Thanks to the popularization of the internet and the model of higher education as an industry, there is an unsurmountable amount of information available, of which little is valuable and huge is the sea of shit one has to wade through to reach the little bits of usefulness. You see this phenomenon when you google something, you find nothing but ads and clickbait, or when you go to a library and see a full corridor with thick books on the topic you are looking for. You pick one book and find nothing but trash as you read, paragraph after paragraph of ideas that could have been expressed in a single sentence, bloated with statistics that nobody use and no one has the time or interest in analyzing, something the book itself won't provide.

How the fuck does anyone manage to find what they need effectively and most importantly efficiently instead of drowning in this sea of garbage? I am aware people study for the USMLE searching for keywords such as "drug of choice", "next step" and such instead of inefficiently memorizing the trash a publisher forced the editor to pad the paper with. What science studies this? How do I know how to pick a book/paper and realize when i'm wasting my time on it? How do other fields fight with this problem?