[saalweachter]

The unfortunate reality is that you can't sift wheat from chaff as casual layperson reading a paper here and there.

You don't necessarily need to be one of the anointed, but you do need to read a lot of papers in a particular field critically. You need to read and understand enough papers in a field that you can tell the difference between a normal paper and a completely bonkers one, to tell which have novel methodology and which methods are less rigorous; you need to read enough to understand the context of each paper in the broader body of research. What other research has been done in a similar vein, which papers agree with each other, which are incompatible. Whether the data in one paper can be accounted for by the hypotheses in another.

Any individual paper can be flawed, unlucky or outright fraudulent. When you just grab a paper or two at random, you're engaging in a dangerous sampling problem. When the papers aren't grabbed at random, it's even worse.

[pbak]

> When you just grab a paper or two at random, you're engaging in a dangerous sampling problem. When the papers aren't grabbed at random, it's even worse.

I think you summarized the current situation perfectly.

It's an inverse Russian roulette of knowledge where only one of the bullets is missing :

hospitalized, gave grandma covid, no go into malls and trains in France, "nudged" into vaccination, dead, perfectly healthy with no adverse or long term effect from anything