Many of you who ready my posts will see that I often write DYOR - and many of you know that this means you should do you own research. I could speculatively claim that BitCoin will hit $1,000,000 by December and I may or may not be right and my sources might be legitimate or the might be dodgy, but either way DYOR means check it out for yourself and don't trust in other people's word alone, even if such people (and hopefully I am in this group) do our best to be as accurate and timely as possible.
BTW I just picked that BitCoin price out of the air when I writing that sentence there is zero research behind it and is almost certainly not going to happen!
What has prompted my article today is a throwaway line that I read in a book I got for Christmas. I am a fan of Yuval Noah Harari and especially loved Sapiens his first book. I have since read Homo Deux and 21 Questions for the 21st Century and have now started Nexus which explores mankind's relationship with information with a particular eye on AI (not got that far yet).
The throwaway line that caught my attention is that DYOR is often used as an excuse to validate one's own opinions and rather than bring about a level of accountability and act as a disclaimer for those who ask that you DYOR it becomes a shield to hide behind. For example a fervent believer of the Bible might read a book about Biblical archaeology to find traces of ancient cities or civilisations that have disappeared over time or even more controversially evidence of a global flood. Such evidence might easily be suggested and whether it is real or not is almost irrelevant. Likewise a person who denies the Holocaust is more likely to read materials that support such views and DYOR then becomes a justification for views that are simply not true. Donald Trump said maybe we can inject with bleach to kill Covid - whatever you think of him that was right out there he is not a doctor and nobody with integrity can quote "Trump said we can maybe do this so let's do it and kill Covid at the same time" . Maybe I personally wouldn't have minded if he had volunteered to go first and then based our future development of such a cure on how he responded!
We tend to read to our own prejudices.
To illustrate many of us have read or watched the Narnia stories by CS Lewis but I am convinced that almost his entire readership for such books as Mere Christianity, which is a Christian apologetic, are Christians whose views have already been formed. To help guide your DYOR I will share with you the PROMPT criteria I used when studying at university. Forgive me for using an image rather than writing it longhand.
DYOR, should not be used to push one's own pre-established views but to encourage due dilligence, personal accountability and responsibility and in its purest form should mean "check it out for yourself, don't take my word for it and if you do take my word for it I have pre-warned you that I might be wrong!'
Just some food for thought for you all.
As always stay safe and well my friends.
