I can’t even imagine giving so much credence to every conspiracy theory or supposed breakthrough that only appears on YouTube that I spend time watching everything. There are only so many hours in the day, time is precious, and the onus is on the person making the claim to support them, not the other way around. It’s like someone telling me to watch everything on YouTube about copper bracelets taking bad energy and putting the onus on me to disprove it, but that’s not how science works.

I will share though that I have heuristics that help me gut check new claims. None of them are infallible but they can give a good indication that saves me watching every layperson video making outrageous claims. Those heuristics include things like getting published in major journals, getting peer reviewed, having large and well thought out studies controlling for confounding variables, having leaders in a field support or coauthor the studies, and more. There are also heuristics in the opposite way, which I won’t get into, but suffice to say that the position of “everyone thinks I’m a ‘nutter’ but this one thing happened to me in one case and it has never been repeated but I believe it and the establishment/BIG GENETICS is trying to keep the research under wraps but here’s a video you can watch that proves everything” is not only not compelling to me, but in fact ticks a lot of the anti heuristic boxes. ;)