I just have some handy advice as another person who doesn't have a Master's degree in the relevant fields. My advice is:
- Don't take advice from the comment section, ever. This includes this very sentence. It also includes HN, reddit, discord, gab, tiktok, prodigy, random podcasters, random math blogs... basically don't listen to anyone who doesn't have direct, meaningful accountability from thou.
- Any smooth-talking non-practicing dumbass Ph.D. in some tangential field can get a decent-enough steaming setup to spread their uninformed opinions as they please. The best of them with the smoothest voices can probably even get a decent number of patrons and other funders for their chicanery, get on podcasts and programs, whatever. They make content where such a person claims that some undefined, proverbial "They" are lying to "us" and that "we" need to do exactly x to thwart "Them". Anyone using this sort of language without clearly defining the perpetrators and victims are not serious, and can be ignored with prejudice. [1^]
- On reading scientific papers and education: You'll likely need a Master's[2^] level of understanding to meaningfully interpret published papers (much less pre-prints). Dr. Dumbass probably doesn't actually know much more about this subject than you, but if they're a few chapters ahead of you they can probably sound pretty convincing to a student.
- Conjecture: in any sufficiently large community of people, a Dr. Dumbass can be found. If true, say community X hates community Y. A member of X can like find Dr. Dumbasses in group Y and compile these statements into a shitty meme in an attempt to convince members of X that members of Y are less rational than they actually are. Such a member can make a big wallpaper image of Dr. Dumbass's crankery, but then mix in a few contextless posts from the hypothetical actually legitimate Dr. Goodfaith to pretend that Dr. Dumbass and Dr. Goodfaith are similarly fraudulent. I've casually called this the "adjacency fallacy" but there's probably a better term for it.
- Members in community Y can in-turn repost the shitty and fallacious memes created by some rando in community X, and claim without merit that it evidence that all members of community X are delusional. This leads to a tumult of angry comments, upon which some members of X repost in their communities and claim their sense of victimhood. Some members of Y do the same, creating a feedback loop where the two communities cease to discuss the primary topic any more, and instead spend more time complaining about other people complaining as a form of anger-pornography. Similar principles can be derived for political pundits, podcasters, streamers, who spend hours of their day practically screaming into their microphones about the horrors of "something". Stay away from the karma farmers who sow this sort of nonsense far and wide.
- For overall reasoning skills, I greatly enjoyed Douglas Walton's "Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach". My big takeaway from the book was that "logical fallacies" are not inherent argumentative traps which must be avoided at all cost. Rather, these sorts of arguments become fallacies when there is an unwarranted dialectic shift in the type of argument. For example, if you were debating a topic and your opponent brandishes a gun to compel you to agree with them, that is clearly not a valid argument. If instead this were a hostage negotiation, their threats of violence can be considered valid. The fallacy wasn't the threat to violence, rather the fallacy was the shift from a "debate" to a "negotiation". Some of the most frustrating arguments I've read online are those where one or both users are more intent on shifting the dialectic to suit their existing arguments rather than to truly learn from others and seek consensus. Identifying dialectic shifts IMO is more valuable than a dump of named fallacies.
- Generalized overall reasoning skills can be actively harmful if incorrectly applied to specific domains if they are used to overcome a lack of domain knowledge. This is because as one moves further away from theoretical wankery and toward actual chemistry, the details become essential. Anyone attempting to use raw reasoning-skills and "common-sense" to hand-wave away the important details of a controversy is a charlatan and can be safely ignored.
[1^]: Yes, there are obviously plenty of times where the leaders of a group of people lie to people and people need to call them out. The most correct form of this would include both specific accusations of crimes and evidence against specific individuals. My concern is with commentators who rail against the actions of, say, extremes on "The Right" or "The Left", but if you get them to describe such extremes in detail, their descriptions would likely cover a supermajority of the population.
[2^]: Not intended as some weird form of gatekeeping, it's more a peg for the amount of study and effort one may need to put forth to really evaluate with what the authors are writing.