There has been a curious criticism that has emerged over the last two years. It is the criticism of people who “do their own research”.
What people mean by “research” here is the process of gathering information, of trying to figure out what the facts are. It’s a little bit different from what an active research scientist means by the term research. In the world of science, doing research means figuring out new stuff; stuff that nobody else knows.
It’s a weird criticism when applied to general life because it seems to be advocating for maintaining one’s state of ignorance. Just watch Netflix, petal, and leave the important decisions to those who know best.
But is it a valid criticism when it comes to matters scientific?
Ethan Siegel, a former astrophysicist writing for Forbes on the 30th July 2020 (here) thinks it is. But is he right?
In many respects, yes - but there are huge caveats here. He makes a very valid point when he writes:
. . . most of us, even those of us who are scientists ourselves, lack the relevant scientific expertise needed to adequately evaluate that research on our own. In our own fields, we are aware of the full suite of data, of how those puzzle pieces fit together, and what the frontiers of our knowledge is. When laypersons espouse opinions on those matters, it’s immediately clear to us where the gaps in their understanding are and where they’ve misled themselves in their reasoning. When they take up the arguments of a contrarian scientist, we recognize what they’re overlooking, misinterpreting, or omitting.
He argues that “doing your own research” (DYOR)
can lead to spectacular failures when it comes to a scientific matter
He then makes the claim that DYOR
could lead to immeasurable, unnecessary suffering
The examples he uses to support this claim are fluoridated drinking water, vaccinations, climate change and, surprise, surprise, covid19. The issue of fluoridated water is one he describes as a “low-stakes” example to get the ball rolling, so to speak. The other 3 are, in his view, potentially much more serious issues.
I can’t help thinking he’s approaching this a little too much from his perspective of an erstwhile astrophysicist. Physics is a reasonably technical subject at school level. At research level it can be extremely technical. In my field it took me a few days to properly read a new paper, sometimes longer depending on the level of technicality. By “read” here I mean poring over every line, checking every reference, and repeating every single calculation so you understand every last little detail of how a result was arrived at.
With hundreds of new papers coming out every month in my field it was simply not possible to read them all at this level of detail. At some point you have to do more of a “sanity check” than a deep-dive and, unless understanding the paper is directly critical for your own work, you more-or-less end up “trusting” the expert who’s written it if it passes muster and seems to make sense.
It’s not at all relatively straightforward
One of the things I used to enjoy was to spend a little time on scientific forums. The growth of the internet allowed people a voice and there were quite a few people who didn’t think quantum mechanics, or relativity, made much sense. These amateur scientists would proclaim they had “proven” QM, or relativity, wrong (more usually they would say things like Einstein got it wrong). I would spend some time explaining the errors they had made - not because I thought I would convince them, but for the benefit of other readers who might not understand the ins and outs.
To be fair to some of these folk, they sometimes raised very interesting questions - and it was useful to work things through in detail.
One very common feature of these anti-Einstein contributors was their claims that science was based on dogma, that scientists knew they were wrong but were pressured into the official narrative for fear of losing their jobs. These people often opened with statements outlining how long they’d been studying the issue.
I have to admit that when it came to covid, I frequently wondered whether I was like these anti-Einsteiners. There were certain parallels from my own experience.
The problem with relativity (and I’m going to talk about Special Relativity here - which is, at least mathematically, much easier than General Relativity) is that it really does seem to be a little bit screwy at first glance. It’s very hard to develop any kind of intuition about it - that intuition can only be gained by a considerable amount of effort and detailed calculation and thought.
Einstein’s original paper on this, On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies from 1905, is an absolute masterpiece. There is a reason why Einstein is (rightly) so highly regarded amongst physicists. More modern textbooks, however, don’t adopt Einstein’s method of proof but choose a much more direct and simpler approach. The modern proofs require little more than high school algebra.
Einstein, with his typical arrow-to-the-heart approach, asked the following question. We know that if an electron is moving there is an associated magnetic field. If it’s moving at a constant velocity, and you move along with it so that (to you) it seems stationary, where does the magnetic field go?
To you, moving in step with the electron, the electron is not moving at all - it’s like how everyone on a plane is stationary with respect to one another, but they’re all hurtling towards their beach holiday at a high speed according to someone watching on the ground.
You won’t measure any magnetic field at all. Someone standing still (with respect to you) watches you and the electron whizz past and will measure an associated magnetic field. What the heck is going on? Is there a magnetic field or not?
It’s all consistent, however, because electric fields and magnetic fields are not separate things - there’s just an electromagnetic field. Depending on the state of relative motion you can see more of the ‘magnetic’ component than the ‘electric’ component. There’s an interplay going on.
The problem is that when you follow Einstein’s thinking to its logical conclusion we find there’s also this interplay, this interchangeability, between time and space. It’s somewhat mind-blowing, and why there’s so much confusion and resistance surrounding special relativity amongst lay people - it’s horribly ‘counter-intuitive’.
How do we know special relativity is “correct”? I’ve put this word in quotes here because we don’t actually know that - what we do know is that, so far, the predictions of special relativity have been confirmed in thousands and thousands of experiments. There might be a superior theory which also predicts the same results (and more). Actually, in the case of special relativity there is a theory based on notions of an aether which is mathematically equivalent - but this hypothesised aether has to have certain very special (and unobservable) properties.
One key experiment that has been confirmed many, many times (it is now sometimes used in undergrad lab) is that of muon decay. Cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere and the collisions produce particles called muons (amongst other things). The problem is that muons are unstable and decay into other particles in a matter of microseconds (if you take 1,000 muons then after about 2.2 microseconds you’ll only have about 500 muons left).
You can measure the number of muons at the top of a mountain. Then you can measure the number of muons at the bottom of the mountain. You can work out how many you would expect to see at the bottom of the mountain - a certain number will (on average) decay during the time it takes to go from the top to the bottom. The problem is that you find more muons at the bottom than you would expect, based on a simple time of flight calculation.
The thing is, is that your experience of time and space, as an observer watching the muons, is not quite the same as the muon’s experience of these things. There’s a time dilation and length contraction going on, according to special relativity. If you use SR it predicts the correct proportion of muons that survive from top to bottom.
I’m not going to say much more about relativity (you can now breathe a sigh of relief) - but it does illustrate one technical area where I think the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of “trusting the experts”.
Trust in a Covid World
You can see from the above example how a very technical and difficult to understand field, like special relativity, requires a considerable amount of ‘training’ to get right - and how easy it might be for interested ‘amateurs’ to get it wrong. That training doesn’t have to be mediated by a university, although it usually is. You can DYOR but to do that properly in the case of something like special relativity requires a whole lot of pieces to have been properly understood and digested first - not least a considerable facility with mathematical techniques.
But should we take this kind of thinking and naïvely apply it to something like, say, covid?
Here’s where it gets much more murky. Physics is highly technical, as are fields like immunology and microbiology, but I would venture the opinion that physics is ‘cleaner’ or ‘purer’ in a certain sense. I don’t know the right words to use here, but hope you catch my drift. With the biological and medical sciences I would say things are hugely more complex. I tried to understand some basic microbiology once - reading some “microbiology for idiots” sort of textbooks. It was horrifyingly complex. I retreated to the much simpler world of physics. So when I describe physics as ‘purer’ and ‘cleaner’ I mean no disrespect at all - quite the opposite in fact.
The other problem, particularly with the more medical fields, are the vested interests. This is a huge problem for things like ‘consensus’. In the Forbes article Siegel waxes lyrical about consensus:
It’s part of why scientific consensus is so remarkably valuable: it only exists when the overwhelming majority of qualified professionals all hold the same consistent professional opinion. It truly is one of the most important and valuable types of expertise that humanity has ever developed.
But only if we listen to it. It’s absolutely foolish to think that you, a non-expert who lacks the very scientific expertise necessary to evaluate the claims of experts, are going to do a better job than the actual, bona fide experts of separating truth from fiction or fraud.
The problem is that medical fields, in particular, are littered with examples of where the ‘experts’, the consensus, fubarred things quite severely.
Here’s an example of the typical kind of question I, as someone who is decidedly non-expert in medicine, would ask. Type 1 diabetes occurs because your body stops producing enough insulin. If you don’t fix that it’s kind of serious. The treatment, quite naturally, is to artificially give the body the insulin it needs.
Type 2 diabetes is where your body is producing insulin just fine but your body no longer responds to its presence in quite the right way - you’re resistant to its effect. The treatment, again, is to artificially up the insulin levels even more. The treatment is to give more of the stuff that’s not working properly for you. Kind of like a long-term drinker who has to drink a whole bottle of whisky to get the same effect a couple of glasses had on them a decade ago.
My naïve question would be “aren’t you just making things worse by giving insulin, or insulin stimulating drugs, to someone with type 2 diabetes?”
There are numerous other examples where, rather than actually treat the root cause (in the case of type 2 diabetes many patients can reverse it with a decent dietary regime), doctors prescribe medications to treat the symptoms. You end up, like my mum, with a pill box from hell - it takes her longer to pop all the pills than to eat the meal she’s supposed to take them with. OK, I exaggerate, but only slightly.
This is the consensus we’re supposed to follow.
It seems quite clear to me that type 2 diabetes is essentially a problem of hormonal dis-regulation, whereas type 1 diabetes is a problem of hormone deficiency. But, despite the (now many) examples of people who have successfully reversed their type 2 diabetes and are essentially cured, doctors will still be prescribing drugs to treat the symptoms. I’m not at all sure I like this medical consensus. And even if dietary changes become the norm, the new consensus, what does that say about those who previously followed the “consensus”?
That’s the thing about consensuses (apparently that is the plural) - they can change. And they change quite frequently when it comes to things like medical or dietary advice.
The consensus is that vaccines are a medical miracle - safe and effective, having saved millions of lives. That might be true for some of them - it seems to be. However, it’s quite easy to see that in some cases the incidence of the diseases they were designed to prevent was rapidly declining before the introduction of the vaccine. Almost certainly, better hygiene and overall prosperity were having a very significant impact before the introduction of a vaccine in those cases.
The curious thing is that the very word “vaccine” seems to have a kind of magic - it’s like some fairy dust that gets sprinkled that beguiles the listener into thinking they’re all the same - when they are manifestly not. It would be like describing the stuff that comes out of MacDonalds and the stuff that comes out of Gordon Ramsey’s kitchen as equally good, because they’re both kinds of food.
Here’s what Siegel has to say about vaccines:
The science overwhelmingly indicates that vaccines are one of the safest public health interventions ever undertaken by humanity. But if you “do your own research,” you can find a small percentage of online activists, and even a few medical professionals, who rail against the overwhelming science, pushing discredited claims, fear, and often unproven cures or supplements as well.
Remember this was back in July 2020 before we had the covid vaccines, or before we’d seen the data about these “safe” public health interventions.
But it gets worse. He argues for ‘consensus’, again, when it comes to covid:
Although there’s still much to learn about the science of this, from how it spreads to who is most likely to spread it to what the best treatments are to the true infection rate and so on, there’s a lot that the scientific experts have achieved a consensus about. In particular:
- the disease is airborne and easily spread from person-to-person contact,
- it’s more easily spread in indoor settings,
- older people are more likely to get critically ill and die from it,
- staying home except for essential errands,
- and the interventions of wearing masks when you go out, not touching your mask once it’s on, and remaining physically distant (2 meters/6 feet minimum) from others not in your household are all effective.
But even those basic messages — for which there’s virtually no scientific doubt surrounding them — have sparked enormous amounts of controversy. Despite the safety and efficacy of masks, many are refusing to wear them, leading to spikes in new infections.
There is, literally, no robust evidence for distancing or masks as effective measures in the prevention of covid19. The consensus, if there ever was such a thing, was utterly wrong as can easily be demonstrated from the real-world data. To describe this as “virtually no scientific doubt” is bizarre.
It’s way too much trust being placed on a supposed consensus drawn from such flimsy data.
And we’ve not yet considered the most important thing of all. How does a consensus get established in the first place?
The traditional view is that fearless and objective scientists dispassionately examine hypotheses and test those hypotheses, bravely carving out the truth from the rockface of doubt and misinformation.
Hmmm. I don’t think so. Even in physics there are passions and prejudices aplenty - not to mention the difficulty of obtaining funding for investigating less ‘traditional’ approaches - the people making funding recommendations are often those working in the field and they have their own passions and prejudices too. It’s a bit of a creaky system, but it works - sort of.
If the consensus is drawn from what gets published, then if you can control or steer that, you can effectively control the consensus. Why do pharmaceutical companies spend so much money investing in university-led research? Could there be other motives at play, other than a selfless desire to heal the world and make us all healthy by objectively discovering new science?
The important point is that when you control the narrative you control the consensus. Doctors don’t really have enough time to properly investigate every new study, or piece of research. They’ll do what I do - give things a quick read to see if it broadly makes sense - at least for most things. The consensus gets established because there are only so many hours in a day.
So Ethan Siegel is right, and wrong, in my view. He’s fallen for the trap of thinking that all the scientific fields are like physics. There is much more room for doubt, for lack of consensus, in the very complex medical and biological fields.
Or there should be - simply by their very nature and the huge degree of complexity involved.
This is why I am (somewhat) suspicious of any consensus in a medical field. It can exist when it doesn’t have any right to.
Great article from a scientific perspective. From an anthropological perspective, it's fascinating that merely going along with the consensus-- acceding to it and showing oneself capable of parroting consensus views-- contributes to one's social status and affords one placement in the elite, educated "in" group. Whereas someone (say, RFK Jr.) who actually belongs in that group by virtue of class, education, and family is shamed and shunned for holding opposite views. (I also have degrees some would consider worthwhile-- in fact, I attended the same institution where my physician received her MD, and while we often chat about that, when I asked her the ultimate question about the new "vaccines"-- "You seem utterly confident that these are highly safe and effective; what is that based on?"-- her whole demeanor changed to one dripping with preprogrammed, condescending explanations for the "vaccine hesitant". I had transformed from "one of us" to "one of them" based on nothing but my shameless willingness to question the orthodoxy. And yet her answers weren't scientific explanations; they were talking points. You don't have to be a scientist to understand the difference.)
Your arguments are good ones, and I would add just two things.
First, epidemiology is a relatively poorly delineated field in terms of the boundaries of expertise and overlap with other sciences, particularly when it comes to such a complex and multilayered issue as Covid. What I mean is that the best epidemiologist is actually a multitude of scientists in one. He is a physicist when he studies the Brownian motion of suspended particles in the air or the vectors of gasses as they pass through and around cloth masks; he is a social scientist when he models the effectiveness of simple mitigations implemented in complex societies; he is a geneticist when he attempts to understand the virus' past developments from its present RNA; he is a computer scientist when he develops complex simulations to model pandemic scenarios; he is a psychologist when he tailors his communications to produce maximum beneficial results in a panicked public. To think that any epidemiologist can stand alone as an expert is an absurdity - the very essence of specialization (in many ways the heart of modern scientific development) precludes this kind of broad expertise. The success of epidemiology depends on its cooperation and integration with a wide variety of outside sciences. That is why it is such a dangerous position to reject the criticism of outsider research, when those outsiders are often the key to a robust and integrated response.
Second, the process of "experization" is, in itself, a sort of innocuous indoctrination. The education process does not, for good reason, emphasize criticism or deconstruction of currently accepted scientific theory - that is left to the established experts - and the schools instead teach students to mold their minds to the thinking of trusted voices. The practical reality of an educational system rooted in such intellectual mimicry, however, is that one ends up with experts best skilled at voicing the opinions of others. This is why revolutionary thinkers, of which Einstein is a perfect example, rarely come from within the ranks of established scientists and rarely find a welcoming audience for their ideas.