> ... to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. It's worse than that; if you're reading individual papers wi

> ... to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. It's worse than that; if you're reading individual papers without the context of the larger body of research in a domain, you're setting yourself up to get a distorted view of the world. Peer review isn't magic; peer reviewed papers can still have errors, oversights, mistakes, outright fraud, or just get unlucky in how random chance played out. Peer review just filters out the obviously fraudulent or flawed papers so that only three reviewers have to spend an afternoon reading and understanding why they are useless, and not a thousand journal subscribers. There's nothing wrong with following scientific developments as a layperson, but you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking because you read something in a published, peer-reviewed paper -- even one in a prestigious, well-respected journal like Science or Nature -- that it must be true.