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I have found that many people "doing their own research" are only searching for confirmation to their beliefs, and also seem to have a misunderstanding about what "research" actually entails.
If you're a rational thinker and you believe you have a source that makes a good point, you'll simply link that source directly, and maybe even explain how it supports the thing you believe. However, if you're a conspiracy theorist who only has bad sources that can be easily disproven, you'll become wary about linking to those sources directly or trying to explain what they mean to you, lest someone in the discussion completely blow your argument apart and laugh at you.
That's why the imperative appeal to "do your own research" has developed - whether intentional or not, it's a tailor-made strategy to protect bad sources (and bad thinking) from criticism. By telling people to do their own research rather than being up front about your sources and arguments, you try to push people into learning about the topic you want them to internalize while there are no dissenting voices present. It's a tactic that separates discussion zones from "research" zones, so that "research" can't be interrupted by reality.
People who actually have good points with good sources don't need to do this. It's only the people who are clinging onto bad, debunkable sources (or simple feelings) that need to vaguely tell people to "do their own research". The actual scientific method is "help me disprove this theory. Only when we all fail can we consider this theory good enough for now, but we will continue looking for other theories that explain things better, and then try and disprove those too".
No researcher tells another researcher on a level playing field to do their own research. They say, "What have you found? Let's discuss it." This is the way progress is made. There's a reason we're calling all this the culture wars and not the new renaissance.
Hell, even culture war is generous branding. It's people living in reality against a loose coalition of people who just generally don't like them because they've been trained to by the moneyed interests who have spent the last 30 years building a propaganda machine to weaponize them for political and financial gain.
The truly strange part is that the research you do as a civilian does not matter. If you somehow got a degree and ran an absolutely bulletproof years-long study in CURRENT THING, the people telling you to "do your own research" would be exactly the people who would not believe you because it would go against their preconceptions. They don't care about research, they care about belief.
Looking things up online that conform to your viewpoint is not research, it is a means to entrench yourself.
Let's Do An Experiment!
Right. So by your downvotes, I see that you don't understand why the scientific method necessitates disregarding personal experience. Let's show you an extremely simplified but basic example:
Let's say that a person believes that cats simply do not exist.
Oh, they've seen cats before, but they think they're just really small people covered in carpet and refuse to believe any evidence to the contrary.
Everyone else knows that cats exist; we know there is something wrong with this person.
Regardless, the person decides to do an "experiment" to prove it. They walk into their living room, glue carpet to their spouse, and then claim victory. They then document it stating that in their personal experience, they proved the one cat they found in the area was just a person with carpet glued to them. They gather support online, and publish it in a for-pay journal. The article is never peer-reviewed because the person refused to tell of their methodology, but people repost the "study".
If science operated in a fashion that the "do your own research" people felt, then we should all believe this person.
Just because a single person has never seen a cat, or chooses not to acknowledge cats, doesn't mean that factually cats do not exist. Even organizing a poor experiment and claiming they have done "research" does not make them correct. The burden of proof is still present, and a poor experiment is often blown apart in the scientific community or unrepeatable. This is why peer-review without an agenda is incredibly important.
If everything someone "saw with their own eyes" were true, then ghosts, aliens, demons, every God that has ever been worshipped (even though they preclude each other), mythical creatures, and countless other things are all true. All of them. That, or there is a flaw in the logic you are using.
Also, to most of the people here who will no doubt not read this as it may challenge your world view - plugging your ears and screaming as loud as you can to drown out the world does not make truth vanish.
Being insulting, blocking, or downvoting doesn't mean that you're correct.
I like to believe that people can be reached and the only outcome isn't just shit-throwing matches and all-out war. However, if you're not willing to debate in good faith, then there is no debate.
You have lost at the outset by not being willing to be incorrect.
So, sure. "Trust the science" is said often. That's because normal people going about their lives can't test, verify, or disprove the science. Normal people who don't carry out "the science" as their job can't afford the time, education, experimentation, controls, or equipment to do anything except "trust the science." They are simply not equipped to do so, and that's okay.
At some point in every career, you need to trust experts, and as an expert in my field, I know nothing drives me nuts like someone with a casual understanding of my field telling me how wrong I am about something that I know inside and out.
"Do your own research" translated from Facebook commonly means "look some shit up, but only the shit that goes against the science, because if it didn't, it would be the science."
The people "doing their own research" have (for the most part) not done any research since high school science classes and feel that reading unsourced blogs is the same thing as actual research. This is not, and has never been, the case.
The stuff you mention about COVID was because they were being cautious at the outset. These variants hadn't been studied yet, and as time went on, those who studied it changed what the recommendations were. That's what you do, you learn and then adapt. That's science. Corona viruses are one thing; COVID-19 was another. Even a detailed study on what came before can only get you so far.
Although I'm sure you're correct about it, I was never told to clean my groceries when they got home by anyone. Recommendations around the world were a hot mess for a while and not every government was clear enough to say "do this for now" and corrected themselves along the way. Canada did pretty well on this front. The stations and other things were made available not because they were helpful later on, but simply because people wanted to feel like they were doing something. It was security theatre.
I would actually say I've seen this go both ways too - I was in Japan in 2020 and there were very much in denial about COVID likely in part because it happened just before the Olympics were supposed to (economically disastrous for a country already struggling).
Conversely, once they started to actually have public policy on it, their restrictions were significantly more moderate than in most places in Canada - in my prefecture aside from an initial month of lockdown I never stopped working, as a teacher, in-person, teaching hundreds of students a week. I could still go eat food with colleagues most times, and our infection numbers rarely exceeded double digits in the whole prefecture. How did we do it?
Our prefecture took more of a laser-focused approach to things - when infections started upticking they would make rules like "no eating at restaurants open after 8pm" and had 5 levels of very oddly specific rules about things you could and couldn't do in public. They often targeted shutting remotely resembling nightlife first because a lot of infections would come from anything that looked like that. Looking at some places in Canada which were being far more draconian (and doing worse) from a public policy end it felt that the Japanese "Don't ask for more than people can do," was more successful. (Of course this was less the case for places like Osaka, Tokyo, etc but even they were on the whole less strict than, say BC).
Would a more Japanese approach have worked in Canada? Hard to say, but I think there is a case to be made that some restrictions were asking for more than a lot of people were willing to give. Essentially, knowing people and good public policy isn't necessary the same as understanding science, because you have to consider what people are willing to comply with, and what is asking too much, whether certain things will backfire, what downsides there are to policy, etc. and it's reasonable for us as citizens to have objections (one way or the other) - I would even go so far as to say that's part of our civic duty.
I think that's probably the standard sentiment but I do think a "somewhat less strict approach in some cases," might have been better.
There's this sort of thing in leadership/negotiation where if you show that you feel people are untrustworthy and you're too strict with them, a good portion will essentially tell you where to go and how to get there by completely ignoring your demands. I feel as though there were at least some areas where we could have borrowed at least a little from that idea.
I would agree that there were some things people were far too angry about that barely mattered. The excessive fighting over the mask thing was definitely the biggest.
That said, in BC rules were so strict at several points that you couldn't see anyone outside of family living with you, regardless of how you did it (ex: meet up in a park and stand 2m apart? Not good enough. Realistically? Near-zero risk). Rules regarding parents in old folks homes were so draconian that parents passed away without their children being able to see them. Quite a few people offed themselves too.
Staying in Japan I was able to, short of bigger social events, avoiding travel to major centres (I did once to buy a car) and wearing a mask, live reasonably similarly to how I did pre-Corona (in a city of ~90,000). So the contrast was quite stark when I heard about how things were in the west.
I'll keep it simple and say that I'm in general a fair bit more skeptical about authority, politicians and overreach (particularly during emergency situations) than you are. I don't think the conclusions that authorities/media come to about science or how they choose to portray it should be accepted without question, nor should those who didn't be silenced (and this was the case even among some professionals). They have self-interests which don't necessarily at all times align with the public good.
I think people are right to have felt that some things were off, even if they were wrong to wholesale believe some particularly questionable explanations. I believe the average person has reasonably good intuitions but often gets the details wrong when the underlying factors that need to be understood are more complex and that's where they end up making themselves look foolish.
I can agree that some of the governmental pushes worldwide weren't terribly agile or well thought through, but what I was following at the time was what the current scientific consensus was.
The way the "silencing" worked that I witnessed was some discredited doctor who had lost their license would say he'd studied something, but wouldn't submit to peer-review or data review. Then people who had studied things would roll their eyes and tell him to shut up because there was no science done by the dissenter in the first place.
That level of "science" is equivalent of getting a doctorate in "trust me bro."
A skeptic seeks the truth regardless of their feelings. A conspiracy theorist follows their feelings regardless of the truth.