I Researched How To Do Research Heres What I Learned

TITLE: I Researched How To Do Research, Here’s What I Learned CHANNEL: WheezyWaiter DATE: 2026-03-30 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz5Nq8PDKDo

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Thank you to Scribe for sponsoring this video. More about them later. Oh yes, interesting. Oh, hello. We are living at a time during which extreme uninformed knee-jerk opinions, hot takes, and memeable opposition from your uncle on Facebook, among other extended family, are rewarded, perhaps more so than ever. People be incentivized to pedal bulldook. That’s short for bulldookie, which is in place of Whether it’s for an essay, research paper, video, that growth on your inner thigh, that growth on your outer thigh, or to win an argument with that uncle on Facebook, learning how to do good research and share it compellingly and honestly, would probably make the world better.

So, I did research about research for this video. I’ve gathered the best advice I can find from YouTube, Reddit sites, university websites, Wikipedia, Wiki How, and came up with what I think is the general best advice people give.

Step one, clarify your question, aka have a goal, reason, objective, purpose, or why you’re doing the thing. It seems obvious that you should know what you’re going to research before you research it. But the actual question you’re trying to answer might be more elusive and wishy-washy than you think. If you don’t have a clear question, you don’t have direction. You could go super deep into irrelevant data or you could fall into bias bubbles where they will more than happily figure out what your question and answer is for you. I actually revisit the question all the time while I’m doing a video. I go back and try to redefine it as I get more experience and more research and learn more about what I don’t know that I don’t know.

Here’s an example. A video about nuclear power brings up lots of questions. Is it as green as they say it is? Is it safer than it used to be? Is nuclear waste a huge problem? How does it actually work? What’s the history? What happened at 3M Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima? After thinking about it for a while, I narrowed it down to something like: is nuclear power our best option or should we be using more nuclear power? Are we too afraid of nuclear power? Having an actual question like that, which actually has societal implications, is more interesting for an audience, but also gives me direction.

Step two, before the actual research, it might be good to check yourself before you wreck your research. Acknowledge the B-word: bias. Every story, every article has subjectivity on some level. Know thyself. Acknowledge your biases. Every goober you watch in your TV box or your YouTube box in your bubble reflects your ideas back at you. If I come across an article that lambasts a group that I disagree with and really strongly aligns with what I agree with, that’s actually a red flag for me. It feels like I’m not getting all the information. I’m drinking in the sweet sweet tribal milkshake and it tastes like truth. I actually believe you can cherrypick any resources to back up any of your beliefs.

Next, acknowledge your level of knowledge. There are some topics that are so complicated that at some point you’re going to have to rely on experts. Most of the people we call experts who are actual experts have been working in fields for 10, 20, 30 years. You Gary have not been working in that field that you’re researching as long as they have. Sure, some experts might be idiots, corrupt, or stinky. But I would still tend to trust them over you, Gary, about squirrels. Personally, I would choose someone with as close to firsthand knowledge as possible, or who has done a lot of research.

This is why red flags raise in my brain when I hear the phrase, “Do your own research.” Now, of course, it’s great to inform yourself. But I think what’s often implied when people say, “I did my own research,” is that they didn’t just do their own research, they did their own alternative research, going out to intentionally find the alternative to mainstream consensus. Of course, mainstream consensus isn’t always right and in fact is never settled. The scientific method guarantees that we’re always going back and modifying and learning new things. But if your goal when you’re setting out to do it is to do alternative research to go against the mainstream consensus, that’s kind of giving into your bias. You can convince yourself of anything if you go in wanting to prove it because there’s so much information out there that can give you the thing you need to prove to yourself the thing that you already think.

Step three, see what’s out there. Where do you start? You Google it. I’ve kind of made it a personal policy to scroll down a little after I Google to get past all the algorithmically optimized stuff. (Editor’s note: you can actually type minus AI after any Google search and it will get rid of the AI overview stuff.) When I start, I basically Google or Wikipedia or YouTube or Reddit search stuff to get a broad picture of what’s going on. And then when I find out more, I refine my question and my searches and find even better stuff. And I go deeper into the sources of these things where I find articles and studies and whole ass books. But then I search counterarguments to whatever the sources are saying. Researching this video, I learned that this is called the spiderweb method.

If you’re going to be doing some searching, perhaps you should get good at searching. There’s something called boolean operators, using AND, OR, and NOT effectively while you search. Say you want to search for peas and carrots. All caps AND, it’s only going to show you things that mention peas and carrots. All caps OR, it’ll show the ones that have at least one of the things. Peas NOT carrots, it won’t show the ones that mention carrots. If you put a phrase in quotation marks, it will show that exact phrase in a search. A good place to find some nice academic research would be PubMed or Google Scholar. Or if you put PDF in your search, you’ll get full text documents.

Depending on if I have the time, energy, and motivation, I might just talk to an expert myself. Smart people are smart. Plus, two people talking makes for great content. Another thing I like to do is just do the freaking experiment myself on myself. The ultimate firsthand knowledge, but with that knowledge, there are limits. An experiment of one is great to learn the experience of something or if something works for that one. Which is why I try to be very honest about all of my limits and my parameters and how exactly I did a thing and I try to avoid very conclusive conclusions because it’s just me.

Step four, check their limits, aka how to trust in an untrusting world. A number of questions should run through your mind when you find a source. Whether that’s an article, a study, or perhaps most importantly, a random tweet. Who wrote this? What were their sources? What else do they consistently write or argue about? Who funded this? What was their purpose? What was the actual study?

Through my research about research, I came across the SIFT method, developed by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield. SIFT. You come across a source. First thing you do, Stop, actually think about the thing. Don’t just blindly share it. Also, read the whole thing. A headline’s not an article. A tweet is not an article. Next, I: Investigate the source. Open a new tab. Google the person who wrote the thing. Read about the publication it’s on. F: Find better coverage. See what others are saying. Do they agree? Do they oppose? T: Trace claims back to the original source. Check sources. Find out where they’re getting this crap. Actually follow the links that they have in articles cuz I often find that if you follow links, they link to studies that have nothing to do with it or actually prove the opposite of what they’re saying.

Also, it might help to have a basic understanding of different kinds of studies and how they work because there’s a lot of stories that get blown out of proportion because of one small flawed study. Figure out what the sample size is. Was there a control group? Was it blind, double blind, triple blind? Was it a meta analysis, a study of multiple studies? Was it quantitative based on actual data and numbers and hypothesis testing? Or was it qualitative based on interviews and opinions and just vibes? I feel like we put far too much emphasis on vibes these days.

One red flag that I have become aware of in my travels: certainty. If claims just seem very sure of themselves, really forceful, really aligned with the author’s consistent arguments, just really conclusive. Watch out. It might be true, but I’ve become very wary of certainty because of all the years of interviewing experts that I’ve done. It seemed like way more often than not, they weren’t very certain. Nothing was 100%. They were much more inquisitive. They were asking more questions than answering. They would talk more about what we’re currently thinking is the case, not so much this is 100% true. That’s what the scientific method’s all about.

Step five, final step, make sense of what you found. When I’m done with my research, when I’m coming to the end of making a video, there is a real temptation to be conclusive, to be like, “This is the moral. This is what we learned, and now we’re better for it.” But that’s not always or usually true. It just makes a better story, and it feels good. But I find that it’s better to be honest. I talk about what I think I’ve learned, but the possible flaws in my thinking, and here are the factors that could be why I was wrong.

If I’m stuck, if I don’t know what to say next, if I don’t know how to conclude, often I discover that I’m just subconsciously afraid to say the truth. I don’t want to say what I actually believe because it’s embarrassing or inconvenient or just doesn’t seem like it would be interesting enough. But every time I do it, I unblock myself and it makes the result much better when someone’s being honest. So, gather your sources, construct your conclusion or inconclusion, and be honest about everything.