Your experience seems to involve hanging out with people who regularly cite academic articles. Is that accurate? There are many people outside of that world wh

Your experience seems to involve hanging out with people who regularly cite academic articles. Is that accurate? There are many people outside of that world who either downplay, or reflexively reject, any claim that comes from peer reviewed research, if they personally disagree with the outcome. These folks won’t even consider academic peer reviewed articles as a legitimate source of information. This viewpoint is disturbingly far reaching in my experience, in part due to poor reporting of science. I’ve had friends and family question if researchers of any discipline know much of anything because of frustration with dietary research reporting: “one month eggs are good for you, one month eggs are bad. Which one is it?!” They end up rejecting researchers and scientists of all types simply because of a paper here or there which got traction in mainstream media but was perhaps reported in a misleading fashion... and that does get to your point of how important quality journalism is. I feel far more distressed by the attitude of “my ignorance is equal to their experience” than people pointing to a PDF of research and saying, “here’s the data,” which seems to be a piece of what you are criticizing. Am I understanding that correctly? If people can read the study, they can question specific methodologies, rather than coming up with fun straw men such as, “well these researchers in this field need this to be the case, because otherwise they wouldn’t have a job.” I’ve heard that argument used on climate researchers and dietary researchers at a minimum, but those trends can extend to people’s thoughts where they start to think, “well those researchers are up to no good. I bet they have the cure for cancer and they just don’t want to release it.” I’m all for ensuring people appeal to reason and not just take the hottest headline (be it in popular press or academic papers), but there is a problem with a large portion of the population that outright rejects many research papers altogether.