[soerxpso]

> If your conclusion after reading a bunch of studies is "wow I really don't understand the fancy math they're doing here" then usually you should do the work to understand that math before you conclude that it's all a load of crap.

While this is true, putting the onus on the reader to understand a lot of advanced math makes it easy to avoid scrutiny by increasing the complexity of your math such that the only people who are ever going to be able to critique you are the intersection between PhD-level mathematicians and experts in the field your paper actually pertains to. Anyone can just say whatever they want and assure you that they must be right because they know more math than everyone else who's interested in that problem.

Instead of, "Understand the math before you conclude that it's all a load of crap," I would say, if it's an unreasonable level of complexity for the particular problem and you can't find a large body of other papers doing something similar with the same problem, just ignore it.