Don’t believe anyone who tells you that they’re right and smarter people with more education are wrong. Especially if they say god told them so.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that a whole lot of other people believe them, without a list of names that includes well-known educated people, and confirmation directly from those people that they really do believe it.
Don’t believe studies, unless you can and do follow through and look up the sources.
Don’t believe graphs.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you more than 0.01% of the population is lying to you.
Don’t believe your eyes or your personal anecdotal experience if it contradicts science. Especially if you don’t understand science. You do not have enough data.
Believe Wikipedia, but only if it says the same thing on several different days. Don’t believe the parts that say “some people claim”. Learn to read the edit history.
Patents mean nothing. Patent pending means less than nothing. Making a big deal about something being patented as a reason to trust it is a HUGE red flag. It just means they filled out a form and paid a fee.
When a business says something is coming “within five years” it means probably never, that’s just what they’re telling investors.
When a government entity says something is coming “within five years”, it probably already happened and they just don’t get it.
If the title of an article ends with a question mark, the answer is probably “no.”
Any article that says a new study tells you something you want to hear or that scares you, it’s just a journalist fishing for a story.
When something new comes out, don’t stick it in your mouth or up your butt.
Don’t trust doctors TOO much unless they’re talking about something with more than 20 years of history. What do you call someone who graduated at the bottom of his class in med school? A doctor. Plenty of them are idiots.
Don’t trust INDIVIDUAL scientists too much, their job is to ask stupid questions, sometimes they paint themselves into a corner, and there’s no rules about who can call themselves a scientist. Trust them in bunches.
Don’t trust groups of scientists that are self-selected.
Don’t trust scientific results until they are confirmed, many, many times by many independent sources. You can make ONE study say anything you want.
Don’t believe lawmakers. They generally have no domain knowledge about anything but kissing ass and getting elected.
Do mostly trust government sources, but take the most and least funded ones with a grain of salt; the former are likely influenced by business, the latter by stupidity.
When in doubt, believe Neil Degrasse Tyson.