The main problem with being incorrigibly curious about a wide range of subjects is that, being the mediocre mortal that I am, I have too little time and too little mental prowess to learn about the innumerable interesting things there are to learn. Whenever I visit various science websites to find out about the latest developments in all kinds of disciplines, I am inevitably confronted with an overwhelming deluge of reports about novel research findings, and I find that I have an extremely difficult time in many fields to discern whether each study is trustworthy or not. Additionally, I think that being aware of the most recent studies only counts as very superficial knowledge inasmuch as I am unable to synthesise these new titbits of information with my existing understanding; and since there are only two ways in which I would reasonably be able to remember these new findings over a long period of time – i.e., either by rote memorisation or through genuine internalisation – chances are that I would also most probably forget about them shortly after reading, which means that it is arguably a waste of time to read about them on science websites in the first place.
To put it harshly, reading about developments in science without really understanding their significance, or without truly being able to distinguish crud from results that represent real progress, feels very much like intellectual masturbation – it gives you the illusion that you are keeping up with advances in knowledge and thus makes you feel good about yourself, but in reality you have merely temporarily added a slew of random facts to your mental inventory without having gained a meaningfully deeper understanding of the world. To be polemical, then, I would say that reading science news without otherwise putting in effort to understand science better through more rigorous means is an activity for mildly curious but lazy laymen – and they might even be ignorant or in denial of their own laziness.
But I am being unfair, for the unfortunate reality is that most of us do not have the luxury of time/money or capability to read academic literature in multiple fields extensively, so subjects that do not occupy the forefront of our minds will only enjoy, at best, passing perusal. Happily, then, there is a good alternative to reading journal articles or textbooks – many academics and specialists maintain their own blogs, and one could defer to their expertise rather than trying impossibly, on one’s own, to sift through torrents of updates from science websites (and probably ending up with more confusion and/or erroneous beliefs). These experts have the requisite skills to critique various research findings – especially sensational ones that have received a great amount of hype in mainstream media – and they are able to assist us in synthesising new findings with our current knowledge into a coherent whole, so that our retention rate is far higher. If we are lucky, they might even provide links to their lecture notes – and reading those is always a decent substitute for studying a textbook, and far superior to reading updates on popular-level science websites.
The free availability of rigorous online content written by experts is why I seldom visit science websites these days: If a result is indeed worth knowing, I would most probably read about it on one of the specialist blogs that I regularly visit anyway, and I would have the advantage of knowing that what I read is not potentially misrepresented by journalists. (In addition, I personally find it intensely interesting to read about these experts’ insights regarding their own professions/research areas, as well as their general musings or speculations about issues that lie at the very cutting edges of their fields.) Basically, then, I am relying on experts as filters (and entertainment providers).
Here is an example of a specialist blog I frequently visit, and here is another. What about you?
Non Compos Sui 
Some thoughts:
i. I agree with the observations you include in the second paragraph, though I see no reason to ‘judge such behaviour’. It is what it is.
ii. Studying textbooks and academic publications like e.g. Springer publications is, I’d argue, quite different from reading random articles either in the form of online academic papers or in the form of ‘science news’ articles. I almost never read the latter and have cut down a lot on the former. Theoretically if one were to go about doing it in a very systematic manner, reading a collection of random articles on a topic may not be very different from reading a Springer publication on the same topic, but the problem is that if you don’t already have a good overview of the field you won’t be able to go about reading those articles in a systematic manner in the first place, as part of the motivation for reading the articles would be to get the overview. I think academic books are different, and I think they add value over papers/studies. If I read a paper about a topic about which I have not read a textbook or an academic publication, I will retain very little of it, regardless of whether it’s an article about ‘cutting edge’ stuff or an article about some findings from the late 90es. Textbooks and publications written for people who’ve read the textbooks go into a lot of details, and they usually have a good structure, making the stuff covered easier to recall and easier to relate to other areas of research. A key point to mention in this context is also that they are often written by many different authors, meaning that you don’t get the opinion of one expert (like you would if you were to read a blog), but rather that of many – it’s quite common for authors of academic publications to disagree with each other about some of the stuff they cover, and reading multiple-author publications will tend to give you ‘both (/many) sides’. Relying on e.g. Springer publications is to rely on a different type of filter from the science-blogger filter, which is arguably more finely grained – but the obvious downside is that they take more time to read.
iii. For every ‘new exciting finding’ in any field there will be 10 or more (100?) much better-established results/effects which an outsider will not know about. I’d much rather learn about those than about the more questionable ‘most recent ones’, especially as it to me often seems that some of the older findings are actually really interesting, and that one of the main reasons why people think the new ones are really interesting is by virtue of them being new – it again relates back to the ‘feeling you’re in the loop, that you know what’s going on at the cutting edge of research at the moment’-stuff.
Science when it is at its best works as an error-correcting mechanism where wrong ideas are rejected and seemingly correct ideas are explored in detail, so that we know under which conditions they are correct and under which they are not. The more recent the research, the less time people have had to find the errors and correct the mistaken ideas, or identifying spurious findings. This to me seems a strong argument for mostly working on the stuff that is not ‘cutting-edge’. ‘Well-established findings’ may also be proven wrong, but all else equal they’re less likely to be. An important point you also make in the post is that usually you’ll need to know this stuff to put new findings into perspective.
iv. Reading the stuff you need to read in order to obtain enough information to be in any position to judge the quality of recent research is a lot of work, and relying on filters like Springer in some sense requires quite a bit of commitment. So relying on filters like Gelman and Khan makes sense. It’s important to note though that relying on experts like these may also expose you to bias, because the experts in question will have some views which are not shared by other experts in the field; and you may end up reading an expert with mistaken views about what’s going on in the field, which differ violently from the views of most people in the field. The only way to minimize that risk is of course to read other stuff as well, preferably other experts, but an annoying problem is that if you’re not an expert you may well not really be qualified to judge the level of expertise of ‘experts’ – there is no Final Arbiter anywhere which one can safely rely on.
v. Extensive knowledge about specific fields will in some cases not be strictly necessary to evaluate the quality of material published, and in particular it may not be required for one to identify truly problematic research methodologies within a field and/or within a specific paper. The common language of science is mathematics and statistics – if you know maths and stats, it gets easier to evaluate the quality of a lot of material published in various fields, regardless of what you know about, say, the specifics of the behaviour of ground sloths during the Miocene.
i. I was in a somewhat polemical mood. 😉 I agree that there is no reason to judge such behaviour — in fact, if the only choice is between reading science news and not caring about science at all, the former is obviously preferable.
ii. I agree fully that reading a compendium collaboratively written by multiple authors is far more informative than reading specialist blogs, but I exclusively mentioned the latter based on the premise that many (if not most) people simply do not have the time/money (or inclination) to read technical academic texts.
iii. There is one related point that I neglected to mention in my post (for I wrote it in haste, which explains why it was tagged ‘Quick thoughts of the day’…), which is that another argument against reading science news is that time, more than anything else, is really the best test of validity and rigour — if a new research finding makes its way into textbooks within the next 5 years, then you know that it’s most probably reliable. So rather than spending (wasting?) precious minutes and hours now to read about possibly suspect novel findings that would likely never garner expert consensus, one would be better off just brushing up on one’s knowledge of the foundational details while waiting for new textbook editions to be published.
iv. You brought up a good question, which I also forgot to address — maybe I should just banish the idea of writing quick thoughts entirely? — is that it can be a very tricky problem to know which expert(s) to trust. It takes time to familiarise oneself with different experts so that one may assign different degrees of credence to their writings. Personally I tend to trust experts more when (1) they have openly changed their minds before on non-trivial issues; (2) they don’t exhibit partisanship; (3) they refrain from caricaturing their opponents; and (4) they avoid emotional language in general. These filters are not always reliable, but they have been generally successful — e.g., it helped me determine very quickly that I should not waste time reading Bryan Caplan’s stuff.
v. I agree that being mathematically/statistically literate is immensely important, and whenever I can, I have been reading about topics like probability theory, statistical tools, and the philosophy of statistics. (You might recall that I sometimes solicit your feedback on certain statistics-related contents that I have read.) Not only is it very useful to learn more about these areas, I also consider them to be intrinsically interesting and fun. 🙂
“I wrote it in haste”
In that case you should certainly not “banish the idea of writing quick thoughts entirely”. I hadn’t noticed the tag.
I find it interesting that none of the four requirements you mention relate to formal education. Most people would probably consider this variable to be important.
Are you referring to the four variables in determining how much to trust an expert?
The ‘formal education and/or professional experience’ part is implicit. We are discussing specialist blogs in the first place — why would anyone even consider a blog written by a person without formal education and/or professional experience to count as a specialist blog? I didn’t think that had to be explicitly mentioned…?
Yes, I was.
“I didn’t think that had to be explicitly mentioned…?”
It probably didn’t, but.. We are discussing specialist blogs and how to figure out which sources to trust – in that context questions pertaining to credentials to me seem naturally to pop up. It’s really quite relevant in the specific context of the blogs you mention, on account of the fact that Razib Khan does not have a PhD, which by many would be considered the absolute minimum requirement to be considered an ‘expert’ in anything. I was incidentally also thinking in the context of a field I know you’re much more interested in than I am, programming, as presumably more than a few skilled programmers do not have formal credentials.
You are right that some very skilled programmers did not receive a lot of formal education, and that is why I explicitly wrote that specialists are (almost?) always those who have ‘formal education AND/OR professional experience’. 🙂 In fact, sometimes professional experience *significantly* outweighs formal education — e.g., when it comes to programming, I would (without any hesitation) trust a top-billed self-taught software engineer more than I would trust someone who has an Ivy League degree in computer science but no actual work experience.
Razib Khan does not have a PhD, but he is working towards it at a rather respectable institution, if I am not wrong. It is of course a good question to ask whether he can rightly be considered an expert — it seems like there are few non-arbitrary criteria that would include him without also including someone like Carl Zimmer.
“It is of course a good question to ask whether he can rightly be considered an expert” – actually that was not the question I was aiming for, I was rather trying to make the same point you do in the last part of your comment. RK is “working towards [a PhD] at a rather respectable institution”, but a) this is a very recent development, b) he’s been blogging for years as a ‘specialist blogger’, and c) I think he was just as competent as a genetics blogger before he started working on the PhD as he is now. I’m fine with semi-arbitrary distinctions and I certainly consider RK to be an expert, the point was just that it tends to get messy when you try to set up criteria for whom to trust, because it often boils down to ‘the specifics’ and because we have a tendency to fit the (‘specific’) criteria so that people we like or agree with get to be considered ‘the (‘proper’/’true’) experts’.
As for the main question you asked, I guess I never really answered that. I read quite few blogs. In terms of specialist blogs I read, I read Razib Khan semi-regularly – I know that I ought to read Gelman as well, but I’ve never really got into the habit of doing that. During some time periods I read John Hawks regularly as well, though I haven’t read any of his stuff recently.
Resources not mentioned in the post are resources like r/askscience and Stack Exchange. I haven’t got into the habit of reading SE, but I often read r/askscience and rely on the community to identify good answers to questions of interest. I have even started to contribute a bit as well.
Ah, yes, somehow it slipped my mind to mention resources like AskScience, AskHistorians and SE, even though I have benefited on many occasions from them!
Good to see that you have begun contributing to those forums — I will try to remember to follow your user page 🙂