In defense of those who claim to have "done their own research"

For a brief time in the late nineties, I wanted to be a scientist. I'd never liked science in high school, and had been ignorant of many basic science facts into my mid-twenties, enough that I was probably borderline science illiterate. In the last of my six years in the Marine Corps, though, someone left a Carl Sagan book lying around somewhere, and for some reason, I picked it up and read it. That led to me reading another Sagan book, and then another, and then I started picking up science textbooks from used bookstores and reading those. I also started self-teaching myself the algebra I hadn't done well in in high school. After about a year of this, I got discharged and was ready to start college. For my first semester, I was a chemistry major. 

I did well in my biology and chemistry 101 courses, but I realized that I was behind in math. I'd caught up in algebra, but there was a still a chasm of geometry and calculus I needed to leap over before I'd be really ready to study science seriously. I was already in my mid-twenties, and I felt some pressure to get a degree in a hurry and get on with life. Most of the people I'd gone to high school with were starting real jobs, and I felt a little ashamed that I was only just starting college. Rather than spend the time to catch up in math, I switched to liberal arts, eventually settling on English. 

For a long time after I gave up the dream of studying in the natural sciences, though, I still wanted to feel like I belonged among scientists. Since I didn't have the chops to actually be one, I did what most wannabes do: I aped the language. I tried to talk like I thought a scientist would. 

One instance of this sticks out in memory. Many people from anti-GMO, pro-holistic/herbal/non-Western medicine, or anti-vax camps would rail against putting "chemicals" in their bodies. Scientists would often snigger at this (and I would snigger along with them), pointing out that all matter is made up of chemicals, so it's impossible to avoid consuming chemicals. They'd say water is a chemical compound, so to be anti-consumption of chemicals meant to be anti-consumption of water. 

Over time, though, I came to feel like this was an overly fastidious definition, one held to only for the sake of belittling and discrediting those whom the majority of scientists disagreed with by making them out to be so little versed in science, they didn't even know how to use basic terms correctly. While I agree that most of the people who rail against consumption of chemicals--say, Gwyneth Paltrow--are likely to be completely wrong about nearly everything, I think this game of definitional gerrymandering is dishonest. 

Many terms have more than one meaning, depending on the social context, and the fitness of one of the meanings of a term shouldn't be determined by whether it is the preferred meaning of a certain group, but on whether those who share the context can reliably interpret what the term means. So when my Net+ course tells me that "ethernet cable" isn't really a correct term, I'm fine with that statement insofar as it's a statement within the context of a class on Ethernet. However, when normal people use the term, we know exactly what they mean be it. If I went into a Best Buy and asked where the ethernet cables were, the clerk would know where to point me. There is a specialist meaning of the term "ethernet," and there is a lay person's meaning of the term, and both can be correct, as long as they are used in the right context. 

For the term "chemical," it can have one meaning within the context of a science class (anything that has a chemical structure, which is to say, all matter), and there is a more general use of the term (a thing made by a chemist, i.e. something artificial). To attack a position for using the lay meaning of the term in a context where it's understood the lay meaning is intended is a disingenuous method of argument. 

"I did my own research"

I've been witnessing what seems like another instance of this form of a discredit-through-definition attack lately against those who are resistant to getting COVID-19 vaccinations. The argument goes something like this: "Research" means original research, performed in a laboratory, by specialists using expensive equipment who produce technical conclusions that will then be peer-reviewed. Therefore, when people say they "did their own research," but mean that they read articles or watched videos about COVID-19 and vaccinations, they do not even understand what "research" means, and everything they say should automatically be rejected. 

Much like when I object to an overly narrow definition of "chemical," it feels a little bit strange to me to be defending the side I mostly disagree with. I got vaccinated as soon at it was available to me. To some extent, I also "did my own research," but for the most part, I got vaccinated because that seemed to be the prevailing recommendation. I did enough "research" to determine what experts were recommending, and I did that. None of us can research every subject under the sun, and I didn't feel compelled to put in a lot of time on this one. 

Prior to two years ago, would anyone have objected to my use of "research" in that last paragraph to describe my attempt as a layperson to determine what the prevailing wisdom on a subject was? Don't we use the word in this sense all the time, in a way that more or less means "to read up on something"? When a high schooler goes to the library to gather materials for a paper on gene therapy, we aren't saying that high schooler is an expert on the subject, but we still call this phase in the process of writing a paper "research." When my mother uses online resources to trace her ancestry, nobody pretends that means she is an expert in genealogy, nor a historian. Prior to 2020, though, if she'd said, "I did a bunch of research and found a few more headstones to go visit," nobody would have objected to that use of the term. To a scientist who does research for a living, the word means one thing, and to a person who does something else for a living, it generally means another. People aren't wrong for using the term in the more general sense.

Why would I worry about playing fair with people like Chipper Jones, whose claim to have "done his own research" far exceeded his antagonists in terms of arrogance and dismissiveness of those who disagreed with him? Maybe because there's a precedent here that I don't want to see set. All of us have to make hundreds of decisions on matters in which we are not experts. For some of these decisions, the stakes are low enough we can go along with the crowd, but for some, we are going to have to decide for ourselves, which means wading in and making the best decision we can on a topic where we lack expertise in key areas relevant to the question at hand. 

For example, how should you pick a political candidate to vote for? Nobody is an expert in everything relevant to picking a candidate: public policy, geopolitical affairs, economics, etc. Should we simply rely on experts in these fields to tell us what to do? Which fields are the most important? And what if the experts don't all agree? Should we try to determine what the majority opinion of experts is and go with that? None of this sounds like a good way to pick a candidate. In a democracy, we all have a moral responsibility to develop our own beliefs (through what you might call research) and to pick candidates we think (based on more research) best align with those beliefs. We can't pass the buck on something like our votes by relying on expertise.

What about religious beliefs? Should we poll all the people with Ph.D.s in the world, see what the majority religious belief is, and go with that? Of course not. For one thing, not all doctoral degrees would be equally relevant to questions about religion. The sciences or philosophy or history might be more relevant than public policy or educational theory. We will of course want to read the works of great minds to determine our own beliefs, but it's up to each of us to determine what weight to give those we read. If one scientist says cosmology supports belief in the existence of God and another scientist says the opposite, I need, to some extent, to judge between them myself, even though I have only the most basic grasp of concepts in cosmology. We all have to make important decisions all the time through research on topics we are not experts in.

Fine, you may say. Those are broad abstract topics, but COVID-19 vaccinations are a subject of limited breadth and a very practical application. Surely on this, we should trust the experts? But there are practical issues all the time when people need to question experts. Do you trust the guy who might be giving you the runaround at the mechanic's, even though he knows more about cars than you, or do you trust your gut telling you he's trying to bilk you?  

At the moment, I'm dealing with an issue in my foot known as Morton's neuroma. I've been seeing a podiatrist for months, and nothing he's tried so far has worked. I might have to get surgery. But my podiatrist gave me a time period for recovery that is at odds with everything I've read on reputable websites. I'm talking vastly different, like four times as long. I don't claim to know as much about feet and neurons as my doctor, but I do think I've done enough "research" to question why he's telling me something like this. I think I should go ask another doctor before I get surgery, rather than trust this doctor's expertise. Would anyone argue I should ignore my instincts because my podiatrist is an expert and I'm not? 

The fact is that while we all have to rely on experts to tell us things they've spent their whole lives learning about, we also realize that those experts aren't infallible. Sometimes, we have reason to think we're seeing mistakes, but thinking this does not mean we think we could do the jobs of those experts ourselves. Personal flaws like inattentiveness, lack of effort, lack of empathy, and greed affect experts as much as the rest of us, and non-experts are capable, sometimes, of picking up on these things. Sometimes, experts make mistakes because they are tired, overworked, or forced to work in bad conditions. If there's anything I've learned about being an adult, it's that you don't become magic when you grow up the way I thought would happen when I was a kid. If I still make mistakes all the time in the profession where I am an expert, it's reasonable to think others will, too.  

In the case of COVID-19 vaccinations, recommendations to get vaccines, and the vaccine mandates that are based on those mandates, come from a body that is part of the federal government. While the goal is for bodies like the CDC to be independent of political considerations, I can tell you from personal experience that true political neutrality in government work is easier said than done. Beyond the political considerations, though, a citizen needs to bear in mind the inefficiencies of a bureaucracy. The CDC sometimes makes bad calls for no other reason than it's a government agency, and government tends to move slowly. That's why the CDC tends to lag behind what research is telling it. Remember how long it took for the CDC to recommend wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic? It wasn't because wearing masks didn't make sense prior to that; it's because the CDC doesn't work perfectly. A citizen wearing a mask prior to CDC mandates, as several of my Korean friends did, would have been opposing CDC recommendations based on their "own research," but that citizen would have been right. While most people aren't better scientists than those employed by the CDC, that doesn't mean we are wrong to be skeptical of their proclamations, for reasons that sometimes have nothing to do with science. 

All of us have to make decisions every day on complicated questions outside our expertise. We do research--and it deserves to be called research--as best as we can, and we make the best decisions we are capable of. As a democracy, we ought to honor this effort, not belittle those who've come to different conclusions by mocking the entire notion of a citizen attempting to independently make sense of what she's being told.  

I realize that a lot of the research done by people opposing vaccinations isn't good research. Even by my expanded definition of research to mean any kind of "learning more about" something, that still should mean reading well-reasoned and reliable sources, not any crazy thing on the internet. If someone claims to have done their own research and believes the government is putting trackers in vaccines, the problem isn't that they didn't do original research in a lab, but that they didn't research good secondary sources. (For what it's worth, I have one friend who is a bona fide MENSA-level genius with a Ph.D in math and an excellent command of many topics in science who isn't a fan of COVID vaccinations. It's not all crazy people.) 

The fact that some people don't do good non-expert research in order sharpen their views isn't a knock against citizens verifying information as best as they can. Nor should it be used to undermine the idea that a minority may come to valid but differing conclusions. We all have a duty to perform the best research we can so we can have the best opinions we can. We all share in what Lionel Trilling called "the moral duty to be intelligent." Mocking those trying to do their own research by stating nobody who isn't an expert can do meaningful research is an argument against the critical work all of us need to be doing in a democracy.