It's a perfectly tenable long-term position. You're missing two points:
1) People aren't uniform. I read all the papers in my narrow field and evaluate them. On the other hand, in 99% of fields, you and I are a popular audience. We should rely on established science. And in my field, you should also not rely on hot-off-the-press because most of it is nonsense.
2) Science becomes established -- over decades -- when you have multiple corroborating results, replicated, with multiple methodologies. We know the earth isn't flat because we e.g. sent a man to the moon. That's a very different standard of knowledge than Viagra and Alzheimers. Before acting on this, let experts in this field do their thing for another decade and understand the pathways, do an RCT, etc. At that point, it will be 20-year-old fact. Or perhaps it will turn out to be a correlation / causation issue, and you'll never hear about it again. Either way.
I'd say the method that science becomes established is one of the problems, because a big chunk (50%?) of that process is non-scientific (political people processses).
I'd feel a lot better if "established" meant something more like well-replicated (with an economic/academic model to support that).
1) People aren't uniform. I read all the papers in my narrow field and evaluate them. On the other hand, in 99% of fields, you and I are a popular audience. We should rely on established science. And in my field, you should also not rely on hot-off-the-press because most of it is nonsense.
2) Science becomes established -- over decades -- when you have multiple corroborating results, replicated, with multiple methodologies. We know the earth isn't flat because we e.g. sent a man to the moon. That's a very different standard of knowledge than Viagra and Alzheimers. Before acting on this, let experts in this field do their thing for another decade and understand the pathways, do an RCT, etc. At that point, it will be 20-year-old fact. Or perhaps it will turn out to be a correlation / causation issue, and you'll never hear about it again. Either way.
TL;DR: It takes a long time to bake good science.