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I love (and agree with) Massimo Pigliucci's quote: “How is the average intelligent person (Socrates’ ‘wise man’) supposed to be able to distinguish between science and pseudoscience without becoming an expert in both?” It's easy to understand the sentiment about people believing that experts are speaking from positions of vested interest and have something to gain. Sadly, not sure that will ever change, and denial seems to be on the rise.
> a longtime journalist shares hard-won insights in teasing out substance from hype.
A journalist is not somebody I would be trusting to tease out substance from hype. Their job is to sift the hype out of the substance for ad revenue.
My rule that generally works :
1. Skin in the game. (Does the person offer his advice for living and does he negatively affected for mistakes ?)
2. Incentives : Does the expert have any perverse incentives for those specific opinions ?
One trick I've used is to look for non-technical errors. Often, people don't even argue the technical merits. For example, when discussing climate change, waiting for 100% certainty is a flag they are not serious. No one ever has 100% certainty. On top of which, you buy house insurance despite the probability of a fire being very small, you care about the risk (P*E).
Moving the goal post, ad hominem attacks, etc...
Even better: how about examining the arguments used by whoever-they-are to support a particular thesis or agenda?
The soundness of a scientific argument may rest on highly technical or deep bodies of knowledge. For the layperson, evaluating such an argument is not trivial.
There are some serious problems in the science industry. The biggest of these is that some otherwise-intelligent people don't realize that they're sometimes "useful idiots".
For example, while modern medical practitioners are generally good advocates for a rational approach to health, they don't realize that their profession sometimes serves the needs of their industry's supply chain. One of the examples in "An epidemic of unnecessary and unhelpful medical treatments" [1] was about how cardiologists still use lots of stents, even though they've been shown to be basically useless for improving the long-term prognosis of the patients.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713563
One of the Science Based Medicine writers, Harriet Hall, regularly defends pseudo-scientific psychiatric practices. This article defends involuntary treatment:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/involuntary-treatment-%e2%8...
She expressed very similar views in a 2016 Skeptic Magazine article. What Dr. Hall doesn't realize is that, when commonly-used psychiatric drugs are used as treatment, the treatment is always a contributing factor for the diagnosis.
I've written here before about how the mental health system tried to turn my friend into one of their customers-for-life. When I met her, I figured she was 'high as a kite'. I gradually learned that she really was self-medicating with the street pharmacy. With my influence, over the course of about 6 months, she came to realize that she didn't like being a "drug addict". Then she ran out of alcohol, became psychotic, and was taken to the behavioral health department of the local hospital. (Methadone is known to cause sugar cravings. My friend began drinking heavily after about a month of methadone treatment. Insulin resistance is a major problem amongst people who train their bodies to run on alcohol...)
When I realized that hospital was sending my friend to get "evaluated" for court-ordered mental health treatment, and presumably misdiagnosed and mistreated, I felt an overwhelming sense of dread: "those people never get better..." ("those people" being people who are trapped in the mental health industry).
So I went to the county court (big-city), and got an order that the hospital release their patient. I should have called the police to accompany me back onto the hospital's property... My friend got sucked into the system.
After a year of my friend getting professionally mistreated, I found videos on my phone proving that she is not "persistently disabled", as the psychiatrists diagnosed her. I went back to the court. This time the (small-town) judge 'tweaked' the law so she wouldn't have to make the community's mental health provider look bad. Eventually I went into the appellate courts... I've learned a lot about 'lawyering' over the past year.
Under the threat of having to explain why they're treating my friend as one who is "persistently" (permanently) disabled, when my videos clearly prove that she was fine before the first hospital, the current treatment provider has realized that their patient doesn't actually require overlapping tranquilizers. They've also realized she has that genetic mutation that makes her unable to convert folic acid to folate, so they've added prescription Vitamin B9 [2] to her reduced regimen of harmful drugs.
[2] https://www.deplin.com/ - I think it amusing that the vitamin is marketed as an add-on treatment for "antidepressant therapy".
With regards to this article, "science and spin"... If conventional science was fundamentally wrong about something, how would they realize their mistake? Max Planck is misquoted as having said, 'Science advances one funeral at a time' [3]...