Comment by gumboshoes
11 hours ago
How is any non-expert supposed to judge the content without some kind of guide like say credentials? Credentials do matter when the author is unknown.
11 hours ago
How is any non-expert supposed to judge the content without some kind of guide like say credentials? Credentials do matter when the author is unknown.
A good first step would be to distrust each and every individual. This excludes every blog, every non-peer-reviewed paper, every self-published book, pretty much every YouTube channel and so on. This isn't to say you can't find a nugget of truth somewhere in there, but you shouldn't trust yourself to be able to differentiate between that nugget of truth and everything surrounding it.
Even most well-intentioned and best-credentialed individuals have blind spots that only a different pair of eyes can spot through rigorous editing. Rigorous editing only happens in serious organizations, so a good first step would be to ignore every publication that doesn't at the very least have an easy-to-find impressum with a publicly-listed editor-in-chief.
The next step would be to never blame the people listed as writers, but their editors. For example, if a shitty article makes it way to a Nature journal, it's the editor that is responsible for letting it through. Good editorial team is what builds up the reputation of a publication, people below them (that do most of the work) are largely irrelevant.
To go back to this example, you should ignore this guy's shitty study before it's published by a professional journal. Even if it got published in a serious journal, that doesn't guarantee it's The Truth, only that it has passed some level of scrutiny it wouldn't have otherwise.
Like for example website uptime, no editorial team is capable of claiming 100% of the works that passed through their hands is The Truth, so then you need to look at how transparently they're dealing with mistakes (AKA retractions), and so on.
Separating credentialed but bad faith covid grift from evolving legitimate medical advice based on the best information available at the time did not require anything but common sense and freedom from control by demagoguery.
And when I'm nice and relaxed, my common sense is fully operational. I'm pretty good at researching medical topics that do not affect me! However, as soon as it's both relevant to me, and urgent, I become extremely incapable of distinguishing truthful information from blatant malpractice. At this point, I default to extreme scepticism, and generally do nothing about the urgent medical problem.