How can laymen evaluate the merit of cited sources, particularly in matters pertaining to medicine and nutrition? All the personalities, spokespeople, advocates, activists, etc in this space all provide citations which they say back up their claims. A lot of them are lying, their claims don't appear in the cited articles, so that's easy to detect if you click through and read each one carefully, but many of the rest do cite articles saying what they claim and it's still just junk science. They do this because they know "cites sources" is a popular heuristic.
Like I can find people promoting magnetic bracelets to align my Chi and they will be citing supposedly scientific articles which supposedly back up their claims. In extreme cases like that I can feel pretty confident that it's bullshit. But the relative health benefits of eating berry A or berry B? It seems intractable. I'm left with trusting my instincts and common sense.
Like I can find people promoting magnetic bracelets to align my Chi and they will be citing supposedly scientific articles which supposedly back up their claims. In extreme cases like that I can feel pretty confident that it's bullshit. But the relative health benefits of eating berry A or berry B? It seems intractable. I'm left with trusting my instincts and common sense.