You're on the fringe of an area which in academia is called Sensory Substitution. A simplification of which is experiencing one of the five senses using different sense organs than usual. Classic examples of this are video cameras which represent their image as a matrix of vibrations on the subjects skin or as a sound.
I also went to Maplins (UK Radioshack) and bought some infra red LEDs to hack together something to achieve this same effect. In the end I just taped the Wii Sensor Bar to my glasses!
My go to phrase for the equivalent observation is "If they ever make a machine that can make a coffee at the press of a button then all the coffee shops will have to close" /s.
Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on this. To paraphrase; she says she notices a subject people are talking about but she's not an expert in, and so she accesses some recent papers on the subject, ideally including a literature review, reads them, considers everything she's read together and forms an opinion.
I ask you, what else you expect anyone else to do? Isn't this exactly a scientific process? and anything else amounts to gatekeeping.
(quick edit: I'm all for taking everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt though, even peer reviewed papers shouldn't be taken uncritically)
Cold reading papers from outside your field isn't 'doing science'. As far as medicine or economics is concerned, she's identical to a layman (or worse, modulo arrogance).
Science is a collaborative social endeavor that exists under a shared set of norms and rules that have the goal of producing new knowledge. She's skipping the social part. She could email these people and ask for input! Many of her weird mistakes and misunderstandings could all be caught by cursory review from a middling grad student.
None of these papers were written for her, she is not the audience, you are not the audience. One of the points of graduate education is to get people to the point where they and meaningfully engage with the state of the art. This process takes years!
Compare her output to people like the math/comedy youtuber matt parker or the numberphile channels, which invite collaboration from the authors directly. They aren't experts themselves, but they do the work to make it interesting and present things as accurately as possible.
Every field has a shared language and culture that needs to be internalised to some degree before you can usefully engage with their contents. Some terms you think you are familiar with will have slightly different meanings within a domain, and just assuming you understand it during even a well-intentioned and careful read can still lead you astray.
The description she gives of what she is doing is a stellar example of good scientific inquiry.
The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.
The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.
(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)
Its the curse of engagement. If she read the literature and came to a "boring" opinion it would be much harder to gain a following online. It isn't impossible to gain a following without getting conspiratorial, but it is much harder.
Not to mention his book, about when he found an Cuneiform tablet circa 1800BC telling the story of Noah and the flood, which included more detailed instructions on how to build an ark than the biblical accounts and so he went and built it.
