[conception]

“Find papers that support what you want via online echo chambers” isn’t the advice you want to be giving but it is the net result of it. Society needs trusted institutions. Not that publishers are the best result of that but adhoc blog posts are decidedly not better.

[yorwba]

It is totally the advice I want to be giving. Given the choice between an echo chamber matched to my interests and wading through a stream of unfiltered crap, I'll take the echo chamber every time. (Of course there's also the option of not reading papers at all, which is typically a good choice if you're not a subject matter expert and don't intend to put in the work to become one.)

If you choose to focus on the output of a well-known publisher, you're not avoiding echo chambers, you're using a heuristic to hopefully identify a good one.

[ricardobeat]

Those are not the only options, namely the parent mentioned 'trusted institutions'. It is the best way to defer that filtering to a group of other humans, whose collective expertise will surpass any one individual.

The destruction of trust in both public and private institutions - newspapers, journals, research institutions, universities - and replacement with social media 'influencers' and online echo chambers is how we arrived at the current chaotic state of politics worldwide, the rise of extremist groups, cults, a resurgence of nationalism, religious fanaticism... This is terrible advice.