@freemo god knows how people conducted their lives before peer review
@skells they believed in things like draining blood for the common cold and a lot of people died. Thankfully we have come a long way since that.
@freemo indeed, a great deal of science was conducted against an uphill battle against public prejudice and vested interests
thankfully, on a long enough time scale, the truth tends to out
@freemo but yeah, not to put too fine a point on it, the experts are clearly not doing their jobs across the board
critical thinking means critical thinking, not *necessarily* following the current academically accepted methodology of research to the exclusion of all else
@skells another article linked there is really nice: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/doidge-science-says-plague-journal