Put it another way: looking up other people's research is scholarship, not science. Scholarship isn't bad. In most fields scholarship is useful, and in technical fields it's a prerequisite to doing science. But -- people should also look at the data directly. If the literature isn't useful (and "how to get rich," for instance, doesn't have an obvious body of sound literature behind it) then unless you look at the data, you'll never know.

And is the literature accurate on more explicitly scientific topics, like global warming? Well, I don't know. To know the answer, I'd have to know more about geophysics myself, be able to assess the data myself, and compare my "DIY science" to the experts and see if they match. Or, I'd have to know something about the trustworthiness of peer-reviewed scientific studies in general -- how likely they are to be true or false -- and use that data to inform how much I trust climate scientists. Either way, to have good evidence to believe or not believe scientists, I'd need data of my own.

The phrase "DIY science" makes it sound like there's some virtue in going it alone. All alone, no help from the establishment. I don't think there's any virtue in that. Help is useful! And after all, even if you do what Tom did and tabulate data about millionaires, it's data that someone else gathered. This isn't My Side of the Mountain science. It's not idealizing isolation.

The trouble with doing all scholarship but no science is that you have no way to assess the validity of what you read. You can use informal measures (prestige? number of voices in agreement? most cited? most upvotes?) but how do you know if those informal measures correlate with the truth of an argument? Eventually, at some point you have to look at some kind of data and draw your own conclusion from it. Critically assessing scientific literature eventually requires you to do some DIY science. (Here, let's look at the data section. Do the paper's conclusions match their actual data?)