Have I? I think it deserves to be mocked. Enough people mocking it turns it into a fringe philosophy. People giving credence to "do your own research" is partly how we got into this mess today.
If we are using a good definition of "research", I agree.
But we aren't. Research within these contexts is consulting a Google search, a social media search, watching short form videos and consulting a sycophantic LLM.
I think the idea is it's better to rely on Phase 3 clinical trials like those done by Moderna in preference to say someone untrained searching X posts in a manner probably not unlike RFK.
It's ok to do the X post thing on a personal level but not really as someone in charge of the health of millions of others.
He can do more real research than ever as the head of the FDA, but ignores the results and fires the researchers. A real DEI hire - Destruction, Ego, Incompetence.
For individuals arguing on the internet, "Do your own research" has long meant cherry pick others' research to support your own worldview, regardless (or in spite) of its scientific flaws.
Doublespeak has a way of becoming exactly the opposite of what it says on the tin, regardless of its origins. It's literally in the name.
The people 'in the know' know what "Department of Peace" means, and the masses use it to laugh at anyone who dares to think they invent wars. That's the point.
Not OP but I would have hoped that it is self-evidently good if not great for a population to be capable and motivated to research things for themselves without solely relying on authorities and institutions.
Especially when so many of those entities are wildly rotten and corrupt; but even if they weren't.
Capable -- yes. Having to actually do it -- no. I would prefer to live in a world where I can depend on my fellow humans instead of living out a fantasy of self-sufficiency.
The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
> The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
Out of the 27 authors of Daszak's Lancet paper, used worldwide to claim that Coronavirus couldn't have come from a lab, how many had a conflict of interest?
How many news outlets repeated their claims verbatim, rather than reading it themselves to find the obvious 'errors'?
And how many academic institutions pointed out its flaws?
...
Too old an example? Ok - how many institutions sat on the Epstein files, lied about them, kept them sealed, etc, for decades? How many political leaders and business owners worldwide had direct links themselves?
How many media companies are giving adequate attention to climate change, and refusing to run ads from fossil fuel companies?
How many institutions/countries dared to tell Biden that arming genocide and vetoing ceasefires isn't actually okay? How many countries have sanctioned the perpetrators?
Read anything about EPA corruption lately? How about what ICE have been doing? Anyone in DOGE face any accountability for permanently compromising key government databases yet?
Because again, if you're relying on media and institutions to get your news on these things you might think everything is fine. It really, really isn't though. You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid.
... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.
So again, how do you propose one actually does this? Via crowdsourcing on FB? AI-generated news gathering? Consulting with a medium? Like what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?
Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, with an ideally healthy array of outlets having overlapping coverage of the same events. Within this framework, "do your own research" would be called "reading broadly".
> ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.
I have been around long enough to know that the meme does fit for some non-negligible section of the population. It's not to say that the system hasn't given a lot of people good reason for doubt, but a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
> what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?
There are lots of valid ways to research things for oneself.
None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.
> Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public,
Sure. Reading journalism can be part of doing one's own research.
> a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
Who primed them?
Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story that recently unfolded: Did you know that the 4chan forum where the Pizzagate conspiracy - which used the same code words as Epstein's circle - opened the exact same day that Epstein met with its founder?
That meant that when whistleblowers talked about real things that happened, or real emails leaked, some people were 'primed' to dismiss them because obviously Pizzagate was a hoax.
Some journalists did report well on that scenario; people like Whitney Webb or Sarah Kendzior. They didn't get invited to mainstream media to talk about it though.
... There are a lot of people who believe one of the dumbest conspiracies possible - that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax. Why do they believe that? Could it be that the fossil fuel companies who knew climate change was real in the 70s helped to foster that? Could it be that the media who profits massively from running fossil fuel ads have been complicit?
It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media. It's not okay to have <80 familes owning half the worlds wealth. You end up with all these terrible cognitive side effects in your population from the propaganda they use. Blaming all that on people doing their own research is essentially blaming the victim, at the worst possible time.
> None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.
I'm expressing frustration at the lack of a proper answer, which you still seem to not be able to provide.
> Who primed them?
Conspiracy theory influencers, cult leaders, unscrupulous politicians, other people with existing mental illnesses, corporations with a lobbying agenda - the list is as long as there are people with a motive to influence the populace to their own gains.
> Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story
You're providing a single example (without any references, btw) as a means of exonerating your entire argument. But sure, pizzagate is suddenly looking a lot less dismissible out-of-hand now, given we've come to learn the sheer extent of Epstein's web.
I agree that much of the disinformation re global warming is at least funded by corporations and individuals with a profit motive; I agree that the concentrated ownership of the media and wealth are highly problematic.
But pumping the "do your own research" schtick and ignoring that it is a term highly co-opted by conspiracy theorists (as well as others with an agenda to misinform) is hardly helping.
So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?
> So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?
Sorry, you think the choice is between people doing their own research or having a 4th estate?
How odd. I don't know if I've ever met anyone with such a binary.
To be as clear as I possibly can, though I did already answer this: doing your own research and having actual journalism exist are not mutually exclusive things. They go very well together.
However, as the quality of media falls, the necessity to do your own research to get an accurate worldview increases.
Republicians. By declaring all parts of the government are full of fraud and incompetence. By "doing there own research" aka not really and just lying and misrepresenting things they didn't really research and didn't really understand. I mean it would be 1 thing if they actually found fraud and incompetence but republican appointed bodies like Doge were to incompetent to find any appreciable fraud that IGs were not already proscuting.
Its been this way for a long time ever hear of the Golden Fleece Awards, these were given to 'useless' basic research projects the government funded. I think the key take away being that do your own research gets equated to the government cannot do research and we won't trust any government research that doesn't comport with our worldviews. The irony being several of the reciepts of Golden Fleece Awards actually turned out to be very usefully and highly impactful economically speaking.
> that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax.
I kind of reject this claim because the suppression of research especially at places like EXXON, or the teflon people did not come from the scientists generally speaking, but rather from the business interests above them who did not want that research to be shared and owned it. Public Scientist later exposed it and the irony here is that the very thing you are saying won't get exposed got exposed but the system your condeming. Main stream media is not the Fact finding body when it comes to research, it is the propogation business. The do your own research crowds I have experienced ignore the Science Fact Finding Groups regardless of the results because they are no doing research they are vibing their beliefs.
> It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media.
I agree 100% here but doing your own research doesn't change this incentive, this exists because we don't have resonable taxes and monopoly laws. I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that. And I think this is the sentiment of the other poster in the thread group is trying to give and i tend to agree with it.
The government likely cannot make 10 decisions better than you personally can, but the government makes billions of decisions everyday probably more than you'll make in your entire life. The scale is the problem government solves and not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly
> the very thing you are saying won't get exposed got exposed but the system your condeming.
Hate (well, love) to break it to you but the Exxon thing was exposed by... One person, doing research.
Neela Banerjee. And she didn't work for one of the media giants.
After she brought the hard proof which had lain dormant for 40 something years, yeah the mainstream media eventually put it out there. They didn't have much choice at that point, did they.
The scientists didn't expose it. The business people didn't expose it. The mainsteram media didn't expose it. They all got paid, all while the Earth got hotter, and hotter, and hotter; more and more reliant on fossil fuel.
> I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that.
Mainstream media isn't ever going to tell you how to end the media monopoly. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
> not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly
I didn't say not to trust anyone. I said that believing everything from rather obviously compromised and corrupt institutions isn't a rational way to get to grips with reality. That's as true of fossil fuel science as it was our pandemic response.
It would be great if the general public were willing and capable of reading the scientific papers which represent the research in question. However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
This absolutely deserves criticism and even derision.
> However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
Kinda hard to blame them for that when they were being lied to so obviously by official sources, about so many things; and when social and traditional media were censoring 'alternative' perspectives (many which later proved entirely correct) on a scale of hundreds of millions of posts.
No, we didn't all have the biology savvy to read and understand Daszak's paper ... But lots of people did have that knowledge - and either didn't speak up, or were censored into oblivion, or had literal actual death threats levelled at them.
Lots of institutions which had a duty to speak up didn't; not just about that, not just about the lableak theory, not just about the funding of GOF research [0], not just about how the virus behaved (animal reservoirs, natural immunity etc), and not just about the ways the vaccines were lied about.
Many of the institutions which did speak up, again, were censored into oblivion [1]; rendered irrelevant by the 'requests' of a Biden admin which was simultaneously threatening every major social media company with monopoly investigations. That's documented fact now, but it was blindingly obvious at the time too.
In context, any research was better than believing whatever you were told to believe; no matter how it changed from one week to the next. And I respect the people who tried, even if they didn't do it very well, better than the people who kept their mouths shut and did what they were told without any independent thought. And I even respect those people more than those who actively derided anyone who questioned authority even the slightest bit.
Yes, but what sources do they use for their research? Is it expected that everyone should get a PhD, a lab and do their own mRNA vaccine trials? That hardly seems feasible, no?
Still doesn't explain the "long term point of view" part, btw.
How am I supposed to research things myself? Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.
I don't have resources to set up my own lab. I don't even know if the manufacturer will sell a dozen or so vaccines directly to me. So can't even do a basic stoichiometry on my own. And forget about me setting up a trial with actual people - I have no idea where I could begin to make it possible.
If by research you mean reading already published papers, that's literature review and I wouldn't call that a research. But because doing my own experiments and trials is out of question, I'm willing to settle for that.
Reviewing published papers comes with its own set of problems. A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. I suppose I can rely only on open journals and pre-prints but that's not all of them. Messaging the authors directly is also an option but it's doesn't scale well and takes time.
Suppose I get my hands on a couple of relevant papers. How can I be sure what's written there is actually correct? It would be nice if I could double check against the raw data, but often that's not available. And at best all I can verify is that the paper's content matches the source data. I can't verify the data itself. At some point I have to trust the authors. Not to mention I don't have access to the data from research that wasn't published, for example because the experiments didn't show anything novel.
But that's fine. Nothing is perfect and after hours (if not days) of reading and playing with data I came to a conclusion that I'm happy with. Of course I have to review it again in a few years. The new research will be published by then. Maybe they will discover something different and I have to review that too.
Overall, I spent a lot of time and it was exhausting. Diligently reading and cross-referencing all that data is mentally taxing. I can't complain though because I've learned something.
There's one problem though. All of that effort was about just a single vaccine. But there's more of them. For other diseases too. And there are other problems I'd love to research. Windmills. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Dozens of types of food. Economic theories. How can I research all of that in a timely fashion?
I'm genuinely asking because I want to. I realize there will be trade-offs involved, but all of them are either relying on someone else (which we try to avoid) or won't be deep enough to form an informed opinion. And I'm not happy with either.
> Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.
Sure. Let's say the manufacturer and the government claim that the vaccine is 100% effective, all of the time, with no side effects.
But you happen to notice that lots of women are complaining online about, say, missing their periods for months at a time after taking it. And getting the flu anyway.
Congratulations. You have done your own research, made your own observations, and thought for yourself.
That's the kind of thing many people were talking about. What else could they be talking about, since as you point out, they didn't have any access to raw data.
If you want to get hardcore into citizen science, that's really cool. You will have to pick a direction though; we can't do everything unfortunately. And funding is hard.
> A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions.
There are ways around this these days, but yeah the paywalling and siloing of knowledge is really holding back our potential as a species.
Did you know that it connects back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? Yeah, he was the guy most responsible for expanding the paywall model of academic research and maximising the profit from it. He could make or break scientific careers, keep certain discoveries to himself, hold leverage on academic institutions and professors...
Reading is worthless if you don't vet your sources. Encyclopedia Britannica and Uncle Johnny's Chemtrail Digest are not equally valid sources of truth.
And there's the actual hard part: institutional trustworthiness is in the shitter. Everyone will have their sources that they trust, and if were honest, none of us can really vet any of them.
A lot of these disputes can be simplified to "I don't trust your sources".
That's true; but I also think a lot of these disputes originate with "your research invalidates my axiomatic beliefs, so I will find whatever 'evidence' needed to counter them." Especially disputes percolating down from the political strata.
He is, and he's publicly admitted to both mercury poisoning (which leads to cognitive impairments and potentially insanity) and having part of his brain eaten by a worm[1].
I don't think it's too cynical to say (based on their voting record) that that's the exact question the Heritage Foundation alums on the court as asking themselves at this moment.
I think a successful product strategy can be "build something you love, see if others love it too". If that's enough customers, you can judiciously expand out from there. The "fail honestly" method.
This is the best way to build products imo. I'm like this, and I've been accused of being very "vibes-based." However, that's a way more tractable way of shipping stuff instead of "well Jim said he wants X, but Amy said she wants Y" so you end up just kind of half-assing features because you think they might get you users, instead of just being passionately all-in into a very defined product vision (which is a very Jobsian way of doing things).
It's also easier to run a feedback loop. If you implement Y, but Amy doesn't give you $5 a month, what are you going to do? Knock on her door? Users have no idea what they want half the time, anyway.
If you build a product and no one cares, it bruises the ego a bit more, sure, but if you self reflect, you can eek out your own bad assumptions, or bad implementation, or maybe a way to pivot that keeps your product ethos.
Good taste is an incredibly powerful differentiator in competitive markets like software. Seems like there’s 3-5 decent choices for darn near anything I need, and usually 1 smaller team has the product that stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Second, if you have the feature that people need or a service or network effect, they will suffer through a bad app - see every Electron app ever.
That “smaller team” may not be around in a year and if you are lucky, you’ll get an “Our Amazing Journey” blog post. Does this product export to a format that my design team can import into Figma if this product goes tits up?
If you want to do the proverbial “moving upmarket” then yeah you’re going to have this and a lot of other problems. Taste does not sell (let’s be nice and add “on its own”) in that segment.
If ten people make focused tools covering different 20% subsets of the giant ones, there's a good chance of having a choice that matches what any given customer wants. And for most customers, that's going to be a better match than a big tool that does tons of other stuff they didn't want.
That is the alternative timeline for software I always wanted to live in, both as a user and as a developer. Make it 100 different tools instead to make it even more likely that there is a close enough match.
Games are closer to that than any other type of software even if they tend to cluster around popular genres and styles a bit much.
If you give people a limited set of tools they quickly improve until then they need (well, want) different tools. In order to keep your customers you'll inevitably end up adding new things.
I don't know anyone that doesn't use a combination of at least one simple, one feature laden, text editor. Most of us via notes apps, etc., routinely move between a range of text complexity, suitable to a range of things we want to write.
Having the simplest to the most powerful apps be consistent between each other, wherever they have feature commonality, would be really nice.
Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself.
No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.
You're right. Even across stuff I _really_ use it's hard to bring myself to try.
Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better.
Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc
I dunno. I get that we have different needs, but I enjoy testing out new productivity tools. I'm sort of a productivity-software-junkie. I don't use almost any of the things I try, but I enjoy exploring the market.
Then again, I do this in my free time. At work, I rarely deviate from what is provided and the handful of things that I explicitly added.
This post is about some highly interactive software with a lot of design decisions, and this thread is about finding whether or not your 20% feature niche is supported.
Let's be real, unless some soul somehow had the same 20% as yours and left a review somewhere, you won't know if the features you need, or their implemention, fit your need until you try.
Which is where the bulk of the other 80% of features come from. It’s a cycle.
You start as you describe, you expand, you end up with this enterprise monstrosity, everyone using a different 20%. New tool comes along, you start as you describe…
The Evanston IL case is worse. They told Flock to deactivate and remove them. The cameras were re-installed and re-activated w/o permission, so the city had to come out and cover them all.
> The company took down 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall all of them by Tuesday. This was apparently without authorization from city officials, who sent Flock a cease-and-desist order to take them back down. [1]
> Flock CEO Garrett Langley released a statement ... where he writes that “some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information” about the company’s relationship with federal law enforcement, confirming that there were “limited pilots” with agencies under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security focused on “combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution.” [2]
Don't underestimate the capitalists. We've seen this many times in the past--most recently the commercialization of the Internet. Before that, phones, radio and television.
While there is still a market for artisanal furniture, dishes and clothes most people buy mass-produced dishes, clothes and furniture.
I wonder if software creation will be in a similar place. There still might be a small market for handmade software but the majority of it will be mass produced. (That is, by LLM or even software itself will mostly go away and people will get their work done via LLM instead of "apps")
As with furniture, it's supply vs demand, and it's a discussion that goes back decades at this point.
Very few people (even before LLM coding tools) actually did low level "artisanal" coding; I'd argue the vast majority of software development goes into implementing features in b2b / b2c software, building screens, logins, overviews, detail pages, etc. That requires (required?) software engineers too, and skill / experience / etc, but it was more assembling existing parts and connecting them.
Years ago there was already a feeling that a lot of software development boiled down to taping libraries together.
Or from another perspective, replace "LLM" with "outsourcing".
What you get right now is mass replicated software, just another copy of sap/office/Spotify/whatever
That software is not made individually for you, you get a copy like millions of other people and there is nearly no market anymore for individual software.
Llms might change that, we have a bunch of internal apps now for small annoying things..
They all have there quirks, but are only accessible internally and make life a little bit easier for people working for us.
Most of them are one shot llms things, throw away if you do not need it anymore or just one shoot again
The question is whether that's a good thing or not; software adages like "Not Invented Here" aren't going to go away. For personal tools / experiments it's probably fine, just like hacking together something in your spare time, but it can become a risk if you, others, or a business start to depend on it (just like spare time hacked tools).
I'd argue that in most cases it's better to do some research and find out if a tool already exists, and if it isn't exactly how you want it... to get used to it, like one did with all other tools they used.
I think RFK is actually mentally damaged. He's been on his "do your own research" anti-vax crusade forever.
reply