Arguments are like boats. Very few ways of making shapes out of metal and wood will sail and won't sink. Likewise, very few arguments have predictive power and survive scrutiny.
The difference is that it's expensive and physically tiring to build boats, and there's no benefit to building a useless boat, so most people don't do it unless they plan to do it right. By contrast, it's fun and easy and selfishly beneficial to craft and publish arguments, even if they're sloppy. So people do it all the time.
You want to know how to build seaworthy arguments, and avoid climbing into leaky ones.This is difficult, because the overwhelming majority of the arguments you're going to find docked in people's blogs are of the leaky variety.
Unfortunately, checking the facts is often a thankless task. The author almost certainly won't thank you, and the audience has usually moved on by the time you get to it. "A lie can travel halfway around the worldwhile the truth is still putting on its boots." It's fun to disprove arguments, though. On this level, I think it's usually best to just assume in your gut that most things you're reading are somewhere on the spectrum of wrong, mostly in inverse proportion to adjacency to math and the hard sciences, the author's specific expertise, and the page count of the document and especially its bibliography.
Once you have a read on those factors, decide which ones it would be the most fun or useful to try and disprove. Occasionally, you'll be pleasantly surprised. You might even find authors who consistently surprise you by being frequently accurate.
A second option is to patch up the argument, which I've attempted to do in another comment here. If the original argument is flawed, is there a piece of it that can be salvaged, reinterpreted, cut away?
A third option is to just focus on making your own arguments sturdy and true. This is difficult, for the same reasons that engineering any useful new product is difficult. You have competition, reality is surprisingly detailed, your customers don't always know what they want, communication and cooperation is hard, and incentives are often misaligned.
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Consider the post Ads Don't Work That Way by Kevin Simler on Melting Asphalt. It contrasts a couple of different mechanisms by which advertising might work, including:
The details are described in the post, and I'm sure that Kevin Simler describes the theory much better than I could. However, they are not very important, as I am not bringing up this post to make a point about advertising. Instead, I want to zoom in on an argument Kevin makes:
This seems obviously true. After all, what inherent connection could there possibly be between Corona and a sunny beach? In a footnote in the post, Kevin admits that there is a slight cultural/circumstantial/contextual factor, but that's not enough to change the core point of the post; the Corona/beach connection is obviously fairly arbitrary.
Except... now, years later, I've watched this YouTube video on the channel called "Food Theory":
In it, MatPat explains that beers can get "skunked" when hit by sunlight. However, it turns out that Corona beer is uniquely designed such that skunking improves its taste, unlike other beers which it worsens. Therefore, there actually is a genuine non-arbitrary connection between the Corona brand and drinking beer on the beach.
This was a completely random fact that I hadn't expected to jump out. I guess reality has a surprising amount of detail. But it makes the development and description of these broad social science theories annoying and difficult.
Obviously Kevin Simler didn't know about Corona's skunking properties when writing his post about advertising, and I didn't know about them when reading it. If his readers had said "This example is unconvincing, because you haven't shown there to be no special relationship between Corona and the beach.", there's not much he could have done; there could be any number of connections, and it's hard to know if you've enumerated all the important ones. So it would be really hard to disprove the objection. But at the same time, as we can see now, the objection would have been right.
One solution to this would be to become an expert on everything you talk about, so you know even the most obscure potentially relevant facts. But that's not practical. Another solution would be to accept being wrong - but I often get the impression that these sorts of things lead to people being wrong a lot. A third solution is to talk about narrower things, so you can specialize more into getting them right. Alternatively, maybe we could keep making sweeping generalizations, but only from things we have a lot of familiarity with? I don't know what the best solution is, and it's probably highly context-dependent, but it seems like a problem to consider.
Thanks to Justis Mills for proofreading and feedback.