That's the point. Textbooks act as the "interpreters" you mention. They don't just provide data.
Look at the citations in a modern, $150 university textbook. Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Article, another Textbook, citation-of-a-citation. It's credibility-laundering.
There's the scientific method, which few mock, and there's explicit data which Covid exposed what "trusting without verifying" leads to:
Take California in this trickle-down credibility ponzi.
Fauci says "pick a mask, any mask"
CDC publishes an official statement "any mask will work, but N95 is best"
-- The first bad citation: CDC uses a 2013 Influenza study on mask efficacy that concludes "cloth masks aren't great" and interprets the study just-for-you
Newsom sees the CDC citation and cites it for his public health emergency shutdown of public gatherings and mask-mandate
A whole state halts to a stop because people cited a citation of an irrelevant study used to back someone's ego.
The CDC was guilty of bad study citation countless times during the Covid19 crisis, and the CDC is what will get cited in textbooks.
That's the problem.
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Reading a modern university textbook is not how you become experienced in any given field of interest. Becoming a scientist is a lifelong interest in a field. What you are describing is exactly what I’m railing against, a narrative crafted as science with all these science looking data points. DIY alternative media is equally as at fault with doing this same crafting of narratives as textbooks, or Wikipedia. And that certainly isn’t the scientific method. What I’m saying is that people unqualified to notice the difference are asserting things on both sides and muddying the public sphere of information. However, scientists, and people of experience in a field, can certainly tell the difference between a narrative and proper data and influencers who poke their head to mess around in a given area cannot in any credible way, yet they talk with authority like they can.