[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.