Cast your memory back to the “research” papers you wrote in high school and college. The hours spent in libraries, the days spent reading sources. If your education was anything like mine, you spent precious little time with primary sources and laboratory-grade investigation until you were in graduate school, assuming you went that far. “Research,” for most of us, involved compiling citations from acknowledged experts to create a consensus.
Watching the debate unwind over vaccine “research,” I’m noticing two opinions arise. Those reluctant to trust new and innovative mRNA vaccines have scolded: “Do your research!” By this, they mean searching publicly available sources for evidence which confirms or contradicts the widely accepted narrative. The “research” they exhort resembles high school research papers, which often consisted of compiling lists of expert testimony to support a chosen thesis.
This version of research, of course, suffers because it’s vulnerable to confirmation bias, the tendency to only accept evidence which supports what one already believes. The wide availability of testimony, and low barriers to “expert” status, mean the Internet and cable news are awash in putative evidence for every position. One needs only modest patience and a little “Google-fu” to support any position, no matter how pseudoscientific or outlandish.
Contra this attitude, I’ve witnessed vaccine True Believers insisting that, unless you’ve established a laboratory, conducted double-blind studies, run statistical regressions, and published in a peer-reviewed journal, you haven’t really done “research.” To these people, only original research, conducted in rigorous laboratory conditions, counts for debate. Everyone else should defer to the experts in their respective fields, who have actually studied the topic.
This may alienate fellow Leftists, but I find this attitude dangerous. Beyond the elitist attitude that only those who have research grants and official standing should “do science,” this mirrors other important American trends. Consider legislation written by lawyers, so arcane that only other lawyers can comprehend it. Chances are, your car is currently in violation of some road laws, and you’ll never know unless the police stop you.
I appreciate my fellow Leftists’ desire to assert that one evening browsing Google isn’t serious research, that too many “skeptics” merely seek confirmation for whatever fish-eyed opinion they already have. But the opposite of lousy research isn’t relinquishing everything to credentialed experts and demanding general obedience. We don’t rescue science from the numpties and full-time professional ignoramuses, by decreeing only the chosen few voices really count.
Consider the parallels. We’ve witnessed the damage caused by legislators making laws without consulting the electorate, artists creating art without thought for the audience, theologians making religious pronouncements that alienate hurting souls, and engineers building appliances we mostly don’t want and can’t use. This has given us a blighted atmosphere, bureaucratic intransigence, intractable spiritual malaise, and long, joyless trips to unpleasant theatres and art museums.
Don’t misunderstand me. I appreciate expertise, in its place: if I have a medical emergency, I definitely want a doctor, not some rando off the street. But I’ve also experienced painful and disheartening interactions with doctors who make snap decisions, disregard their patients, and prescribe treatments for illnesses this individual doesn’t actually have. I’ve watched conditions go untreated for years, because experts considered themselves immune to consultation.
Even serious researchers don’t think only new research counts. Universities and laboratories conduct metastudies frequently, because only taken collectively do scientific studies yield insights. As Thomas Kuhn has written, science is the process of discovering new information, but it’s also the process of putting that information in a narrative context. Science is about fact-checking, certainly, but it’s also about story-telling.
“Skeptics” Googling information are only seeking the story that unifies the evidence around them. I agree that they generally accept thin evidence and don’t scrutinize the source. Maybe, when our middle-school teachers assign “research papers,” they need to dedicate a unit to evaluating sources, and not deferring that until graduate school, as happened to me. But barring that, Google researchers just want the narrative that ties everything together.
Certainly, we need better discussions about what constitutes “evidence,” who really is an “expert,” and why “science” sometimes changes its mind. Skeptics make bank harping on minor inconsistencies, or on people reversing track following new evidence, which shows a lack of process understanding. But the solution isn’t telling unbelievers to shut up and obey state-sanctioned authority. This shouldn’t be a choice between ignorance and subservience.
People do their “research” because they want to understand. That deserves respect, not mockery, and they deserve a better class of experts.
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