In most places in the United States and Canada, our drinking water is fluoridated at a specific level that’s safe and effective for humans of all ages. In places like Colorado Springs, CO, significant amounts of fluoride are removed from the water, bringing the levels down to acceptable values; in other places, like New York City, NY, fluoride is added to bring the levels up to acceptable values. Controlling the fluoride levels of water is a safe and effective public health intervention, reducing dental caries in children by 40% where it is implemented versus places where it isn’t implemented. Research also shows that people learning about topics are vulnerable to hubris.
The idea that “our water is natural” and “adding fluoride isn’t” has proven more powerful in swaying public opinion in these locations than the science supporting fluoride’s safety and effectiveness. To the voting public, a fear of chemicals and an affinity for what feels natural was more compelling than the dental health of poor children, despite near-universal support from dental health professionals. We surveyed 150 academic experts on misinformation and identified https://www.xcritical.com/blog/how-to-do-your-own-research-dyor-before-investing-in-crypto/ areas of expert consensus. Experts defined misinformation as false and misleading information, though views diverged on the importance of intentionality and what exactly constitutes misinformation. The most popular reason why people believe and share misinformation was partisanship, while lack of education was one of the least popular reasons. In an online experiment in India, incentives for sharing factual posts increased sharing compared to no incentivization.
Climate Science Glossary
Moreover, there are other benefits to lay research, such as the capacity to apply political pressure when needed. Finally, doing one’s own research tends to increase understanding, even when it undermines knowledge. These facts entail that the attractions of doing one’s research are genuine. On some views, understanding is insulated from the factors that prevent justified true beliefs from amounting to knowledge (Hills, 2015; Pritchard, 2009).
When that consensus changes, evolves, or moves forward because we’ve learned more than we previously knew, we should correct course to follow that novel path instead. 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.
Your saved search
There are multiple options for research at the libraries in your community. Anything from a public library to the local universities, community colleges, and even some specialized libraries will offer access to their online databases, which are much more easily updated than printed publications. These databases, like PubMed and Web of Science, will include medical papers announcing findings on studies that have been done outside the political arena, before the findings might have been used to decide policy. It means you can certainly get an answer to your question, but you might not get the right answer, or even all of the right information, especially if you’re clicking on the first link of your results or even staying on the first page. I’m not going to say that nothing available to read on the free web is correct when you’re doing advanced, in-depth research on complex topics. But a lot of the things you’re going to find, especially if you’re unaware of your own confirmation bias, are only going to answer the question in the way you expect them to.
Research, then, is a search or investigation, to gain knowledge you didn’t have before. In formal, professional research, this new knowledge is then usually published and used as a foundation for future research. As a reference librarian, then, I’d like to offer some professional thoughts about when and how it’s a good idea for people to do their own research. Let’s start with the basics, and look at what the word “research” actually means.
thoughts on “How to do your own research”
All of us must make intellectual choices, deciding where to devote our finite intellectual resources. None of us can acquire genuine expertise across the full range of topics we’d like to know about. Few of us can reasonably engage in our own research in view of the prospect of acquiring https://www.xcritical.com/ expertise on more than a small handful of topics across our lifetimes. Those who accept contrarian theories often advocate doing your own research to test the official stories. The problem is that we fail to recognize where our knowledge ends and the community’s begins.
Well, if you really want to do your own research and not just validate your reasons for not doing something, here are some tips for getting to the scientific or policy-related information you’ll need. 13For a number of reasons, ranging from justifiable demands of civility through to psychological facts about social animals like ourselves, it can be difficult and often inappropriate to engage dogmatically in person with someone who is sincere in their views. For this reason, dogmatic engagement might be better confined to engagement with texts rather than persons. And then there’s the news, which tends to report on new, unique, or sensational findings, generally without the detail and nuance in the literature. If individual studies are like pieces of a puzzle, these papers help to put the puzzle together.
What is a consensus? And why is it trustworthy?
If you must know, I literally had no idea of how to do a research project or how to write a thesis. So I went to my professor and told him about my plans to complete a research project for my final semester. “If students imagine completing a research project in three months, I ask them to come and see me. Right now, as we enter the month of August during the year 2020, it’s a critical time for the United States and the world.
- There are also sometimes important social benefits to doing one’s own research.
- Look up your keywords in the appropriate titles in the library’s Reference collection (such as encyclopedias and dictionaries) and in other sources such as our catalog of books, periodical databases, and Internet search engines.
- Even the staunchest climate change denier isn’t making speculative real estate purchases in at-risk regions that are likely to be submerged in the next few years, such as much of southern Louisiana.
- 2On what is perhaps the best-known account of intellectual autonomy, an agent is autonomous to the extent she has been active in resolving conflicts between her beliefs (Zagzebski, 2013).
I told you earlier that I did not have any clue about how to do a research project. I communicated my weakness openly to my supervisor and warned her in advance that I would be asking stupid questions throughout the duration of my project just so I could get an idea of what I was doing. The credit indeed goes to her, but it is ultimately your responsibility to communicate with your supervisor and ask as many questions as you need to. One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it. There are people who’ve gotten rich, people who know a lot about blockchains and people who believe in the liberating power of digital currencies.
Support for “doing your own research” is associated with COVID-19 misperceptions and scientific mistrust
On some views, an agent may understand something, but fail to believe their own explanatory account of it (Wilkenfeld, 2017). Such an agent may possess understanding without justification, in virtue of their possession of an undefeated defeater for their explanation (Hills, 2015). It is controversial whether internally accessible defeaters, that undermine knowledge, may nevertheless be compatible with understanding (Dellsén, 2017; Hannon, 2021). But it is not controversial that someone may retain understanding in the face of internally inaccessible defeaters whether or not they undermine knowledge. That is, though it is controversial whether (or when) epistemic luck undermines knowledge, philosophers on both sides of this debate accept that understanding survives the threat. Agents who acquire true beliefs through their own research may sometimes lack knowledge, for example because their beliefs were acquired from the few facts on an otherwise unreliable website, or because they read the one reliable site among the dozens they had bookmarked.