If you only read the comments, you’re learning the argument, not the facts.

A comment section teaches you what people say about a thing, which is a different subject from the thing. You come away fluent in the fight, knowing every insult and rebuttal, and still unable to explain the basic mechanism at the center of it. That is a strange kind of knowledge. It sounds informed and falls apart the second someone asks you a plain question.

When a topic matters to you, spend your first twenty minutes somewhere the fight is not. A textbook page, an explainer, the original document. Learn the thing first and the argument second, and the argument gets much easier to follow.