Not directed at you but "research" and internet topics. I think that term has been ruined for me. Lotta folk's "research" is they saw a youtube video the told them what they wanted to believe .. .or they even sought it out.
Really hard to know what anyone means by that anymore.
And honestly even I don't research much, most research I last did was looking for a new dishwasher... and that wasn't a lot.
So I get a subscription to Nature and The Lancet and Science and read the literature. Except I'm now stuck. I cannot attempt to reproduce any of the studies, so I'm stuck either taking every study at face value, or trust someone else to tell me which studies were done correctly, which have merit, which were methodologically flawed, which were purposely skewed to fit some desired outcome etc.
At the end of the day, everybody has to trust someone else. In my parent's generation, I think most people trusted their doctors and other "credentialed" people, but now for some reason millions are listening to fucking Joe Rogan for health advice.
Do you want to get rid of the internet?
I did not make a decision about masking or not because I conducted primary research, nor did I read dense medical papers from peer reviewed journals using terminology I don't understand. I followed the advice of sources I trust.
That is not research in any sense of the word. If my source has chosen to deceive me for whatever reason then my echo chamber is never going to allow me an escape. In fact, I'll most likely dismiss any counter evidence as propaganda even knowing full well that is what my echo chamber is feeding me.
People used to trust subject matter experts and now they trust personalities in stead. It is a natural evolution of newscaster to entertainer and reliable source to propagandist.
I think the largest disservices were done by unethical scientists such as tobacco "researchers" and military sponsored clandestine medical experimenters.
Now we would sooner trust a reality TV personality than a phd subject matter expert. We reap what we sow.
Of course. That’s what allows us to talk about the foibles of People in this thread as if we were Martians.