> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong
The good news is that not only does the "private researcher"
(curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate
some work.
The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.
I think there'd be some value in asking each of the major chatLLMs whether vaccines cause autism. If the answer is not some unequivocal variation of "no, aside from fraudulent and discredited research," you have a serious problem if you're relying on AI to do research for you.
The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work.
The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.