> in an ideal world, trustworthiness of information should not be coupled to how slick its presentation is. On the surface and without context, this sounds lik

> in an ideal world, trustworthiness of information should not be coupled to how slick its presentation is. On the surface and without context, this sounds like an ideal, but it’s an interesting question and I wonder if you and I would really want that ideal. I’m not so sure that trustworthiness and presentation are separable nor whether I think they should be. Just Google “ugly web pages” and really imagine how many of them you could see yourself trusting. When there are clear signs that some information has had no thought put into the presentation, isn’t it reasonable and natural to start assuming that lack of attention extends to the information itself? Presentation is a very important part of how information is interpreted. It’s easy, for example, with bad color choices to accidentally emphasize one piece of data over another, and therefore to mislead the viewer - like how something yellow or bright green tends to dominate next to dark grey. By choosing colors carefully like in the article, the presentation can actually make the information more neutral. An interesting followup question might be: what characteristics should make information trustworthy? What other cues should I look for in a presentation to know whether something is trustworthy? Ideally, the trustworthiness of information should depend solely on whether it’s true, right? But ignoring that there are points of view and shades of true, in the world we live in, we use other cues like who is the presenter and what are their credentials, whether we agree with the conclusions beforehand, whether we were seeking the information or it was pushed, whether the presentation is informational or agenda driven, and lots of other things... since it’s often impossible to know whether information is true or not without resorting to original research. What cues should we use to establish trust in information without having to do original research?