You can’t do your own research without doing your homework first

Most of us, in the modern world, make countless decisions in our daily lives without much thought, and for good reason. We don’t have the ability — the time or energy necessary — to devote ourselves to fact-checking every decision that we make. Is the tap water safe to drink, or to shower in, today? We assume that it is without bothering to check. Is your seat belt fastened when you get into the car? If it isn’t, a sensor will alert you, reminding you incessantly to buckle it. Is the air safe to breathe? Is there an extreme weather event that threatens you today? Is your friend who you’re going to go meet about to infect you with a contagious disease?

We assume that these aren’t real worries and that everything will turn out fine. (And this is okay, in most cases they will.) And yet, the only reason that we can make those assumptions is because somewhere, over long periods of time, responsible adults have done the work necessary to ensure that these mundane, everyday activities aren’t going to pose threats to you.

• The EPA, FDA, and Department of Agriculture have long monitored the air and water quality, ensuring that they’re safe for humans, and issue alerts, warning residents in real-time, if they are not.
• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has long overseen seat belt safety and regulations in the USA, ensuring compliance with modern vehicle safety practices.
• The National Weather Service, run through the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has long monitored the country, coasts, and planet for extreme weather events, sending out alerts, warnings, and recommended courses of action to residents in afflicted areas.
• And the Centers for Disease Control, run through the USA’s Department of Health and Human Services, has long monitored the spread of disease and infection throughout the country, identifying outbreaks and working to stifle their spread.

Yet much of this (and similar) work — work conducted by bona fide experts over many decades — is being or has already been undone, in favor of allowing individuals to fend for themselves, make their own decisions, and do their own research about life-and-death matters like public health, public safety, and issues that affect the long-term future of the planet. The truth is not that consensus undermines science, but rather that our modern rejection of expertise, and our newfound embracing of the “do your own research” ideology, is a recipe for societal disaster. In truth, most of us aren’t even well-enough equipped to do our own homework, much less research, on these and other issues. Here’s what that’s all about.

Flossing in between your teeth, up under the gumline, can remove plaque, bits of food, and bacteria where toothbrushes cannot reach. No large-scale, double blind research trials have been conducted on flossing, as putting people into a “do not floss” group would be an unethical experiment to perform on their oral health.

The idea of “doing your own research” can only exist side-by-side with a concept that most of us normally take for granted so thoroughly that we rarely, if ever, even mention it: the concept that we inhabit a reality that obeys rules and that those rules can be, at least in principle, understood. This is the core idea behind any field that claims to be scientific in any sense:

• that we have a real, physical, material-based (e.g., made of atoms) system,
• that there are underlying rules that govern the behavior of that system,
• that we can observe, measure, control the conditions of, and experiment on those systems,
• gathering results about what happens to those systems in a repeatable, replicable fashion,
• and then that we can draw conclusions about how that system will perform under the real-world conditions we’re likely to encounter.

While this may not look like the scientific method that you recognize (or that you may have been taught in school), this method of thinking about the world encapsulates how science works. You have a real, material-based system that exists in our physical reality: that can be planet Earth, our drinking water, the population of human children on Earth, or just your one, individual body. You know that this system obeys physical rules (geological, physical, biological, or in the case of less-well-known rules, medical, psychological, or sociological), even if you don’t fully know what those rules are. We can perform experiments on those systems, whether intentionally and in a controlled fashion, or whether observationally based on what happens in a fashion that cannot be controlled by us, such as in astronomical situations.

This image shows the Homunculus Nebula surrounding the massive blue supergiant Eta Carinae. The Eta Carinae Nebula was largely created during an 1843 eruption, where it appeared as a supernova impostor. More distant ejecta indicate a much earlier eruption, while the central star has brightened in recent decades to once again become visible to the naked eye. We cannot control events like this; we can only observe them in astronomy.

Regardless of the nature of the data that we gather, we can use the full suite of it — complete with all necessary caveats, errors, uncertainties, and limitations — to model the best picture of not only physical reality, but of the relevant issue(s) in question, that best explain the data that we’ve collected. If you want to make a new contribution to a field that’s being studied in this fashion, what you had better make sure you’ve done, well in advance of attempting to conduct new research, is that you’ve understood all of the relevant research that’s previously been conducted in this field, and that you’re aware of the results, issues, models, limitations, and uncertainties that surround that earlier research.

That is what’s meant by “doing your homework.”

Unless you do your homework, and you do it correctly and comprehensively, you lack the most important thing necessary to actually contribute new knowledge to whatever field you’re seeking to wade into: the foundational knowledge — or starting point — needed to even understand what you’re reckoning with.

For example, there are many people who believe that chemicals are bad for you, and that if you can only avoid ingesting or coming into contact with said chemicals, you’d rarely-to-never get ill. This is a small portion of what’s known as the naturalistic (or appeal-to-nature) fallacy, but there’s a tremendous lack of homework-doing that one must do to even think up such a thought.

Despite a variety of conspiratorial claims to the contrary, 5G cell towers, which this previous 4G tower in Orem, Utah, was being upgraded to at the time this 2021 photo was taken, pose no danger to human or animal health. In particular, they do not cause cancer, mind control, or spread COVID-19. A few years ago, this (now-obvious) conspiracy theory was taken seriously by millions of advocates across the planet, and no doubt the next upgrade, to the 6G standard, will bring about the same fundamentally anti-science claims.

When people use the word “chemical,” they are implicitly talking about a subclass of chemistry: the science of atoms, molecules, ions, salts, enzymes, etc., and how they interact within either a nonliving (for inorganic chemistry) or a living (for organic chemistry and/or biochemistry) system. It should only take you a fraction of a second to realize that every physical system that we interact with here on Earth is made of those very ingredients: atoms, molecules, ions, salts, enzymes, and so on. Humans, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the medicines we take, the living and non-living things we interact with, and so on, are all made up of these raw ingredients, bound together in an infinite combination of possibilities.

In reality, whether something is natural or not has no relation to its safety or its effectiveness. How common a practice is or was, similarly, bears little relation to its safety or its effectiveness. And yet when many of us hear the word “chemical” we recoil, as we often associate it with a poison or a toxin, even though the truth is that any physical system made up of atoms, which again, is literally everything, can be classified as a chemical. Chemicals are just as likely to keep us safe (for example, chlorinating or brominating a swimming pool) as they are to poison us (for example, ingesting cyanide); it solely depends on what the chemical is used for, where, and in what concentration.

Grains of the genetically engineered Golden Rice (right), compared to the Vitamin A-deficient white rice (left). Hundreds of thousands of children per year, worldwide, on primarily rice diets, go blind from lack of Vitamin A, with even greater numbers dying from it outright. Golden Rice could cure that problem. Scientists, but also many other professionals in public health, marketing, politics, and more are needed to transform this scientific solution into a practical solution, as misinformed advocates frequently and vociferously oppose this life-saving measure.

If that idea sounds controversial to you, take heart; it was controversial when it was first put forth by the scientist Paracelsus back in 1538, and remains one of the foundational pillars of the science of toxicology. His written statement,

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison,”

is often shortened simply to “the dose makes the poison.” If you went out right now and drank two-to-three gallons (~7-11 liters) of water, you’d very likely die from poisoning yourself, while if you drank just a pint (about half a liter), you’d likely feel refreshed. Similarly, if you took 500 milligrams of N-acetyl-para-aminophenol (known commonly as acetaminophen, paracetamol, or Tylenol), you might feel a slight reduction in any fever you had, as well as the aches-and-pains in your body and/or your head, while if you took ten times that dose, it would be life-threatening.

When people raise alarms about toxic chemicals, they often do so without even this basic, foundational knowledge of what toxicity even is.

A recent, but dubious, study links exposure to fluoridated tap water during pregnancy to lower IQ scores in infants. Several outside experts expressed concern over that study’s methodology and questioned its findings. Fluoride has been added to community water supplies in industrial countries to prevent tooth decay since the 1950s. Very high levels of the mineral have been found to be toxic to the brain, though the concentrations seen in fluoridated tap water are generally deemed safe, and by a wide margin.

Situations very similar to this have come up many times here in 2025: as the institutions that safeguard public health, public safety, and basic protections for children and the environment have all abandoned or otherwise abdicated their duties to society. Fluoridated drinking water, one of the most important public health interventions of the 20th century that:

• strengthens bones,
• strengthens tooth enamel,
• reduces cavities in children and tooth loss in adults,
• especially among the lowest socioeconomic groups,
• and that has no quantifiable ill effects at the CDC-recommended levels of 0.7 mg/L (usually measured to be in the range of 0.5-1.0 mg/L) of water,

has recently been not only called into question as safe and effective for no good scientific reason, but has already been banned in multiple states in a wholly political move.

Similarly, vaccines — rated the #1 public health intervention of the 20th century by the CDC — are safe, effective, and reduce or eliminate both the virulence and transmissibility of preventable diseases. Tens of thousands of deaths and millions of infections have been eliminated, annually, by the near-universal adoption of routine childhood and adult vaccinations as recommended by the CDC. Yet many people, out of a combination of fear and ignorance and a woefully misguided view of what vaccines actually do inside one’s body, seek to opt out of these routine vaccinations, putting children, newborns, the immunocompromised, and the elderly at elevated, unnecessary risks of severe illness, long-term injury, and even death.

Although vaccines are some of the most effective measures one can take to protect themselves, their families, and others, a large amount of misinformation here in the 21st century has fueled a large movement of vaccine hesitancy. Uncovering the actual facts, and making them widely available through trusted professionals like doctors and pharmacists, can help.

In fact, a 1994 study concluded that, over the course of the 20th century, the average lifespan of someone born and living in the United States lengthened by more than 30 years, and that approximately 25 years of those gains were due to advances in public health. In addition to vaccination and water fluoridation, those advances also included:

• improvements in motor vehicle safety, including the use of seat belts, child safety seats, motorcycle helmets, decreased drinking and driving, and improved engineering designs in vehicles as well as the designs of highways,
• workplace safety, particularly in the reduction of injuries and deaths in mining, manufacturing, construction, and transportation,
• better control of infectious diseases from clean, safe drinking water and improved sanitation practices,
• decline in deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke, which is due to the recognitions of the harms of tobacco, as well as a medical focus on identifying and controlling high blood pressure,
• decline in maternal and infant mortality primarily due to improved hygiene, better nutrition, better access to health care, and access to family planning and contraceptive services,
• and safer, healthier foods as a result of the reduction in microbial contamination and improved nutritional content of food, with food-fortification all but eliminating nutritional deficiency diseases such as rickets, goiter, and pellagra.

Many of these programs and services, here in 2025 in the USA, have already been gutted, reduced, or revoked entirely.

This graph shows the estimated percentage of kindergarteners, as of the 2023-2024 school year, with medical or nonmedical exemptions from one or more vaccinations. The overall vaccination rate has declined to ~93% in the United States for all vaccines: its lowest value in the 21st century.

But who are the people who are questioning the safety and efficacy of these interventions? Who are the people questioning whether the Earth is warming and whether human activity, and our burning of fossil fuels, are the cause? Who are the people questioning whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was the result of a zoonotic spillover and instead are promoting the notion that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory?

In almost all instances, they’re not the bona fide experts in these fields. They’re non-experts, and in most cases, people who haven’t even sufficiently done their homework to learn about the foundations of their fields. If they are in the field, they’re contrarians who do not accept the basic foundational knowledge that is widely accepted for very good, scientific reasons.

On scientific grounds, we know what’s true and what isn’t to a degree of confidence that would shock most people. We know that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t created in a Chinese lab, and a series of concerted misinformation campaigns cannot change that fact. We know how anti-science myths take hold in society, but that doesn’t make those myths any less harmful or any more true. And we know how safe and effective vaccines are, even if today’s US government sows doubt about it. Reality doesn’t change due to the existence of misinformation.

This graph shows the global average temperature anomalies relative to the 1850-1900 baseline. The red line shows the multi-year moving average of global temperature, while the dotted green line shows a linear fit to the warming from 1974-2022. As recent years show, the warming trend has accelerated, with 2023 and 2024 marking severe (hottest-ever) departures from the late-20th century trend.

Even the very basic science of global warming — which should be a completely non-controversial issue on scientific grounds — might prove to be what historians will point to as the “wedge” for rejecting the notion that doing one’s homework is important in US society. Back in 1977, Exxon recognized the reality of global warming: just 10 years after the scientific community accurately predicted what should occur based on a now-foundational climate model. That report was buried. During the 1980s, global warming became mainstream climate science, but industry and political opponents painted those raising the alarm about it as, well, alarmists, and claimed that the science was still uncertain.

Even as the world came together to ban chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer, inaction on global warming led to an ever-increasing set of global greenhouse gas emissions: a trend that has continued ever since. As biologist Sean B. Carroll noted, there’s a six-step denialist playbook that seems to work to sway public opinion every time:

1. Doubt the Science.
2. Question Scientists’ Motives and Integrity.
3. Magnify Disagreements Among Scientists and Cite Gadflies as Authorities.
4. Exaggerate Potential Harm.
5. Appeal to Personal Freedom.
6. Reject Whatever Would Repudiate a Key Philosophy.

We have seen this at play repeatedly: about fluoridated drinking water, about vaccines, about the origins of COVID-19, and about global warming. Many other examples abound, as you can commonly find Americans denying evolution, the Big Bang, a round Earth, or even the rights to equality for our fellow humans here in 2025.

This view of the Earth comes to us courtesy of NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which had to perform flybys of Earth and Venus in order to lose enough energy to reach its ultimate destination: Mercury. Several hundred images, taken with the wide-angle camera in MESSENGER’s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), were sequenced into a movie documenting the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth. Earth, an oblate spheroid, rotates roughly once every 24 hours on its axis and moves through space in an elliptical orbit around our Sun.

But there is a path back from all of this: a path back to reality. First, we have to recognize the value of not “doing our own research,” but of doing our own homework. If we care deeply about an issue — and not just about justifying whatever position we’ve decided to take up for ourselves — the path is not to delude ourselves into overvaluing our own knowledge, expertise, and capabilities. Most of us, quite frankly, will never devote the needed resources into becoming a bona fide expert on most issues, and that is not a flaw in ourselves. The truth is that there is too much foundational knowledge, knowledge that only a specialist who seeks to actually conduct research in the field will acquire, to acquire all of it for ourselves, individually, about every issue that we care about.

The path back to reality is instead to value actual expertise, and those who have devoted their lives to the betterment of humanity through discovering scientific truths about reality. This isn’t to say that the notion of a scientific consensus should never be challenged; only that those challenges are only legitimate when they come from experts who’ve already sufficiently and scrupulously done their homework. If we can take this path, and return to reality, then we can once again aspire to having a functional society where we all work together to make policies for the collective long-term good of all. Without it, the thin veneer of civilization is likely doomed to crumble.