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Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this: if you grow into this approach, it's almost impossible to become a "radical" believer in anything; usually any serious discourse has very solid points on both sides, which are formulated by very smart people. It's quite hard to live with it, actually, humans are not built for seeing nuance everywhere.

Although you have to be careful not to fall into "Enlightened Centrist" mode all the time. While there are usually solid points on both sides of an argument, you should take one side on many (most?) issues.

Why? Especially if the outcome of the argument doesn't matter to you, why take a side?

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

#72
For now at least, try Telegram. It appears to me not to be as censored/manipulated as the american social platforms, though the limited number of search results might suggest otherwise. At least I find there a lot of information which is not visible in the west. It also curiously has the feeling of the internet when it just started: you find concrete people who speak up their mind, in a usually more free way than on today's internet.

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

#73

Prioritize sources where I understand some motivation beyond traffic/ads for the existence of that source. Non-profits dedicated to providing information (Wikipedia, MDN), individual people I am familiar enough with to believe genuine interest in their topic, publicly-funded yet independent journalistic outlets, documentation written by the actual author of software, etc. I often find these in my Google/DDG searches,…

I think taking into account human motivation is a very smart system, but the motivations of a lot of what you mentioned aren’t necessarily aligned with everybody. 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…

You're correct that every individual source has biases and imperfections, so I think it's also essential to have multiple sources. I think that as long as you have a set of "good enough" and "diverse enough" sources, you can form an accurate idea of the truth by synthesizing what you read. Greenwald is a great example of that - definitely seems to be motivated in the right way, but wouldn't be a great single source of news. By publicly funded I mean things like NPR, the BBC, or their equivalents in other countries. Not perfect, but I believe that there's enough motivation there related to doing good journalism for its own sake, that I would include those sources in the "good enough" category.
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