I’ve found this to be very much what happens. Purely because I have a master’s degree that specialised in the autism thing particularly, it actually stands against me with the Google scholar types. Notwithstanding that they haven’t had – on the whole – the same amount of time to lear:n how science is done, the pros and cons of different types of research methods, the relative merits of various statistical tests, and so on; nor have they taken the time to review and get to grips with even the most basic theoretical background to much of what they read on the net; and they certainly haven’t had their ‘learning’ assessed by people who have the necessary training to know how to assess learning! At one time, I could quite happily accept that someone without the necessary piece of paper from a university could still actually have a good grasp of knowledge in a particular area. Nowadays, the validity of that concept has been shot to shit, with the rise of the Google scholar.

Isles: “Similarly, when authorities produce voluminous evidence in support of the mainstream position, this is viewed as a sign that the mainstream is desperately manufacturing fake evidence because it is so threatened by challenging views.”

Indeed. This stance of theirs comes from the fact that they have no actual training in research methods and so have no clue how to discern the good research from the really piss-poor. And then – when you point out the reasons why the research THEY choose to go with is actually very much of the piss-poor type – they have a go at you for the reason you outllined above.

Isles: “Sad.”

Not just sad. It’s frigging dangerous.

A little learning is a dangerous thing. To understand a field well enough to evaluate the research done in that field needs a LOT of learning. And the typical Google University ‘graduate’ has not done that much learning at all.