I didn’t even click the link, just read the top two comments and closed the page before realizing what I had done.

What's the problem with that?

I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad."

You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.

In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research.

On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...