“Educate Yourself” vs “Do Your Own Research”
They mean exactly the same thing
Hello, my name is Matitya and welcome to Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.
On issues like COVID vaccines versus Ivermectin, the phrase “do your own research” elicited backlash. After all, when you say “do your own research” that raises the question ‘How am I supposed to do my own research. I’m not a scientist. I have no mechanism through which I could conduct a test to assess relative efficacy.’
Ironically, there’s overlap between the kinds of people who mock the phrase “do your own research” with the kinds of people who say “Educate Yourself”. The issue is that, like the “do your own research” crowd, the “educate yourself” crowd seldom explains how you’re supposed to go about educating yourself. (A fair share of “educate yourself” people will say “it’s not my job to educate you”.)
In, 2021, Joe Rogan uploaded a video, linked here, saying that he had tested positive for COVID and “we immediately threw the kitchen sink at it. All kinds of meds. Monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, Z-Pak, Prednisone. Everything”. The Hollywood Reporter responded with a video, linked here, captioned “Joe Rogan revealed that he tested positive for COVID-19, and says he took Ivermectin, a commonly used horse dewormer that the CDC says is an unproven COVID-19 treatment.”
It was not the only outlet which said that, a number of personalities at CNN also claimed Rogan had taken horse dewormer. Rogan objected that Ivermectin was prescribed to him by a doctor and that he doesn’t go to a veterinarian. (Presumably, by “we”, he meant “my doctor and I”). He pointed out that Doctor Satoshi Omura and Doctor William Campbell won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, for using Ivermectin to treat people for river blindness and several other parasitic afflictions, in 2015. Omura and Campbell did get it greenlit for animals first, something Campbell even mentioned in his Nobel acceptance speech, but
“since 1987 it has been used in a program orchestrated by the World Health Organization to eradicate the devastating tropical diseases of river blindness and elephantiasis. Merck and the Kitasato Institute have supplied the drug, formulated for human use under the brand name Mectizan®, free of charge, currently providing it to around 300 million people every year. Mectizan® has already virtually eliminated river blindness in Latin America and is proving highly effective in Africa”.
(In case you’re wondering, my source for that quotation was that the official magazine of the government of Japan said it while profiling Omura, in 2015. Here’s the link)
After the Rogan controversy, the FDA tweeted “you are not a horse, you are not a cow, seriously y’all, stop” followed by emojis of a cow and horse. The (since deleted) tweet linked to this this paper about why “The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals.”
Don’t get me wrong, the same paper says that “Animal ivermectin products are very different from those approved for humans. Use of animal ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous.” That said, the paper never claims that Ivermectin is used primarily or exclusively as horse dewormer. It explicitly says “Ivermectin is approved for human use to treat infections caused by some parasitic worms and head lice and skin conditions like rosacea.”
Indeed, when Doctor Sanjay Gupta appeared on Rogan’s show, he acknowledged that there was no reason to dispute Rogan’s claim that Ivermectin was prescribed to him by a doctor. So, CNN and the mainstream media in general did report on Rogan dishonestly.
The issue is, people on the Right (and anti-woke Left) assumed that because the mainstream media were unfairly critical of Rogan, Rogan’s treatments must have been effective. For the record, that’s not how medical science works. Don’t get me wrong, I know that, in 2021, the British Medical Journal published an article ,linked here, positing that “Ivermectin is recommended strongly for all phases of COVID-19” and that “While several countries and some sections of the population need to wait for their turn to get vaccinated, Ivermectin could act as a safety bridge, in saving human lives, while we get there.” Guess what? In the same period, the BMJ published articles about how Ivermectin for COVID didn’t work. Thus, one could reasonably say that the jury was still out on Ivermectin for COVID. For the record, it makes perfect sense to advise against a medical treatment that the jury is still out on. The dishonesty of Rogan’s critics doesn’t make Rogan right.
If you want to “do your own research” about something like this, you can’t stop at tweets and “hashtags” or even really at podcasts. You have to put in the effort at engaging in the work of well-established medical professionals and even that has its limitations because most of us wouldn’t be able to understand large portions of what they said without first becoming medical experts ourselves.
So, when Dave Smith said, in a discussion with Rogan and Douglas Murray, that the experts were wrong about COVID and as such should be presumed to be wrong about everything else, it was a terrible argument. The case for Ivermectin for COVID was always based on accepting the word of some experts against that of other experts. To be clear, experts can make mistakes and can be deceitful but both of those critiques apply just as well to non-experts and it’s generally a good idea to know what you’re talking about.
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For instance, when people claim that Alex Jones was right about frogs turning gay, they’re referencing pieces like this paper which posit that frogs from non-hermaphroditic species developed hermaphroditism due to exposure to “the herbicide atrazine at low ecologically relevant doses”. There are three issues with that. The first is that hermaphroditism and homosexuality are different things. The second is that hermaphroditism and transgenderism are different things. The third is that even if the people claiming Jones was proven right about frogs were correct, his vindication would have to be by experts on amphibians, and on chemicals, conducting the kinds of tests that most of us aren’t qualified to conduct.
Smith posited that the experts had failed on COVID and that because of that failure, expertise should be disregarded when discussing the Israel-Hamas war. The question that raises is, if you disregard the experts, how are you supposed to familiarise yourself with the details of the conflict? Presumably, Smith would say ‘do your own research’ but that raises the question ‘how’? One possibility, which Murray brought up, is going to Israel and documenting the events firsthand but Smith, in the same discussion, all but boasted that he never visited the places he discussed.
For the record, you can easily read the PLO Charter of 1964 ( linked here), the PLO Charter of 1968 (linked here), the Hamas Charter of 1988 (linked here), and the Hamas Charter of 2017 (linked here). You can just as easily read the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (linked here), Israel’s declaration of independence (linked here), Israel’s Basic Law on Jerusalem (linked here), and Israel’s Basic Law banning anti-democratic political parties and racist political parties (linked here). If you actually put in the effort, you have two possible conclusions
1) The Anti-Israel terrorists are evil and Israel is not or
2) The Anti-Israel terrorists are evil and so is Israel but is Israel is better at public relations
The latter possibility is so far fetched it doesn’t bear consideration. Israel is abjectly terrible at public relations. Furthermore, on October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists filmed their atrocities and live-streamed them on the Internet. So, you don’t need to be an expert on this. You just need to have a functioning brain to tell whose side you should take.
In the same discussion, Smith lied that Darryl Cooper doesn’t present himself as a historian and Smith claimed that Cooper wasn’t a Nazi apologist. (Cooper tweeting “If you’re having a bad day just remember that the Trump shooter is currently wandering around Hell looking for Hitler while the two guys Kyle Rittenhouse dropped figure out how to break the news to him” should be enough to disprove that. You don’t insinuate Hitler is in Heaven when you’re not a Nazi apologist.)
Smith claimed that Cooper was speaking hyperbolically when he called Churchill the “chief villain” of the Second World War. While Smith is right that Cooper claimed to be being hyperbolic, Cooper also said, in the same sentence, that the sincere claim he was exaggerating was that it was Churchill, not Hitler, whose fault it was that the war became bigger than Poland. In The Ultra Secret by Fredrick Winterbotham, Winterbotham mentions that when he personally infiltrated the Nazi high command and met one on one with Hitler, Hitler explicitly told him that he wanted to create a new world order whose sole recognisably distinct political entities were Greater Germany, the Greater Americas and the British Empire. Whitehall didn’t take Winterbotham’s warnings particularly seriously until Hitler invaded Poland but that’s still enough to demonstrate Cooper was espousing ahistorical nonsense. That’s the issue with doing your own research. It’s not always easy to assure you don’t mistake frauds like Cooper for people who are worth your time.
The Left is hardly better. After all “educate yourself” and “do your own research” mean exactly the same thing. Firstly, the way people educate themselves about controversial issues is usually the same way they do their own research about them. They Internet search the issue and click the first link to confirm what they already believe. Secondly, the thing being advocated is the same in both situations, putting in the effort to understand the issue under discussion. Thirdly, as the ‘do your own research people’ use ‘research’ as a euphemism for ‘agree with me’, the “educate yourself” people use “educate yourself” as a euphemism for ‘agree with me.’
A Canadian website for drama teachers has a piece, What does It Mean to “Educate Yourself”? (linked here), explaining it as listening to “LGBTQ” people, supporting “queer theatre-makers”, and understanding that it’s not an LGBTQ person’s job to educate you. Do you notice the issue yet? No. All right. Here’s more information. In 2018, a lesbian tennis player named Martina Navratilova tweeted “Clearly that can’t be right. You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women.” The L standing for “lesbian” means that if educating yourself means listening to what LGBTQ people have to say, then listening to Navratilova would be educating yourself even if it puts you at odds with what transgender activists would say. In any case, when Navratilova tweeted that, she elicited backlash. Her critics explicitly told her to educate herself. Per Navratilova “Wanting to be open-minded and respectful, I took the tweet down and promised to educate myself, and for the past five years, I’ve been doing that. I’ve been reading about testosterone. I’ve been talking with scientists. I’ve been listening to female athletes and trans athletes, young and old. And I’ve learned a lot.”
She concluded “The female category was created to provide opportunities for women to compete fairly. It was always intended to exclude males. We need to keep excluding them. I promised to educate myself, and I have. I plan to keep advocating for fair competitions — and equal rights — for female athletes. I hope you’ll join me.” (Details linked here)
She educated herself and that led to her concluding she was right all along. Something similar happened with Joanne Rowling. She posited that transgenderism was an issue to be debated in the marketplace of ideas with no one being cancelled for it. She thus elicited enough backlash that she felt compelled to familiarise herself more with the data and found herself in a much more strongly gender critical position. (Details linked here) I don’t like to talk about the online personality King Critical (though I did write about him here) but he has said that his origin story was that he was a fan of Steve Shives but then posted in the comments section to ask how Shives reconciled the claim that the sole difference between men and women was physical sex with the claim that transgender women are women. Per Critical, Shives responded by insisting that it wasn’t his job to educate him and it wasn’t transgender people’s job to educate him but that it was necessary for Critical to be educated on the subject. Because Shives didn’t say how Critical was supposed to educate himself, Critical did so by doing his own research and now Critical devotes his channel primarily to debunking gender ideology. (I find that backstory ironic considering Critical has himself refused to respond to questions asking for him to substantiate his claim that Israel was waging genocide against the Palestinians.)
It’s clearly the case that telling people “Educate yourself” doesn’t lead them to the conclusions to which you want them led.
For the record, I don’t think you need to be certified as an expert on something to be entitled to speak about it as long as you familiarise yourself with the facts on the ground. I wrote about why Moses wasn’t schizophrenic and Samson wasn’t a psychopath even though I’m not a psychologist. I wrote about the concept of evil despite not being a moral philosopher. I wrote about euthanasia even though I’m not a doctor. It would be rank hypocrisy for me to say ‘shut up and stay in your lane’. ‘Do your own research’ can be good advice if it’s sincerely given and accompanied by actual recommendations for how to conduct said research. The same principle applies to ‘educate yourself’ for the simple reason that it and ‘do your own research’ mean exactly the same thing.
My name is Matitya. This has been an episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.
