I'm fairly sympathetic to both of you here. Even without the vast trove of bullshit that is the Internet, the published scientific literature is already far mor

I'm fairly sympathetic to both of you here. Even without the vast trove of bullshit that is the Internet, the published scientific literature is already far more than anyone could possibly hope to read with care. Using a credentialism filter is one possible step in the process of narrowing down the set of papers available to read to a subset small enough that you can read them all. It's a popular method that has been practiced in some form for as long as there have been organized intellectual pursuits. And while it's evidently good for maintaining some approximation of a local optimum, I suspect it's also why the adage that scientific progress comes one funeral at a time rings so true. We should be clear though it's the narrowing process that has the value. Credentialism is just one possible means of narrowing that scores highly on ease of use, but perhaps not so highly for learning radically new things.