3 ms·

Not only check for verifiable sources, but actually go and verify them. For example: story says proposed bill will have horrible effect on thing you care about

by imgabe 7y ago

Not only check for verifiable sources, but actually go and verify them. For example: story says proposed bill will have horrible effect on thing you care about: bills are public record, go read the text of the bill and see before freaking out.

Uehreka 7y ago
Part of the problem is that I have no context for most of the the stuff in those bills. If it's about healthcare spending, I have no idea how much spending is normal, or to be expected, or where it usually comes from. I have general feelings about this stuff (I'd like to see Americans spend less on healthcare and I'm fine with rich people paying more taxes) but while reading the text of a bill I have no idea whether a good looking paragraph is going to be completely invalidated by a 4 word sentence 2 pages down. Bills are public, but they aren't written for a lay audience. Instead of reading bills myself, I decide to trust folks who are well versed on the topic to provide me with analysis.
JohnFen 7y ago
A million times this. I learned the importance of this from working in research labs and seeing how the press reported studies that I had first hand knowledge of. Spoiler: the press pretty uniformly does a bad job of accurately reporting what studies say. It's not entirely the fault of the press, though. Research papers (and bills) tend to be complex and use language in a very specific way. Translating them into something that is easy to understand, without losing so much important nuance and context as to become deceptive, is extremely hard.
mistermann 7y ago
Also, verify whether the facts actually (comprehensively) support the conclusion the author is wanting readers to put into their brains.
yibg 7y ago
This becomes a bit of a recursive problem for me. I don't have the time to read through every source for everything I read. In practice, I only dig into things I care about, or things that sound fishy based on my own knowledge / experience. This leaves 95+% of information I ingest unverified by me. This may not be an issue at the time (since these are things I care less about), but the problem is I've now formed an opinion about these things based on what I read but not fact checked. Later on that "truth" becomes part of my knowledge base with which I make judgements with. This then end up influencing other decisions downstream which may be important to me. The nasty thing is I don't even know to what extend I'm influenced in this way.

by imgabe 7y ago

Uehreka 7y ago

Part of the problem is that I have no context for most of the the stuff in those bills. If it's about healthcare spending, I have no idea how much spending is normal, or to be expected, or where it usually comes from. I have general feelings about this stuff (I'd like to see Americans spend less on healthcare and I'm fine with rich people paying more taxes) but while reading the text of a bill I have no idea whether a good looking paragraph is going to be completely invalidated by a 4 word sentence 2 pages down. Bills are public, but they aren't written for a lay audience. Instead of reading bills myself, I decide to trust folks who are well versed on the topic to provide me with analysis.

JohnFen 7y ago

A million times this. I learned the importance of this from working in research labs and seeing how the press reported studies that I had first hand knowledge of. Spoiler: the press pretty uniformly does a bad job of accurately reporting what studies say. It's not entirely the fault of the press, though. Research papers (and bills) tend to be complex and use language in a very specific way. Translating them into something that is easy to understand, without losing so much important nuance and context as to become deceptive, is extremely hard.

mistermann 7y ago

Also, verify whether the facts actually (comprehensively) support the conclusion the author is wanting readers to put into their brains.

yibg 7y ago

This becomes a bit of a recursive problem for me. I don't have the time to read through every source for everything I read. In practice, I only dig into things I care about, or things that sound fishy based on my own knowledge / experience. This leaves 95+% of information I ingest unverified by me. This may not be an issue at the time (since these are things I care less about), but the problem is I've now formed an opinion about these things based on what I read but not fact checked. Later on that "truth" becomes part of my knowledge base with which I make judgements with. This then end up influencing other decisions downstream which may be important to me. The nasty thing is I don't even know to what extend I'm influenced in this way.