[funcDropShadow]

One purpose of science is to provide the rest of the society, who are not scientists, with reliable insights, ideally with actionable advice on how to solve a problem. If you treat science purely as a stong-link problem, the burden of quality control lays with the consumer of science. Peer review attempts to lay it with experts. That approach is nowhere near perfect, but is the best we have. And it scales much better.

[rcxdude]

Peer review is more table stakes to the expert conversation. A non-expert is still not particularly well equipped to evaluate peer-reviewed papers and synthesize a conclusion from them, you still will need an expert to boil it down to a lay-interpretable conclusion.