Although this topic is going to become a flame war, I would like to point out that the vast majority of people here are smarter in terms of raw IQ and skills than the people trying to "do their own research".

For example, as a scientist, you might scoff at,

> Evidence is collected and evaluated in an unbiased, objective manner, and those methods have to be available to other scientists for replication.

> Conversely, when someone says they’re “doing their own research,” they mean using a search engine to find information that confirms what they already think is true. We are all prone to confirmation bias, and the effect is especially powerful when we want (or don’t want) to accept a conclusion.

Because you know about p-hacking and shady research. But you have a sampling bias as an individual in the field. Everything that's wrong is often magnified and the good is minimized. (we do have a negativity bias in the kinds of news that spreads amongst us)

The state of science, for the most part, is healthy. As the replication crisis has shown, it's still possible to do good science, the crisis itself is proof of that. As is the fact that during the COVID-19 pandemic a lot of previously held assumptions of aerosols and transmission were overturned based on new evidence.

Yes, the sausage getting made is messy and it's filled with endless grad students, publish or perish, and arbitrary metrics. But when you compare this against the people this is aimed at, a person with barely a high school education unable to understand epistemology, you can see that you're comparing apples with motorcycles.

You have the ability and the mental toolkit available to you to sort through different claims, make simplified mental models and reason out the world. Most people do not.

The people on the other side of this comparison are the same groups of people who believe in "urine magic", https://old.reddit.com/r/h3h3productions/comments/qdmjcp/sne...

What's worse is that we have good reason to believe that such things aren't a sampling bias, they're endemic and a part of the background,

> In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory.

> With regard to the theory that childhood vaccines cause psychological disorders like autism and the government knows it, 69 percent had heard the idea, 20 percent agreed with it and 44 percent disagreed.

and

> 37% of the sample agreed that the Food and Drug Administration is intentionally suppressing natural cures for cancer because of drug company pressure; 20% agreed either that corporations were preventing public health officials from releasing data linking cell phones to cancer or that physicians still want to vaccinate children even though they know such vaccines to be dangerous

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

This was done in 2014, before the mass adoption of social media.

Maybe, when it comes to someone who doesn't have the tools nor the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality, it isn't such a good idea for them to "do their own research." And this is true for the majority of the public. Expertise and the differentiation of professions happened for a reason, the world is simply too complex for all of us to learn all of it and be proficient in the nitty gritty.

This absolutely places a lot of trust in experts and doctors, who've had an extremely disappointing past (to say the least). But it also signals and re-emphasizes their responsibility. And the importance for public-facing experts to make the best calls and to be held accountable to those calls; something that we can't do with Norman's great aunt and uncle on Facebook doing their own "research".