It's very avoidable. This whole thing of taking non-peer reviewed works seriously is very field dependent, and even then only a decade or two old. In physics an

It's very avoidable. This whole thing of taking non-peer reviewed works seriously is very field dependent, and even then only a decade or two old. In physics and computer science it seems to be common, but for example, in biomedical research it is basically unheard of. People have been trying to get a bioarXiv started or post biology papers on arXiv itself, but they have very little influence because people think rightly or wrongly that a non-peer reviewed work must be flawed in some way.