I'm not a scientist, I'm in digital media and ads, but I've been doing this for almost 20 years and feel confident in my level of technical and business knowledge of the space.

I never realized how wrong papers could be until I read some from my industry and dug into their methodology of which I'm sufficiently knowledgeable to spot issues. I don't recall specifics as it was a while ago but I do recall the district impression I was left with which amounted to "holy crap, I wouldn't let this person pull reports on my ad account let alone run campaigns" due to the buy side 101 mistakes they made.

Since then I read all scientific papers with a huge heaping of salt.

0.5. The guy who reads the press release for the journal article!

(0.2. The guy who reads the title of the news article for the journal article on HN and proceeds straight to the comment section...)

0.1. Guy who reads the edited HN title and makes an offhand joke in the comments without even reading any other comments.

0.01 Guy who reads someone else's comment and assumes their offhand joke means they didn't read any of the other comments.

That’s why I skip even reading the title, and get right to mocking other commenters.

A true Posting Elemental needs no context to ply their trade

> Posting Elemental

Is that a thing or did you make it up?

Made it up

It should be a thing. Thanks.

#3 is pretty orthogonal.

There's a reason abstracts exist, and they usually provide enough information as to whether the paper discovered any significant findings, so whether it's worth reading at all.

If you are #1, #2 and in #2 you include reading not just the paper but the meta-analysis papers of the field, that already puts you ahead of 95% of the general public.

Not even scientists themselves are full #3 people. It's just impossible, considering the amount of work that exists in the field, and considering that most studies just confirm existing findings from 10-20-50 years ago.

#3.5: The guy who skims the text of the article with just enough effort and time to be proven correct about their opinion of the article’s title

This is an incredibly common guy

You claim you're a #2.5 which is intermediate. So according to the article you might very well be an overconfident #1, instead...

You should probably add a "5. don't know" option and check that one...

I read the title, skim the abstract and jump directly to the tables/graphics. There is a lot of bullshit in the introduction and conclusions.

2.5. The guy who reads the abstract then skips to the figures.

#2.5 someone who lets Karpathy explain it all :-)