Do Your Own Research
How deep in the fractal of knowledge do you want to go?
Lots of people say “do your own research!” This gives me hives. I want to say, “are you insane? Do you have any idea what that actually means?” You want to do your own research about, I dunno, cancer treatment, the best nutrition for dogs, voter fraud, evolution, electric car safety, climate change, AI risk, or anything at all? Fine. Go get a PhD from a real school, maybe start your own lab, then spend several years in grueling study and publish a few papers on the topic. Then get back to me.
That’s what it means to do your own research, not just looking at a few YouTube videos by some glib conspiracy mongers, or reading people who hype up unproven scientific hypotheses as settled fact. Doing your own research is a dull, difficult slog. It is a 1000-mile bicycle race through the Alaskan Iditarod trail. In winter. Alone.
That’s what it should be, too. Knowledge is hard, and making a claim to have it is a sacred trust. In the words of the 19th century philosopher and mathematician William K. Clifford, “it is wrong everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” Clifford’s famous paper on this is actually quite stirring, his clarion instance that from the loftiest lord down to the most untutored rustic at a country ale-house we all have the same duty to humanity, to pass along the best knowledge of the world that we can to the next generation. Reading Clifford makes me want to stand up and salute.
That’s what I used to think, anyway. Now I‘ve come around to realizing that knowledge is a fractal, and there are levels of inquiry. There’s no limit to how deep you can go, but getting a sense of just the initial hooks and spirals is virtuous too. The key is recognizing how much understanding you have, and not getting too big for your epistemic britches.1
One of the downsides of scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge more generally is that it is not very legible. So a passionate observer of WWII history, or apologetics, or cosmology might easily mistake themselves for an expert. You don’t know what you don’t know, and can fail to see that small differences in knowledge are in fact vital ones.
Scales of expertise
I wish knowledge were more like sports. In this sense, anyway: in sports the ability levels are extremely transparent. It is really, really clear that Novak Djokovic is a spectacularly superior tennis player to me. If it is not obvious for some reason, it is easily proven to everyone’s satisfaction. There’s a whole rating system in tennis. Someone still learning to get the ball over the net is a 1.5. A touring pro is a 7.0. A 3.5 player will (on average) beat a 3.0 by a score of 6-2, 6-2 in two of three sets. A 4.0 player will beat a 3.5 by 6-2, 6-2, and so on. I’m a regular hobbyist player; at my best I was about a 4.0.2 I once played a tournament-rated 5.0. He sat on my chest and beat me with both fists. I got one game. I wouldn’t get a point off an actual professional, much less Djokovic.
Hubris in sports is mostly limited to trash-talking among the pros, which is completely different from amateur arrogance. Not even the drunkest baseball fan seriously believes he can out-hit Aaron Judge. But we see hubris all the time when it comes to knowledge; plenty of people are lined up to insist that those eggheads with their Nobel Prizes don’t know how the real world works.
John Hawthorne (at the time of this story the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford) once asked me what my wife did for a living. I told him she was a fundraiser for a children’s hospital. He replied, “well, I guess no one can say that’s bullshit.” Philosophers are used to being told that our expertise is bullshit.
Like the NTRP scale in tennis, I propose a rating system for levels of inquiry. Here it is.
The novice. Knows nothing about the topic, but may have heard of it.
The observer. Reads several popular, but responsible, discussions of the topic.
The deep diver. Writes a 2500-word investigative think piece for The Atlantic, Aeon, Quillette, or… Substack.
The professional. Writes a 10,000-word article for a scholarly journal.
The expert. Writes a 100,000-word book for a scholarly, big five, or otherwise legitimate press.
The monomaniac. No holds barred, devotes one’s life to the topic, with decades of study and a river of peer-reviewed publications.
I don’t mean these literally as the achievements necessary to do a deep dive or be a professional, or an expert or whatever, but each is a synecdoche representing the amount of effort needed. The degree of sustained work required to move up these ranks is considerable and grows exponentially.
Philosophy is massively, comically difficult. So is every other serious academic field. It is a lifetime’s undertaking to push back the frontiers of knowledge and substantively add to the world’s understanding of 17th century Dutch mercantilism, medieval paper-making, collective action problems in macroeconomics, shale formation in the Russian steppes, pigment analysis for fine art restoration, Hopi linguistics, or the correct calculation of the Hubble constant. I’m in awe of the monomaniacs, but I want to sing the praises of the lower ranks as well.
Humility
Expertise is contextual, which the rating system helps bring out. We don’t need to assume that every claim to knowledge means “I’m ready to debate Martha Nussbaum or Roger Penrose.” Among observers and even deep divers, I’m an expert on ethics. I’ve published a few journal articles in ethics and know the main big positions decently well. Among actual expert ethicists, I know jackshit. There is zero chance I would strut around them. Likewise, in front of an Intro class I’m pretty confident about the main moves in the traditional arguments for God, but I would be maximally humble and cautious talking about the ontological argument with Al Plantinga.
I’m nervous to claim expertise in the strictest contexts even for things I’ve written books on. There’s always some monomaniac who’s spent the last 30 years of his or her life scrutinizing every tiny facet of this exact issue. This is why I’m tempted to pat effective altruists on the head and say, “aren’t they cute? They just discovered utilitarianism! Bless their hearts.” You need to know when you are a 3.0 player and have the appropriate humility.
At the same time, good for them. At least they’ve been thinking about ethics in a sustained and actionable way, which is a lot more than the average citizen. Yeah, yeah, I know a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. However, it’s only dangerous if you overestimate your ranking.
Doing your own research means getting on the ladder of levels of inquiry. It’s doing more than staying at the bottom rung of the ignorant novice. Even if you’re no more than an observer of AI risk who likes to read Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, or an observer of physics who reads Sean Carroll, Stephen Hawking, and George Smoot, you’re at play in the fields of knowledge. That is a fine and splendid thing.
How much should we investigate a topic before we decide, eh, I know enough about this? Your mileage may vary, of course, but the true answer is: until you get bored. That is OK! You might think those monomaniacs are heroes, but they are paying a high opportunity cost. There’s just so much to know about, well, everything. Sometimes I think that the world is a vast Aladdin’s cave of riches, and as fascinating as it is to sit and stare at this egg-sized blue diamond, there’s rubies, emeralds, sapphires in profusion. I don’t want to miss out on that. At least I can get a small sample of the greatest gems in research areas far from my own. And why not?
I’m reminded of Archilochus: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”3 Hedgehogs have tunnel vision, foxes have FOMO. I know which I personally relate to. Doing your own research can mean becoming a hedgehog, devoted to knowing your one big thing, climbing the ladder of inquiry, and delving ever deeper into the fractal of knowledge. But that is not the only thing it can mean. Doing your own research can also be becoming a fox. Foxes might never ascend to the expert or even professional ranks of knowledge, but they know many things. In Thoreau’s wonderful phrase, they “suck all the marrow out of life.”
Both are fine creatures worthy of aspiration; each of us just needs to make sure we know which one we are.
I’m eliding the difference between knowledge and understanding here, which I don’t think is important for this essay, but I’ll probably revisit in the future.
I’d like to say I am still a 4.0, but my knees beg to differ.
Made famous by Isaiah Berlin, of course.
I have always been baffled by people that can find a deep, often lifelong interest in one "thing". I have taken to describing myself as interested in concepts and ideas over a wide range of subjects. I know a little bit about the surface of lots and lots of topics but when the digging begins, as soon as the subject starts to be dissected, I quickly lose interest.
I think that those with truly expert knowledge in one narrow field often have bizarre gaps in their knowledge about other things. When I respectfully listen to their expertise I can sometimes pick out assumptions that they have about other subjects that are just obviously incorrect. It makes me wonder, "If you don't know that, what else don't you know?". A good example is that scientists often talk about philosophical concepts in a dismissive way that is toe curlingly naive, they are much less likely to possess epistemic humility. They don't know what they don't know. Philosophers seem, in my experience, to be much more clued up on science. Similarly, people like Rowan Williams and David Bentley Hart can talk about Science, Philosophy, Theology and Culture in a way that puts people like Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson to shame.
“Yeah, yeah, I know a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. However, it’s only dangerous if you overestimate your ranking.” Well said. I saw a comment the other day that went something like, “I don’t need to read thousands of pages of Aquinas proving the existence of god…” and I was tempted to reply, “You’re right, you don’t. His proof for the existence of god was something like three paragraphs.”