6 ms·

What sources do you personally trust?

fidgewidge 4y ago
The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked, which allow or encourage open commenting with third party moderation so I can quickly see disagreement, etc. Mostly that means Substacks, these days.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked What makes the citation correct or trustworthy? Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of value.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Straight news reporting has no lower level, short of your going out and talking to the same kind of people the reporter did. Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part, but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check). Journalists create the things that others cite. If they could produce what they need mainly by reading and citing, they wouldn't be journalists.
      - fidgewidge 4y ago
        News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual claim about some public data, check it. If someone is assigned a job title, is that actually their job title? Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or things that were previously claimed? All those types of checks are ones I've done before to news stories and found they failed them. Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.
        BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        That murder victim in the C-19 data was only exposed because he was #6 in the list. Imagine if his name+age were buried on page 23/45. Checking each and every name in a list that long is beyond a reasonable standard for fact-checking for an individual journalist.
        fidgewidge 4y ago
        It was because he was the first non-elderly person in the list, which is an obvious thing to double check because COVID basically never kills people below a fairly high age. That was already well known at the time. If journalists can't check the claims they're making, they shouldn't make them. The fact that the NYT wanted to make 1000 factual claims on the front page doesn't suddenly mean they don't have to check them. It means they shouldn't pull that sort of stunt. The loss of trust is clearly deserved.
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  Any you particularly recommend? Trying to stretch my reading material.
- gaws 4y ago
  > Mostly that means Substacks, these days. Yikes.
blululu 4y ago
Not the OP, but this is a leading question that goes in the wrong direction. You can't really trust any source 100%. You need to do your own research and be humble about it. Journalists are good at this kind of work but they make plenty of mistakes (and as the child of Journalists I will also add that they can be total idiots who are more focused on emotional stories than facts). Basic media literacy with a healthy dose of skepticism and humility is necessary to get anything more than urban legends out of the paper.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  The problem with "doing your own research" is that it is unworkable as a policy for the masses, as it leads most to settle on believing well-spoken hucksters. Humility to know when you should trust someone else as a guide is necessary until you've developed the personal experience+knowledge to evaluate sources independently.
- duckmysick 4y ago
  > You need to do your own research and be humble about it. It takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to research a short news article in a topic that I'm familiar with. For topics I'm not an expert in it's multiple hours. I simply don't have time for it. Family, work, and sleep already occupy much of my day.
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    That's a common objection, yeah, and it's a problem. One solution is to recognize that, unfortunately, in that case you don't have much reliable knowledge about the world and therefore your default position should be to not try to influence it. Practically that means things like not judging other people, not voting, or alternatively voting for libertarians who don't believe in imposing rules on other people (because if you voted for specific rules, you'd be doing so based on unreliable information). Luckily you don't have to actually research every single article. It's OK to generalize over time. Rules can also be shared. Here's some of mine: ignore any story about Russia because they're always unreliable especially since the war, ignore any study about science or public health, ignore any claims made by (ex)-intelligence agents, ignore any claims that appear to support woke narratives, ignore any statistical claims about China, ignore economic predictions or really anything that depends on academically developed statistical models.
lodi 4y ago
Not OP but for me it's not about what sources to trust (blindly? literally none of them), but what type of information you can trust. Naked facts seem to be safe for the time being, context should be assumed to be heavily biased in a particular direction, and opinions are worse than worthless.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  Unfortunately I've found journalists and/or their sources often lie about basic facts too, even when those facts are easily checked. You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it because they know most people will take factual claims at face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.
Metricon 4y ago
While in no way a panacea, you might want to check out Ground News (https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/). They at least make an attempt to point out how different news sources respond to the same stories. Perhaps most interesting are the "Blindspot" sections which show news stories that are not covered by opposing political sides.

The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked, which allow or encourage open commenting with third party moderation so I can quickly see disagreement, etc. Mostly that means Substacks, these days.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked What makes the citation correct or trustworthy? Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of value.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Straight news reporting has no lower level, short of your going out and talking to the same kind of people the reporter did. Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part, but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check). Journalists create the things that others cite. If they could produce what they need mainly by reading and citing, they wouldn't be journalists.
    - fidgewidge 4y ago
      News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual claim about some public data, check it. If someone is assigned a job title, is that actually their job title? Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or things that were previously claimed? All those types of checks are ones I've done before to news stories and found they failed them. Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.
      - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        That murder victim in the C-19 data was only exposed because he was #6 in the list. Imagine if his name+age were buried on page 23/45. Checking each and every name in a list that long is beyond a reasonable standard for fact-checking for an individual journalist.
        fidgewidge 4y ago
        It was because he was the first non-elderly person in the list, which is an obvious thing to double check because COVID basically never kills people below a fairly high age. That was already well known at the time. If journalists can't check the claims they're making, they shouldn't make them. The fact that the NYT wanted to make 1000 factual claims on the front page doesn't suddenly mean they don't have to check them. It means they shouldn't pull that sort of stunt. The loss of trust is clearly deserved.
kthejoker2 4y ago
Any you particularly recommend? Trying to stretch my reading material.
gaws 4y ago
> Mostly that means Substacks, these days. Yikes.

blululu 4y ago

Not the OP, but this is a leading question that goes in the wrong direction. You can't really trust any source 100%. You need to do your own research and be humble about it. Journalists are good at this kind of work but they make plenty of mistakes (and as the child of Journalists I will also add that they can be total idiots who are more focused on emotional stories than facts). Basic media literacy with a healthy dose of skepticism and humility is necessary to get anything more than urban legends out of the paper.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
The problem with "doing your own research" is that it is unworkable as a policy for the masses, as it leads most to settle on believing well-spoken hucksters. Humility to know when you should trust someone else as a guide is necessary until you've developed the personal experience+knowledge to evaluate sources independently.
duckmysick 4y ago
> You need to do your own research and be humble about it. It takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to research a short news article in a topic that I'm familiar with. For topics I'm not an expert in it's multiple hours. I simply don't have time for it. Family, work, and sleep already occupy much of my day.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  That's a common objection, yeah, and it's a problem. One solution is to recognize that, unfortunately, in that case you don't have much reliable knowledge about the world and therefore your default position should be to not try to influence it. Practically that means things like not judging other people, not voting, or alternatively voting for libertarians who don't believe in imposing rules on other people (because if you voted for specific rules, you'd be doing so based on unreliable information). Luckily you don't have to actually research every single article. It's OK to generalize over time. Rules can also be shared. Here's some of mine: ignore any story about Russia because they're always unreliable especially since the war, ignore any study about science or public health, ignore any claims made by (ex)-intelligence agents, ignore any claims that appear to support woke narratives, ignore any statistical claims about China, ignore economic predictions or really anything that depends on academically developed statistical models.

lodi 4y ago

Not OP but for me it's not about what sources to trust (blindly? literally none of them), but what type of information you can trust. Naked facts seem to be safe for the time being, context should be assumed to be heavily biased in a particular direction, and opinions are worse than worthless.

fidgewidge 4y ago
Unfortunately I've found journalists and/or their sources often lie about basic facts too, even when those facts are easily checked. You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it because they know most people will take factual claims at face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.

Metricon 4y ago

While in no way a panacea, you might want to check out Ground News (https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/). They at least make an attempt to point out how different news sources respond to the same stories. Perhaps most interesting are the "Blindspot" sections which show news stories that are not covered by opposing political sides.