PhD here. Doing background research is hard. Reading papers, separating the wheat from the chafe, reading the sources, the sources sources, it's all hard, time consuming and 90% is not readily...
PhD here. Doing background research is hard. Reading papers, separating the wheat from the chafe, reading the sources, the sources sources, it's all hard, time consuming and 90% is not readily available. It's behind paywalls, sitting on microfiche, stored on researchers hard drives.
The vast majority of people have no idea how to even begin doing background research. Web searches are not your friend, they often return garbage, popular instead of informative, opinion instead of factual. And the majority don't have the training to understand the difference.
Yup. The difficult part of doing research is not finding information but contextualizing it, and that is really only possible by dedicating a lot of time to the matter as well as (in my opinion)...
Yup. The difficult part of doing research is not finding information but contextualizing it, and that is really only possible by dedicating a lot of time to the matter as well as (in my opinion) having other experts around to help point out issues you yourself may not notice. The latter is especially relevant before you have your own expertise to rely on. A lot of doing a PhD is reading reading reading the literature to gain that knowledge and ability to contextualize. It’s also part of the reason that it’s hard for ‘amateurs’ to contribute seriously to a given field. It takes more time than most people have if they are working other jobs to familiarize yourself with a field. It’s not impossible, but it’s harder than most people think.
It's hard when you're looking to establish reality. Much easier when you're just trying to confirm your biases. Trivial, even, everything is served for you on a platter. It's as if someone...
It's hard when you're looking to establish reality. Much easier when you're just trying to confirm your biases. Trivial, even, everything is served for you on a platter. It's as if someone benefitted from the disinfo and SEO'd some of these results :^)
This applies to when they actually attempt "research". I think the core problem with "doing your own research" is not trying and failing. It's doing something else entirely and calling it...
This applies to when they actually attempt "research".
I think the core problem with "doing your own research" is not trying and failing. It's doing something else entirely and calling it "research" regardless. Visiting an echo chamber, talking with a RN friend, coincidentally having read a scam ad in a tabloid earlier. And it's not because the person doesn't know what's the consensus—they deny it because it's cooler that way.
Hell, many people claim they "did research" simply because they want to sound like they did. They think it adds credibility to their statements and are too Dunning to Kruger it does not, at least not outside their echo chambers.
I've had someone tell me they did their own research and when I asked what research, they linked a tweet. It was a tweet of an unlabeled graph and some text claiming it was from a scientific paper...
I've had someone tell me they did their own research and when I asked what research, they linked a tweet. It was a tweet of an unlabeled graph and some text claiming it was from a scientific paper proving some point. The person felt genuinely confident they had researched the topic and had seen the data themselves. Because a picture of a graph was enough to make them trust that the paper agreeing with their point must exist somewhere.
What gets me is the complete fabrication of sources they think they've seen. A flat earther on Instagram told me that there's a video of Neil Armstrong saying the moon landing was faked. I asked...
What gets me is the complete fabrication of sources they think they've seen. A flat earther on Instagram told me that there's a video of Neil Armstrong saying the moon landing was faked. I asked for a source and they hit me with the classic "do your own research bro" comment. I then offered $1000 for the video, they said it was on telegram and I need to go find it myself. So it's obvious they're lying about seeing it. If that video was real, every flat earther would be posting it everywhere all the time. It's insane the lengths they go to to justify their insane beliefs.
A huge problem is we look for links that follow our own beliefs too. So it is easy for someone to go down a path of not necessarily being wrong but missing a bigger unbiased picture. I think it's...
A huge problem is we look for links that follow our own beliefs too. So it is easy for someone to go down a path of not necessarily being wrong but missing a bigger unbiased picture.
I think it's good to be skeptical of everything media related. Anything can be faked and claimed. Every conspiracy has a little truth behind it. It's a matter of finding the balance for what is actually right.
I wonder whether there is some kind of bias here. As in, the people likely to attempt their own research were already predisposed toward conspiracy belief, and the research is just a symptom of...
I wonder whether there is some kind of bias here. As in, the people likely to attempt their own research were already predisposed toward conspiracy belief, and the research is just a symptom of that.
This is, I would think, related to the phenomenon where conspiracy folks tend to discount (at best) contrary evidence.
Disclaimer: I’m a conspiracy folks. But I am a trained and seasoned researcher, and like to think my conspiracy assertions are rooted in the real evil men do, like those in the pnac drumming up false pretenses for war, as opposed to the outrageous, fauci and the democrats created the covid to have a pretense to implant satan tracking chips.
Here’s the paper: Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity As always, it helps to ask “what did they actually do?” Specifically, the first study was of...
As always, it helps to ask “what did they actually do?”
To this end, we run five separate experiments that measure the effect of SOTEN on belief in popular false and true news stories for the point in time investigated. Four of these studies use survey experiments; the fifth combines survey and digital trace data of search results collected using a custom web browser plug-in. In each study, the individuals in both the control and treatment groups were asked to assess the veracity of news articles, but those in the treatment group were encouraged to search online for information (instructions to search online were provided by a partner organization and are provided in the Methods) to help with this assessment.
Specifically, the first study was of whether Americans could evaluate articles about breaking news:
All of the respondents were then asked to evaluate the veracity of the article using both a categorical (true, false/misleading, could not determine) and seven-point ordinal scale. A key challenge was establishing the veracity of the articles directly after publication, a period during which assessments from fact-checking organization were not likely to be available. To this end, we sent out the articles to be evaluated concurrently by a group of six professional fact-checkers from leading national outlets.
The second study asked people to rate articles and then do a search, to see if they changed their minds. The third one asked new respondents to evaluate the same articles 3-6 months later, to see if the task would be easier after there’s more information online. The fourth study tried again with articles about COVID during the pandemic.
The fifth study used Mechanical Turk instead, so it’s no longer a random sample of Americans, but it allowed them to collect the queries, search results and the URL’s that people visited while using Google.
How did they pick the articles?
We sourced one article per day from each of the following five news streams: liberal mainstream news domains; conservative mainstream news domains; liberal low-quality news domains; conservative low-quality news domains; and low-quality news domains with no clear political orientation. Each day, we chose the most popular online articles from these five streams that had appeared in the previous 24 h and sent them to respondents […]
I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the study, but an alternative summary might be “can the average American use a search engine to fact-check news articles?” The answer seems to be “no.”...
I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the study, but an alternative summary might be “can the average American use a search engine to fact-check news articles?” The answer seems to be “no.”
I wonder what effect education has. Would college graduates do any better?
Also, maybe you’re more curious about how well you would do? It might be fun if someone set up an online quiz so you could see how well you do at fact-checking.
Ever since the pandemic happened in 2020, I'm taking the term "conspiracy theorists" with a little bit of nuance and not too keen to just brush them off irrationally like earlier. I remember...
Ever since the pandemic happened in 2020, I'm taking the term "conspiracy theorists" with a little bit of nuance and not too keen to just brush them off irrationally like earlier.
I remember reading several reddit comments and threads around late 2019 (when the news of COVID had already surfaced but it wasn't declared a pandemic by WHO yet). Needless to say, some of these threads were quite fatalistic and catastrophic, most certainly the people who wrote articles like the OP would consider them "conspiracy theorists". But as it turned out, their conspiracy theory turned out to be true and the pandemic really happened, many people actually died on this planet. COVID is no longer just a conspiracy theory today.
That's the whole paradox of a conspiracy theory, each one can be potentially true and rejecting one straightaway (however eccentric or catastrophic it may sound) is as much an irrational stand as accepting one without questioning?
I think it takes some years to determine what is actually a conspiracy theory. Also scientific and historical theories are always subject to being disproven by actual scholars. But people are...
I think it takes some years to determine what is actually a conspiracy theory. Also scientific and historical theories are always subject to being disproven by actual scholars.
But people are finding and believing misleading theories about the moon landing, the measles vaccine and the Holocaust.
Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine is a good book about algorithms and content promoted on social media
We have to acknowledge that there are actors actively engaged in poisoning the well of truth. ***Don't search on this phrase, unless you want to find a perfect example of what I'm about to...
We have to acknowledge that there are actors actively engaged in poisoning the well of truth. ***Don't search on this phrase, unless you want to find a perfect example of what I'm about to describe - a video that turns into a rabbit hole of "whose truth, and have you heard about CIA psyops?".
Anyone who's savvy about Internet propaganda can trace homegrown authoritarian-leaning, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian-spawned memes, commentary, articles, videos, etc. that undermine institutions Western societies depend on. There are carefully built and planted edifices of half-truths and garbage narratives, and people paid to interactively lead others farther along into conspiratorial thinking. We still don't know exactly who was behind QAnon, though we can see results in Trumpism and anti-vaccine beliefs. It's all too easy to click and share the most inflammatory items with other people who don't have well-developed immunities.
Bellingcat has a good primer on how to evaluate for falsehoods before you click and share.
Edit: Current example of a disinformation/conspiracy theory pipeline.
In addition to bad actors from other countries, and oligarchs, the selfish executives who control social media algorithms are sacrificing truth and civility on the altar of engagement. Max...
In addition to bad actors from other countries, and oligarchs, the selfish executives who control social media algorithms are sacrificing truth and civility on the altar of engagement. Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine has a pretty decent explaination of some of the issues and the tradeoffs. You don't have to be actively malicious, just indifferent and with something to gain.
PhD here. Doing background research is hard. Reading papers, separating the wheat from the chafe, reading the sources, the sources sources, it's all hard, time consuming and 90% is not readily available. It's behind paywalls, sitting on microfiche, stored on researchers hard drives.
The vast majority of people have no idea how to even begin doing background research. Web searches are not your friend, they often return garbage, popular instead of informative, opinion instead of factual. And the majority don't have the training to understand the difference.
Yup. The difficult part of doing research is not finding information but contextualizing it, and that is really only possible by dedicating a lot of time to the matter as well as (in my opinion) having other experts around to help point out issues you yourself may not notice. The latter is especially relevant before you have your own expertise to rely on. A lot of doing a PhD is reading reading reading the literature to gain that knowledge and ability to contextualize. It’s also part of the reason that it’s hard for ‘amateurs’ to contribute seriously to a given field. It takes more time than most people have if they are working other jobs to familiarize yourself with a field. It’s not impossible, but it’s harder than most people think.
It's hard when you're looking to establish reality. Much easier when you're just trying to confirm your biases. Trivial, even, everything is served for you on a platter. It's as if someone benefitted from the disinfo and SEO'd some of these results :^)
This applies to when they actually attempt "research".
I think the core problem with "doing your own research" is not trying and failing. It's doing something else entirely and calling it "research" regardless. Visiting an echo chamber, talking with a RN friend, coincidentally having read a scam ad in a tabloid earlier. And it's not because the person doesn't know what's the consensus—they deny it because it's cooler that way.
Hell, many people claim they "did research" simply because they want to sound like they did. They think it adds credibility to their statements and are too Dunning to Kruger it does not, at least not outside their echo chambers.
I've had someone tell me they did their own research and when I asked what research, they linked a tweet. It was a tweet of an unlabeled graph and some text claiming it was from a scientific paper proving some point. The person felt genuinely confident they had researched the topic and had seen the data themselves. Because a picture of a graph was enough to make them trust that the paper agreeing with their point must exist somewhere.
What gets me is the complete fabrication of sources they think they've seen. A flat earther on Instagram told me that there's a video of Neil Armstrong saying the moon landing was faked. I asked for a source and they hit me with the classic "do your own research bro" comment. I then offered $1000 for the video, they said it was on telegram and I need to go find it myself. So it's obvious they're lying about seeing it. If that video was real, every flat earther would be posting it everywhere all the time. It's insane the lengths they go to to justify their insane beliefs.
A huge problem is we look for links that follow our own beliefs too. So it is easy for someone to go down a path of not necessarily being wrong but missing a bigger unbiased picture.
I think it's good to be skeptical of everything media related. Anything can be faked and claimed. Every conspiracy has a little truth behind it. It's a matter of finding the balance for what is actually right.
I wonder whether there is some kind of bias here. As in, the people likely to attempt their own research were already predisposed toward conspiracy belief, and the research is just a symptom of that.
This is, I would think, related to the phenomenon where conspiracy folks tend to discount (at best) contrary evidence.
Disclaimer: I’m a conspiracy folks. But I am a trained and seasoned researcher, and like to think my conspiracy assertions are rooted in the real evil men do, like those in the pnac drumming up false pretenses for war, as opposed to the outrageous, fauci and the democrats created the covid to have a pretense to implant satan tracking chips.
Here’s the paper:
Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity
As always, it helps to ask “what did they actually do?”
Specifically, the first study was of whether Americans could evaluate articles about breaking news:
The second study asked people to rate articles and then do a search, to see if they changed their minds. The third one asked new respondents to evaluate the same articles 3-6 months later, to see if the task would be easier after there’s more information online. The fourth study tried again with articles about COVID during the pandemic.
The fifth study used Mechanical Turk instead, so it’s no longer a random sample of Americans, but it allowed them to collect the queries, search results and the URL’s that people visited while using Google.
How did they pick the articles?
What articles did they pick?
This is in the Supplemental information (PDF).
I can’t easily cut and paste, but it seems to largely be political news about hot-button topics.
I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the study, but an alternative summary might be “can the average American use a search engine to fact-check news articles?” The answer seems to be “no.”
I wonder what effect education has. Would college graduates do any better?
Also, maybe you’re more curious about how well you would do? It might be fun if someone set up an online quiz so you could see how well you do at fact-checking.
Ever since the pandemic happened in 2020, I'm taking the term "conspiracy theorists" with a little bit of nuance and not too keen to just brush them off irrationally like earlier.
I remember reading several reddit comments and threads around late 2019 (when the news of COVID had already surfaced but it wasn't declared a pandemic by WHO yet). Needless to say, some of these threads were quite fatalistic and catastrophic, most certainly the people who wrote articles like the OP would consider them "conspiracy theorists". But as it turned out, their conspiracy theory turned out to be true and the pandemic really happened, many people actually died on this planet. COVID is no longer just a conspiracy theory today.
That's the whole paradox of a conspiracy theory, each one can be potentially true and rejecting one straightaway (however eccentric or catastrophic it may sound) is as much an irrational stand as accepting one without questioning?
I think it takes some years to determine what is actually a conspiracy theory. Also scientific and historical theories are always subject to being disproven by actual scholars.
But people are finding and believing misleading theories about the moon landing, the measles vaccine and the Holocaust.
Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine is a good book about algorithms and content promoted on social media
We have to acknowledge that there are actors actively engaged in poisoning the well of truth. ***Don't search on this phrase, unless you want to find a perfect example of what I'm about to describe - a video that turns into a rabbit hole of "whose truth, and have you heard about CIA psyops?".
Anyone who's savvy about Internet propaganda can trace homegrown authoritarian-leaning, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian-spawned memes, commentary, articles, videos, etc. that undermine institutions Western societies depend on. There are carefully built and planted edifices of half-truths and garbage narratives, and people paid to interactively lead others farther along into conspiratorial thinking. We still don't know exactly who was behind QAnon, though we can see results in Trumpism and anti-vaccine beliefs. It's all too easy to click and share the most inflammatory items with other people who don't have well-developed immunities.
Bellingcat has a good primer on how to evaluate for falsehoods before you click and share.
Edit: Current example of a disinformation/conspiracy theory pipeline.
In addition to bad actors from other countries, and oligarchs, the selfish executives who control social media algorithms are sacrificing truth and civility on the altar of engagement. Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine has a pretty decent explaination of some of the issues and the tradeoffs. You don't have to be actively malicious, just indifferent and with something to gain.