The best I can say is to go to grad school. That's a terrible answer, but it's perhaps the only realistic one. It's in that situation, or one very similar, where you're exposed to loads of criticism and discussion. Basically any paper that was competently written (even if it wasn't competent work) is going to sound convincing to the naive. After hearing a few papers get torn down, you'll see the cracks in weak arguments, the poorly supported conclusions, and the seemingly boring stuff that's absolutely brilliant.
Very generally, the best sign of good work is a 'masochistic' author. What I mean by this is an author that writes as though every result they get is deeply suspect and needs to be corroborated in multiple ways. When it's almost exhausting to read because it feels like they're just beating themselves up, you're probably reading something really special.
Likely the most difficult thing to do as an 'outsider' is to get a sense of how 'trustworthy' certain results are. Some methods are almost binary in that you either get no result, or a great result. If an author shows this, there might be very little reason to doubt it, and thus independent lines of evidence not really necessary, especially if there's context that supports / is consistent with that result. Other methods are notoriously terrible and need a great deal of careful controls and analysis to even be considered, and then only as one angle of attack. Sometimes you can find reviews that discuss methods like this, which would be an invaluable resource. Reviews are generally a great way to start reading a field, anyhow.
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As a practical guide, a well written paper can just be read start to finish. Then reflect on it to see if you understand it. Could you explain the paper to someone else? That's a good sign of whether you understand it. After that, think of critiques. Could the results be interpreted different ways? Was the analysis appropriate for the data? Are the methods reliable? All papers have weakness; we live in a world of finite time and resources. All papers could be better, so think about what could be done. After that, consider what would be reasonable to do. Did the authors skip something conspicuous? That's a good sign that there was some difficulty there were avoiding. That might be fine, but it also might mean there's data that doesn't fit with their conclusions, which would be a very big issue indeed.
That latter part is the most important, but also the most difficult to do. It requires reading dozens, really hundreds, of papers so that you learn about some 'unknown unknowns'. Hearing talks really helps with this, too, as many people will give a sort of history of their work that includes some of the twists and dead ends.
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That all said, anyone can read a paper. It's not 'magic' that lets you do it. You'll miss some of the nuance, and occasionally be lead astray, but peer review works reasonably well enough that papers are mostly quite good with the devil held to the details. Like most things, it likely follows the Pareto Principle, with a little effort bearing outsize results.