How not to fall into epistemic nihilism?

I have a curiosity across a wide range of academic fields, most of which I have no formal expertise in. Because of that, I tend to rely on a person’s credentials or the presence of cited studies as a proxy for how likely a claim is to be true.

However, I often see that even people with strong credentials can spread misinformation, cherry-pick or misrepresent studies, or make contradictory claims. It’s also common to see different people with studies backing completely opposite conclusions. On top of that, there seems to be a replication crises affecting many academic fields.

Given my inability to independently validate claims due to lack of expertise, it becomes very difficult to know what to trust, and I sometimes feel pulled toward epistemic nihilism, the sense that we can’t really know anything at all.

This feels like a dead end and an unproductive way to approach knowledge. What strategies can I employ to navigate this environment without falling into total skepticism or nihilism? How can someone in my position reasonably form beliefs and evaluate claims?