Some people tend to stop reading a text whenever they come across blatantly incorrect statements. I mind much less. Yes, the person may be generally mistaken, but they may still have some worthwhile points mixed in.
I try to stop reading whenever I come across sufficiently strong evidence that finishing it will provide less insight per unit time than a cutoff value, which is adjusted based on the length of my reading queue and the marginal value of my time. Blatantly incorrect statements are evidence of this, and if an article says sufficiently wrong things before it offers any novel positions or insights, I do stop reading. As a defense against confirmation bias, I penalize incorrect arguments much more strongly if they argue for positions I already agree with.
I have a mental image of your reading algorithm as Guitar Hero, where an epic solo can correct for some missed notes, but not too many, and you only get so much room to screw up at the start.
In Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight W. Swain gives advice on receiving advice:
One way to reduce damage done by cached thoughts is to cultivate a habit of asking questions about the origin of the thought. Do you remember where you heard the thought? Did it come from someone practicing good epistemic hygiene, or do they just unthinkingly pass on anything they hear? If somebody offered advice based on their own experiences, how representative is their experience? What kinds of experiences have they had that prompted that advice? Are there alternative ways of interpreting those experiences? Or if you're the one offering advice, which you came up with yourself, what situation led you to come up with it? How generalizable is it?
So far I have mostly been framing this as a way to notice flaws in seemingly good advice. But there's also an opposite angle: finding gems in seemingly worthless information.
All outcomes are correlated with causes; most statements are evidence of something. Michael Vassar once gave the example of a tribe of people who thought that faeries existed, lived in a nearby forest, and you could see them once you became old enough. It later turned out that the tribe had a hereditary eye disease which caused them to see things from the corners of their eyes once they got old. The tribe's theory of what was going on was wrong, but it was still based on some true data about the real world. A scientifically minded person could have figured out what was going on, by being sufficiently curious about the data that generated that belief.
Some people tend to stop reading a text whenever they come across blatantly incorrect statements. I mind much less. Yes, the person may be generally mistaken, but they may still have some worthwhile points mixed in. Folk theories can be useful, even when they're entirely wrong. What you're reading is somebody's interpretation of an event, which provides information about the event even if the interpretation is wrong. Can you come up with a better interpretation?
Maybe you disagree with something that I've said here? In that case, what data do you think generated this advice? What conclusions would you derive instead?