[ayakura]

> How do we teach people to draw that line

By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0]

It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines.

[0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...

[ceejayoz]

This makes us susceptible to what's essentially a Gish gallop, though. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop, for those unfamiliar.)

It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.

[taneq]

Also worth noting that false claims need not be malicious to serve as a DOS attack. An army of untrained ‘researchers’ drawing improbable conclusions from randomly combined snippets of scientific papers can generate a huge amount of pseudoscientific ‘sourced-looking’ ideas.

Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.