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First of all, let me say very good post. This:

But I worry that most smart people have not learned that a list of dozens of studies, several meta-analyses, hundreds of experts, and expert surveys showing almost all academics support your thesis – can still be bullshit.

…is solid gold!

Other very good points in here, like:

there will also be random noise caused by inevitable variation and by some of the experiments being better quality than others. In the end, we might expect something looking kind of like a bell curve. The peak will be at “weakly effective”, but there will be a few studies to either side.

Now, those said, you do indeed seem to preach from a point of adamant skeptical neutrality – indeed, radical skeptical neutrality. That’s not the best approach to take, and frankly isn’t really true skepticism.

Let me illustrate the problem. You say:

Can we trust news sources, think tanks, econblogs, and other institutions to sum up the state of the evidence?

…

Okay, fine. What about economists? They seem like experts. What do they think?

Here’s the problem: if you don’t understand a matter well enough to look at the evidence and come to a conclusion yourself, you’re screwed. There is no strategy, no system, no method you can use to ascertain truth with contradictory results when you, ultimately, have to rely on “experts.” End of story. If I can’t look at a matter and come to my own conclusions, I don’t form an opinion.

Proper skepticism isn’t just being critical of claims on a matter, but being able to methodologically examine the evidence to get towards the correct conclusion. Indeed, this is integral to good science.

Those said, again, good post. That funnel plot was rather telling (I love funnel plots), if not definitive thanks to methodological issues. Nonetheless, still telling.

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