The “do your own research” people need to have it explained to them that even experts in their respective fields aren’t automatically capable of parsing scientific literature. A family doctor with 50 years experience who prescribes antidepressants every day will have no deep understanding of what any particular scientific peer reviewed study on SSRIs is telling them. They need a grounding in statistics more than anything else, which most people just don’t have. So the idea that a non-educated, non-scientist can read peer reviewed studies and come away from them with some sort of understanding of the issue is the thing that needs to be highlighted, preferably in high school science class (earlier, frankly). A willingness to slog through scientific papers in pursuit of deeper knowledge is admirable, but is dangerously misguided without proper training. I don’t even mean training in the specific science, but just in how to speak the language of peer reviewed studies more generally. It’s very much its own discipline.

I want someone to ask Joe Rogan what ‘regression to the mean’ means. I want someone to ask him what a ‘standard deviation’ is and how to apply the concept. I don’t want to know what papers he’s read, because you could read 50 true scientific papers a day on one topic and still have no idea what the current scientific consensus is on said topic, absent the requisite training. You’ll almost certainly come away from it with a very wrong but very confident belief. Dunning-Kruger on steroids.