You have the right approach. If you have neither the time nor the ability to judge for yourself, you should 100% outsource it to the proper channels. I just mean for the people who have the energy and ability to responsibly do the digging, there is no reason to be so limited in your resources.

38 with a masters degree. No house in sight. Good luck. Remember, there is always [redacted].

I have no skin in the game but I have worked professionally as both an academic scientist and a data scientist in the private sector and I can tell you that peer review is great but a lot of legitimate research is done outside the bounds of academic journals. It is entirely possible for amateurs to do real science.

If the effect size is large enough, you dont actually need to be that rigorous about it. No one needed to do a study on whether there was a direct correlation between adverse medical outcomes and gunshot wounds to the head.

Well yeah. Sam Altman just came out and basically said he needs a few trillion dollars and government backed loans. This shit is going to be BAD.

I suppose it really depends on what freedoms you consider important and how much you weigh things. It is true, in china, you cant be openly critical of the regime. FWIW, that is increasingly true in the US.

However, in china, you are free to not be killed by violence. You are free to get affordable healthcare. You are free to get affordable high quality food. You are free to get affordable housing (outside of Beijing and a few other financial centers). You are free to get an affordable high quality education. I dunno. There are tradeoffs. The US is increasingly offering less and less by way of substantive freedoms and is becoming more and more authoritarian.

Also, have you actually been to china? How much of what you know about china is based in outdated information from 30 years ago or might just be straight up propaganda? I have been in the last 10 years and it blew my mind and changed a lot about how viewed the country.