Generally speaking, you should trust someone whose professional or experienced more than some random stranger. Especially if it's not one person but a large group of experienced professionals (most of the controversial "anti-science" issues today).
But it's actually important to "do your own research", and not just listen to authority. Provided you actually know how, i.e. you can find accurate sources and distinguish fact from fiction. Because even the most qualified, unbiased, genius authority are occasionally wrong. The big issue today is that a lot of people don't know how to research and distinguish lies, but (although it's probably impossible for most) finding a way to teach someone how to find the truth, will always be more effective having some authority tell them the truth.
Key example: doctors often miss symptoms and diagnoses that a patient can discover on their own. It's not that the doctor is stupid or unqualified, in fact they have way more medical knowledge than you. But the doctor only has a series of questions and maybe a few tests to make a diagnosis, whereas you have the full experience of symptoms and an internal understanding of your "normal". IMO people actually should "play Internet doctor" and research their symptoms, not to reach any 100% conclusions, but to suggest diagnoses and tests to their real doctor.
> IMO people actually should "play Internet doctor" and research their symptoms, not to reach any 100% conclusions, but to suggest diagnoses and tests to their real doctor.
Even if you don't outright say it, you should never convince yourself you have a diagnosis. The human body is extremely complex and some particularly weird issues need patient research, doctor's research, and experimentation to solve.
I recently had an appointment with specialist for my son. My son has ADHD but was never diagnosed within Kaiser and so Kaiser won't prescribe medication.
The appointment started with, "My son has ADHD, was first diagnosed at 7 by _____, here are volumes of paperwork demonstrating that he had this diagnosis, has continued to have symptoms, and documenting what we have done for him. He wants to go back on medicine despite the side effects from last time. Here is more documentation that he continues to have symptoms."
There really ARE times when you're coming with enough background that the diagnosis is never in doubt.
For a less recent but more trivial example, I once showed up to the doctor and said, "I broke this bone in my hand while playing volleyball, what should I do about it?" Again, the diagnosis was never in doubt.
>sometimes the experienced doctor or researcher made a mistake, and the guy who posted something on Reddit is correct
Both of those points are true, and we can reconcile them thusly:
Broadly, the doctor is the fully educated, while the layman-interested-in-subject is making semi-educated guesses. However this relationship inverts on narrow subjects, like a particular rare disease: the doctor ends up making a semi-educated guess (based on his general medical education), whereas a layman with intense interest in this particular rare disease can easily be the fully educated one - again, on this particular narrow subject.
If a researcher made a mistake and if 50 people on reddit said 50 different things, at random, one might be correct by chance.
Being correct once means nothing unless you are correct most of the times, but by then you are the researcher in the scenario above.
Except if the large group is mostly a handful of experts with non-scientific private interests (say, to publish papers, to get grants, paid by companies with a product to sell), plus a large mass of professionals who seldom/never question the information they receive and just follow everything they read from their research and protocol-setting breathen.
When non-reproducible papers with BS mistakes get top citation counts and are held as gospel without any researcher/peer reviewer bothering verify them for decades, does anyone really think the average "professional doctor" really questions what they're told to follow?
And to know if you’re only seeing narrative-approved sources, when contra-narrative sources have been suppressed.
Lots of folks got fooled by Iraq WMD because you couldn’t say anything to the contrary without being fired. Other examples, some more recent, are available.
You should probably not play internet doctor if you’re a hypochondriac or prone to anxiety. The least probable cause of almost any symptoms is cancer or another deadly condition and you can probably find a gruesome description of someone’s experience online somewhere. If your nervous system can’t grasp that, stay away from googling your symptoms!
> IMO people actually should "play Internet doctor" and research their symptoms, not to reach any 100% conclusions, but to suggest diagnoses and tests to their real doctor.
> some doctor can get quite upset if you dare to suggest a diagnosis
Don't tell the doctor your diagnosis. You didn't go through a decade of medical training. Tell the doctor what you've observed, let him conclude the diagnosis.
> When the client tells you what the cause is, he's wrong.
Lots of anecdotal stories of people doing just that and having doctor after doctor failing them.
Doctors are like everyone else: 90% of them are kinda shit at their job.
On the other hand, if I’m in the market for a guess, I’ll probably go for the educated guess rather than the uneducated one, because even though I recognize it’s not necessarily more correct, it probably is less wrong.
Medical advice on the internet can be n=1, but read enough to get to n=100+, while still limited, can be quite valuable. I can't ask 100 doctors what’s wrong with me, but I can ask my question to hundreds in an online forum. They might lead me astray, but so can a single doctor’s misdiagnosis. A doctor can prescribe treatment that helps or harms, but I can ask a forum of people, with the same problem I have, if I should take his advice. I can't, however, ask 100 of his colleagues or peers if I should trust his advice, and that's why we end up with so many charlatans in medicine. But he's a doctor. Of course you can trust him! I don't know about the rest of you, but I've found a fair number of doctors to be mostly useless.
Isn't that just a by definition thing?
My Tesla can already drive itself, I don't trust it and I don't think it's safe. When I get one that I trust and is safe then it will be safer than me, and by extension other humans.
The problem is that the current generation of algorithms are brittle.
Specially for subtle but critical concepts:
"Researchers misunderstand confidence intervals and standard error bars"
This is why we shouldn't take medical advice from people who have read a few Wikipedia articles. This is why years of experience in e.g. software are necessary to even begin to understand how deeply hidden security issues can be. This is why self-driving cars still elude us, but will be so much safer than human drivers when they finally do arrive.