In many cases, there's forums, wikis, clever people's blogs, but none of them are easy to find through Google/DDG, and essentially rely on manually "indexing" them in your head/bookmarks/notes.
How do YOU go about this?
“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”— Charlie Munger
We have data for knowing that grass is green. But it is not true at night.
While there are usually solid points on both sides of an argument, you should take one side on many (most?) issues.
truth is often undefined, and you can simply weigh sides with probabilities.
There is however 100% certainty this post will be downvoted.
Absolutely.
And is most cases one side has a 60%+ probability. That should be your side.
The good news is you can spot these people easily by just asking them to explain why they believe the opposite. And if they answer with empty platitudes or lofty statements that don't really address the specifics of the issue at hand, you can keep searching.
Obviously, he got votes from a lot of normal Republicans, but there's a decent segment of support for him where people were apolitical before, but latched on to him out of sheer, immature contrarianism.
Same with research papers, data sheets, raw press releases, etc. Like it or not - you have to rely on 3rd party summarization and information selection.
> Like it or not - you have to rely on 3rd party summarization and information selection.
I don't necessarily disagree. I have a slightly different viewpoint. I do rely on 3rd party summarisation as a first step. Beyond that, I dig deep myself and form ym own opinion.
Your answer seems to suggest reliance on credible 3rd party sources. No issues with that - but if you should also accept the implications with reliance on expert / wisdom of crowds. <Insert Aswath Damodaran's lemming cartoon> If you are fine with those implications, good for you. I am not, most of the times - at least in areas that I care about. Therefore, I read research papers and 10Ks myself.
1. Click bait title? Immediately bail.
2. How many trackers were blocked (ublock). If there’s a ton, then I’m now extra suspicious and might even bail at this point.
3. After that it’s really just specific words I watch out for that could tip me off that it’s fluff or content marketing crap.
4. I will often follow up on sources / searching for corroborating articles or if it’s just a regurgitated press release.
Over time you recognize good sources.
I try different search terms for the same topic. Differences between the articles presented help in finding areas of disagreement that can be explored further.
When I find a result that seems interesting, I search for the opposite to find opposing point, and ask which one seems more reasonable. I try to allow any stance to be changed as long as I manage to find anything more reasonable than what I had thought.
I search for different categories of media: articles, videos, podcasts, forums/comments so that regardless of the creator's preferred media platform for delivery, I can look at it. Longform videos are oftentimes helpful because they go into a topic further and it is easier to find more points that can be investigated further. Many books are not online and can be an equally good resource.
I go to the sources linked in the article. Sometimes, I use the time or location search filter to find what the search engine suggests for different locations and geographies.
When I come across something that seems outlandish, even over Group Messaging or comments sections, I search for those even if I know it is wrong because there is oftentimes something to be learned in how it became a prevailing view for some or many.
Of course, this is for online information only. Information you get offline is as important and in many cases more important.
The return on time spent is horrible and I also realize that more often than not, I don't have the time and knowledge knowledge to sift through and evaluate the information that I find.
Don Knuth smirked and said (paraphrased from memory): "I'm x years in the field, you can bet I made a few friends along that I can ask."
Social media posts, both-sidesism (aka the false middle), people claiming to live in a place where some event happened (or did not...) doesn't move the needle factwise. It's all just different degrees of hearsay and that does tend to converge on 'what you agree with'.
I often find these in my Google/DDG searches, after scrolling past the things I know to be “otherwise” motivated.
Take Wikipedia for example: it started nobly but has become an ideological battleground for petty editors to wield influence when you look at what kinds of edits are made to important current day topics.
Or take non-profits: I’m sure many of their employees have fine motivations, but in a big picture sense the organization dies if they actually solve the problem they’re designed to solve. It’s hard to perfectly trust the motivations of even non-profits.
As far as publicly funded journalistic outlets, do you mean stuff like NPR? Without getting into an argument about NPR, there’s a substantial amount of real criticism about them out there. It’s hard for many to perfectly trust them either.
The best system I think is trusting independently minded journalists who have developed some credibility: namely those willing to take real shots against their own “team”. I’m open to finding others, but the best one in this regard that I’ve come across might be Glenn Greenwald. Time and time again, he’s willing to take shots against his own political side, even when it damages his career: that carries some credibility with me. I’d love to find more independent journalists like that.
We desperately sought help for our child who was reading at pre-k reading levels while in the 3rd grade. In many US school systems, after 3rd grade, if you haven't acquired basic reading skill, then you are completely screwed: the curriculum moves on. Finding useful information was astonishingly hard -- what we learned is that within the US, an entire industry has evolved around dogmas that are completely uninformed by reproducible research. If you search for reading help, you find appeals to emotion, "this-one-trick-worked-for-me" type books, self-help conferences and such. We also learned that professional teaching programs are built around dogma, and publishing "research" in the field of education requires strict adherence, and does not meaningfully apply hypothesis testing or reproducibility.
The practice of reading pedagogy lives in this sweet spot where it kinda-sorta works for just enough students that school districts and admins can assert that kids for whom the system does not work should adjust their expectations in life.
We were lucky to discover that reading problems are well understood through neuroscience (not education), and there are decades of reproduced research supporting useful ideas. We were also lucky that my wife happens to be a good teacher (I could never do this!), the two of them get along well, she left her paid job, started homeschooling our child full time, and our child now reads far above grade level.
Websites which strictly reporting events and stick to the 5 Ws (What, Who, When, Where, Why).
They don't even try to make predictions and only talk about the past, not the future
A trick that I've heard about in this video [1] is to focus most on information in this order of publication style:
1. books [2]
2. research papers
3. articles from respected [3] news sources
4. anything else
[1] https://www.jw.org/en/library/videos/#en/mediaitems/VODOrgBe...
[2] caveat here: garbage books exist, but when you draw a "web" of bibliography (references in books to other books) you quickly see which books are by the authors considered to be noteworthy books as well.
[3] A "respectable" news source will, for example, retract a statement if they later on discover it to be a false claim.
Picking good sources is hard, though. Generally I find it has to be the case that specialists writing about their specialism are the people who knowledge originates with, even when it isn't lay people.
Where curation is worth it is in reviews. The London Review of Books will introduce a wide array of new literature to me and prepare the ground for approaching those books by explaining the content and critically analysing it.
Statistical literacy also helps - for this I've read David Spiegelhalter's Art of Statistics, which is for the lay reader.
News-wise, single generally credible sources are hard to come by. The Guardian does good live blogs, especially on UK parliamentary debates. The New York Times has a solid but anglocentric newsgathering operation, but tragically partisan opinion. Le Monde Diplomatique is good for international stuff from a francophone perspective.
tl;dr, navigate institutions, not search engines. Institutions are in effect communities with a culture that guards against rot algorithms can't perceive.
1. Credible sources. 2. Tools and methods for searching and matching.
In my opinion:
1. It's very subjective. Pepople just believe in different things. It's hard and time consuming. There is no the single point of truth. 2. For this purpose I wrote https://github.com/livelace/gosquito and I extract different keywords (tech, people, orgs etc.) from information flows. It frees my time heavily.
For knowledge try search in https://teclis.com
And forgot about idea of having credible information. It is always a way of looking for truth.
Do you have concrete examples of stuff from r/conspiracy that "checks out"? I don't frequent that sub, but every time I've visited it's been just.. crazy talk without a shadow of a kernel of truth.
Yeah, much of the time people are on to something - and most of the time they have no idea what, just that something is amiss, whether it's their understanding, media coverage, or an actual systemic issue.
I find it's good for e.g. opinions on products, experiences with treatments, etc. that come from actual humans.
Claim 1: "Wind turbines are committing genocide upon wildlife and if they weren't subsidised by Daddy Government they wouldn't exist"
Claim 2: "The levelised cost of energy is $40/MWh for electricity generated by wind versus $50/MWh for electricity generated by natural gas, and capacity factor for wind can be 35-40% in the UK"
It's a little bit of an extreme comparison, but if I feel like it would be impossible to find a counterexample to prove a source wrong, then I find it less trustworthy. If it would theoretically be easy to disprove the source, but my independent searches keep confirming it? I trust it much more.
And there's one other trick: if I don't have a basic grounding in a certain field then I will just reserve judgement. I am pretty happy to evaluate claims across engineering disciplines, but once it gets into medical fields for example? I just outsource my judgement to government health websites - they might be wrong but they are NEVER going to be more wrong than me.
So I follow various media via RSS save articles I think interesting and reason on them looking in my notes/feeds history for link and correlation. Such "manual indexing" is mandatory now, propaganda is too powerful to be contained otherwise...
On finding sources: try to scan for news from various countries then select between those in a language you can read. For instance in many countries there are journals in English, few random examples:
- Helsinki Times
- Korea Herald
- Norway Today
- The Citizens (south Africa)
- Japan Times
- Ekatimerini (Greece)
- B92 (Serbia)
- Astana Times
- Ulambataar Post
- TASS / Moscow Times / Siberian Times (not much updated)
- Der Spiegel International (Germany)
- Bangkok Post
- Jakarta Globe
- South China Morning Post
- Taiwan Times
- Sermitsiaq (Greenland, not much updated)
- LRT (Lithuania)
... Pick some, look for others depending on the language you know, check their quality, quantity of posts and put them in a feedreader, consider scoring, and that's already something. Than look for think tanks from various political areas and countries. Than look to well know geopolitical journals. Collect much and test. Then cleanup until you reach a manageable level of news. Collect them in a timeline, annotate correlation anytime you spot something, look for similar stuff (full-text search) when you add a news. In an year you'll already have a certain mass of news-base to spot trends. The rest is up to you: decide where to look for, decide how to evolve your collection. Enjoy and profit from the new awareness.
You can't know "The Real Truth" but in fuzzy logic you can form a reliable enough vision of the world and with it + experience you'll improve. Do not expect immediate results, like for investments or life choices, but in a small number of years your comprehension of the world likely change and if you select well enough your sources and keep adjusting them you likely been able to spot enough propaganda to filter much of the crap out.
Shows news articles from the whole spectrum so you get more perspectives.
NY Post article citing 'scientists' or 'a study' about how doing handstands increase your sexual capabilities in 250 words or less? Unreliable.
Scientific paper linking biweekly handstands to increased cardiovascular health in 40-50 year-old Asian men in the Baltimore area, with raw data attached, in 12500 words? Reliable.
Articles: Not really, a lot of SEO practitioners and expert storytellers use these tactics to their advantage.
Scientific papers: You have to be technically trained a bit to see the nuances - ex: journal impact factor (citations), methodology (sample size, variables controlled, stat. significance...) affects results, analysis & interpretation; conflicts of interest with industry sponsors (often stated, but sometimes hidden), etc.
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...
Statistics is a HARD subject, specially when you get a juicy believable story in front of you. And a lack of credit to do confirmation research because for administrators "it is not new".
Richard Feynman :
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
A big part of modern science is very expensive, and controls aren't made.