This is far from a compelling paper. Calling it deceptive or counterproductive wouldn't be outside of reason.

I understand that science is hard, and I think it's great that people read primary research, but your attempts to do so should be balanced (i.e. don't just read things that support your argument!) and you should seek expert interpretations when possible to consider counterarguments.

It's good to take a step back and understand the kind of evidence that a given manuscript may employ. Ideally you have high-quality data from experimental intervention, appropriately quantified with statistics. This generally comes from tried-and-true experimental methods, and will produce results that speak for themselves without 'squinting' at it with stats. For smaller effect sizes, or else when sampling is limited, you may need to rely on more questionable statistics, but as part of a suite of complementary methods, this data can be very useful as well.

Next would be observational data. Observational data must deal with confounding factors as no controlled experimental intervention is made, and can only demonstrate correlation, not causation. Sometimes this data is all that is reasonably available (for practical or ethical concerns), but extreme care must be used with observational data. It becomes very easy to support a desired conclusion by careful selection of data. Serious work with observational data will go to extreme lengths to consider potentially confounding factors and explore them in great detail.

This is not a serious paper. It's not good science, and there are litany of reasons.

This paper amounts of a sort of 'gish gallop' of specious correlations that pin glyphosate as the ultimate evil and cause of an absurd variety of maladies. Celiac disease, intestinal infection, sulfate metabolism, retinoic acid, reproductive issues, Cobalamin deficiency, anemia, Molybdenum deficiency, thyroid cancer and selenium, kidney disease, general cancer, and various nutritional deficiencies. It's an astounding list. More astounding, in other work, the first author has included asthma, autism, diabetes, COPD, and more!

A priori, you should consider whether this is plausible when it's such a well-studied molecule. How could so many studies, carefully conducted with standard methods in epidemiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, etc. have missed this litany of issues?

What kind of data is backing this up? The paper presents a few graphs where incidents of certain diseases are compared to the mass of glyhposate applied. One immediately wonders how this relationship plays out: are more acres being treated with glyphoste, is the application per acre increasing, what is the number of people exposed, what are the doses of exposure, are there geographic relationships between exposure and incidence, are there new diagnostic tools or detection of the disease, etc. etc.? These are the standard sorts of questions you expect to be addressed from observational studies, yet they have no discussion here. This is telling.

Furthermore, the proposed mechanisms are little more than idle speculation. This is basic biochemistry and molecular biology, tractable issues that can be investigated experimentally. So why is this discussed? This is the sort of thing that might get a paragraph or two in a review article talking about future work. Generally this is only done when the review author knows that a colleague is performing this work or seeking funding for it.

It's difficult to communicate how 'off' this kind of speculation is. Biology is full of specious hypotheses. It's so easy to be wrong, but to sound very right and reasonable while you're doing it. You quickly develop a deep distaste for speculation outside of some animated conversations you might have with colleagues in the lab or at conferences. It has no place in the literature. It is a violation of norms that is deeply revealing.

So what about these authors? Are these molecular biologists? Biochemists? Epidemiologists? Physicians? No.

Anthony Samsel is an 'independent researcher' that publishes on occular medicine. He does stuff like go on "Moms across America" and says that glyphosate and GMOs are responsible for the Autism 'epidemic'. https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/tags/anthony_samsel Seriously, this asshole is an autism scaremonger, and somehow he's getting upvoted of fucking hacker news.

Stephanie Seneff is a (staff, i.e. not a PI. her husband is a PI, tho) computer scientist at MIT that works with speech, natural language, human-computer interface, that sort of thing. She's earned herself a Wikipedia entry that discusses her habits of publishing controversial (i.e. shitty) work in low-impact journals and generally gets involved in all kinds of shit she has no professional experience in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Seneff

You almost couldn't pick a more ridiculous pair to embody 'bad science'.

The paper you linked is pure bullshit my friend.

It's clear as day for all to see with a moment's reflection. I think you may consider your own epistemology and critical faculties to see whether they are serving you.

You got got.

"Plausible" is everywhere. There's good reason why it has not currency in science. Evidence is what has currency, and that's tricky enough to begin with.