11–20 of 73 posts
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.
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…
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.
It's a classic formula: A diversity of sources, and learned experience at understanding who lies, about what, and how much. The "truth" is something you must compose and maintain from multiple sources on a regular basis.
Rule of thumb: The longer and more complicated the article, the more reliable the content. 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.
“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