Search and Research

In my case, I find research to be more of a necessary evil: something that needs to be done if we want to learn the truth about any given topic, but something I am incredibly untalented at. It’s actually kind of sad how bad I am at finding the right key words to lead me to the topic I’m studying. It’s rather like a video I saw a few weeks ago of a choir director who was so tired of his students singing badly that he recorded himself singing Oh Holy Night, and intentionally made every singing mistake imaginable, and after playing it for his students said that was what he sounded like. The only difference between this story and my own ability to research is that my mistakes and overall lack of ability is not intentional. That leads me into the question of what I will do to improve the research process, both for this paper and for future ones. Mainly my plan is just to work on gaining experience: surely the longer I attempt to find more information through searches, the higher the probability I’ll come across something useful, and hopefully as I spend more time researching I will gain more experience at it and start to recognize what will make good search criteria and what will not.

            There is a slight issue with the idea of researching that I am working to get over, as well. The whole idea of some sources being more trustworthy than others does make sense, I suppose, at first glance, but instead of learning to distinguish between the two, I’ve developed the habit of distrusting nearly any information regardless of the source, unless I can prove it for myself. An example of why I’ve developed this habit was given in class today by one of the other students who is researching climate change. He mentioned that he’d found trustworthy sources giving data that were in complete opposition to each other, that there was no way they could both be correct. It’s because of situations like that, where there is obviously a strong bias by the authors (probably on both sides), that I almost always assume that the answer lies somewhere in the middle, and that unless I have the ability to work it out for myself, do the experiments and run the numbers, I can’t possibly know for sure what the actual truth is. On the one hand such a strong sense of skepticism can be extremely useful to weed out biased information. On the other hand it makes it very difficult to form an actual opinion or conclusion.

            Basically my goal is to keep searching for new information and more sources until I get good at distinguishing whether a source is in fact trustworthy or not, and until I’m convinced that a specific viewpoint is correct.