[duckmysick]

How am I supposed to research things myself? Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.

I don't have resources to set up my own lab. I don't even know if the manufacturer will sell a dozen or so vaccines directly to me. So can't even do a basic stoichiometry on my own. And forget about me setting up a trial with actual people - I have no idea where I could begin to make it possible.

If by research you mean reading already published papers, that's literature review and I wouldn't call that a research. But because doing my own experiments and trials is out of question, I'm willing to settle for that.

Reviewing published papers comes with its own set of problems. A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. I suppose I can rely only on open journals and pre-prints but that's not all of them. Messaging the authors directly is also an option but it's doesn't scale well and takes time.

Suppose I get my hands on a couple of relevant papers. How can I be sure what's written there is actually correct? It would be nice if I could double check against the raw data, but often that's not available. And at best all I can verify is that the paper's content matches the source data. I can't verify the data itself. At some point I have to trust the authors. Not to mention I don't have access to the data from research that wasn't published, for example because the experiments didn't show anything novel.

But that's fine. Nothing is perfect and after hours (if not days) of reading and playing with data I came to a conclusion that I'm happy with. Of course I have to review it again in a few years. The new research will be published by then. Maybe they will discover something different and I have to review that too.

Overall, I spent a lot of time and it was exhausting. Diligently reading and cross-referencing all that data is mentally taxing. I can't complain though because I've learned something.

There's one problem though. All of that effort was about just a single vaccine. But there's more of them. For other diseases too. And there are other problems I'd love to research. Windmills. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Dozens of types of food. Economic theories. How can I research all of that in a timely fashion?

I'm genuinely asking because I want to. I realize there will be trade-offs involved, but all of them are either relying on someone else (which we try to avoid) or won't be deep enough to form an informed opinion. And I'm not happy with either.

[Schmerika]

> Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.

Sure. Let's say the manufacturer and the government claim that the vaccine is 100% effective, all of the time, with no side effects.

But you happen to notice that lots of women are complaining online about, say, missing their periods for months at a time after taking it. And getting the flu anyway.

Congratulations. You have done your own research, made your own observations, and thought for yourself.

That's the kind of thing many people were talking about. What else could they be talking about, since as you point out, they didn't have any access to raw data.

If you want to get hardcore into citizen science, that's really cool. You will have to pick a direction though; we can't do everything unfortunately. And funding is hard.

> A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions.

There are ways around this these days, but yeah the paywalling and siloing of knowledge is really holding back our potential as a species.

Did you know that it connects back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? Yeah, he was the guy most responsible for expanding the paywall model of academic research and maximising the profit from it. He could make or break scientific careers, keep certain discoveries to himself, hold leverage on academic institutions and professors...