challenges are only legitimate when they come from experts who’ve already sufficiently and scrupulously done their homework. If we can take this path, and return to reality, then we can once again aspire to having a functional society where we all work together to make policies for the collective long-term good of all. Without it, the thin veneer of civilization is likely doomed to crumble.
My own insight about these matters, another theme of this blog, is something most articles like this never mention. The challenges to science come from deep-seated prejudices, or biases, built by evolution into human nature, because those biases — deference to personal experience, resistance to anything that might like polluting the body — were useful at one time, thousands and millions of years ago. These biases remain in modern human nature, even as our current environment has changed from the ancestral one. Only a relatively small portion of humanity, it seems, has the ability to think around those biases, and understand how they mostly don’t apply in the modern world.
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An example of a specific claim and its retraction.
Scientific American, Mark Boslough, 25 Jun 2025: A Sodom and Gomorrah Story Shows Scientific Facts Aren’t Settled by Public Opinion, subtitled “Claims that an asteroid or comet airburst destroyed the biblical Sodom captured the public’s imagination. Its retraction shows that scientific conclusions aren’t decided by majority rule in the public square”
Personally, I think it a fool’s errand to try to “explain” things reported second/third/fourth/hundredth-hand via oral stories told and retold — usually to make some moral point — before they were ever written down, and then translated and retranslated across different versions of the Bible. It’s building complex infrastructure on a foundation of sand.
Still, let’s see what this article says. It begins by referencing a 2021 claim that a “Tunguska-sized airburst … destroyed a Bronze Age city near the Dead Sea.” How the story went viral, but was then retracted due “to faulty methodology, errors of fact and inappropriate manipulation of digital image data.”
The Sodom airburst paper instead represented the nadir of “science by press release,” in which sensational but thinly supported claims were pitched directly to the media and the public. Press releases, rife with references to Sodom and biblical implications, appeared to be focused as much on titillation as on science.
An example of a meme that, like many other memes, isn’t true.
Contrary to that bastion of error, scientists know that humans use more than 10 percent of their brains, vaccines don’t cause autism, “detox diets” don’t cleanse our bodies, toads don’t give us warts, and bulls don’t hate the color red.
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Simpletons who don’t understand, or dismiss, complexity and subtlety, like the ones currently running our government, are doing real damage.
LA Times, David L. Valentine, 24 Jun 2025: Those cuts to ‘overhead’ costs in research? They do real damage
As a professor at UC Santa Barbara, I research the effects of and solutions to ocean pollution, including oil seeps, spills and offshore DDT. I began my career by investigating the interaction of bacteria and hydrocarbon gases in the ocean, looking at the unusual propensity of microbes to consume gases that bubbled in from beneath the ocean floor. Needed funding came from the greatest basic scientific enterprise in the world, the National Science Foundation.
My research was esoteric, or so my in-laws (and everyone else) thought, until 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded and an uncontrolled flow of hydrocarbon liquid and gas jetted into the deep ocean offshore from Louisiana. It was an unmitigated disaster in the Gulf, and suddenly my esoteric work was in demand. Additional support from the National Science Foundation allowed me to go offshore to help figure out what was happening to that petroleum in the deep ocean. I was able to help explain, contextualize and predict what would happen next for anxious residents of the Gulf states — all made possible by the foresight of Vannevar Bush, the original architect of the National Science Foundation.
With discussion of what “overhead” costs cover. Lab coats. Electricity. Disposal of chemicals.
Ending:
The scientific greatness of the United States is fragile. Before the inception of the National Science Foundation, my grandfather was required to learn German for his biochemistry PhD at Penn State because Germany was then the world’s scientific leader. Should the president’s efforts to cut direct and indirect costs come to pass, it may be China tomorrow. That’s why today we need to remind our elected officials that the U.S. scientific enterprise pays exceptional dividends and that chaotic and punitive cuts risk irreparable harm to it.
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Philosophy. Certainty is dangerous.
Washington Post, Clary Doyle, 25 Jun 2025: I just graduated with a philosophy degree. Here’s my message to the Class of 2025., subtitled “Why it’s better to doubt than to know.”
Today, I receive a degree in philosophy. Which, as many of my relatives have pointed out, means it may be a long time before I pay off my loans. So, I am both literally and figuratively indebted to Northwestern because I got to spend the past four years trying to answer questions like: What is the meaning of life? How should I live? And what is the right thing to do?
But I’ll let you in on a secret in my field: Philosophers are less concerned with finding the right answers and more concerned with asking the right questions. No one is quite as famous for this as Socrates. When the Oracle of Delphi supposedly prophesied that he was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates was shocked because he was sure that he knew nothing. He then went around all of Athens, meeting with those who called themselves wise, and asked them questions to find out what they knew. And what he discovered was that they, too, knew nothing. So, indeed, he was the wisest man, because at least he knew that he knew nothing.
There’s a strain among some scientists that claims philosophy is useless. Only science can establish provisional truths. I think I slightly disagree. Philosophy will ask, or wonder, why is science pursuing certain questions and not others? Because certain questions appeal to human vanity? A very open question.
The writer tells her personal story.
I grew up in a religious town, to a religious family. My entire life everyone around me championed faith — belief in the unknown and a steadfast trust that things would work out. They urged me to set my doubts aside, but I remember, even back then, my dissatisfaction with blind faith. I pestered our parish priest with questions about why we ought to do what God said, why women couldn’t be priests, and how we could know if God was real.
Going on with what she learned at college. Then about current regressive politics:
We are now in an unprecedented moment in history in which universities like ours are under attack. And why? Because some people believe that in universities we are being inculcated into the cult of science and liberal ideology. But, in fact, the real reason is because we are not being taught faith. We are not learning to blindly believe. We are learning to doubt and to question and to criticize. And, make no mistake, it is precisely this skill that is powerful and is being attacked.
Exactly.
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I take religions as cultural mechanisms to establish arbitrary certainty, without any basis in objective reality, for the sake of tribal conformity and solidarity, and simplicity of living. Despite which, there’s always been a minority of people who are curious about what the real, objective world is like. They are the ones who developed science and invented technology and created our modern world.
