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Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?

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Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?

#1
Aside from the obvious trick of appending "reddit" to searches, or going straight to wikipedia or scientific literaure, how do you actually find anything?

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?

Re: Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?

#4
The main thing would be to never trust a single source all the time, and question everything, no matter how much I agree or disagree with it. The process of analyzing how credible information is and how it came to be is oftentimes more advantageous than simply finding credible information

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?

#8
Find one well-reputed or authoritative source and then find a second independent source to verify and corroborate the claims of the first. Basic standard of journalism. When a claim is made, the burden of independently verifiable proof is on the person making the claims.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?

#9
This is a tricky one, but in my main area of interest (energy) I ask myself whether a source is "falsifiable", or whether it would be theoretically possible to come up with some way to prove their claim wrong:

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.

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