4 ms·

All sources are secondary technically. The only primary sources about stuff like what happens in Ukraine are in Ukraine. I happen to know some people there but

• runsWphotons 4y ago
  A primary source in Ukraine is an eyewitness or direct account. A secondary source is someone reporting on, summarising, or drawing conclusions from one or multiple primary source accounts. No one said primary sources are complete, objective, unbiased, or any other thing than primary.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Which is why a good secondary source is so valuable. A good secondary source will combine multiple primary sources, add some objectivity, and come up with something that is closer to the truth of what happened than any one primary source.
    • throwaway290 4y ago
      Agreed. Good tertiary sources like analysts are also sometimes OK. But all primary sources all the time is not reality
• Stranger43 4y ago
  And yet were required by society to subscribe to the prevalent narrative as a mark of our loyalty/respectability within whatever group we operate. And that requirement is getting more and more enforced by more and more groups as the old social contracts are collapsing as a consequence of global changes nobody feels in control of and a lot of people aren't ready to deal with. And as blind group loyalty is fundamentally irrational it's no longer necessary or even desirable for the accepted narrative to conform to any kind of standard for logical coherence and accordance with the observed reality, as accepting it more about showing your commitment to the group/nation/party/movement then it is about it being true, or useful for guiding behavior and decisions. This is where we get today's problem there simply is no tolerance for any grayzones where we dont know what is right and true where big interest are at play so we cannot really have a rational open search for the truth in those area. And once you accept this for the big ticket items it's hard to then require rationality in the areas where it might still be allowed societal pressures.
• jonathanstrange 4y ago
  Sometimes you can distinguish between primary and secondary sources easily, e.g. if you talk about a book this book is the primary source and everything else is not. Sometimes it's harder to get to primary sources, but it's generally not hard to get close enough. If you analyze who copied what from where you can find out fairly easily which sources are close to what is reported and which ones are remote and part of the "whisper game." In my experience, almost everyone who criticizes media tends to offer no reasonable substitute for e.g. news agencies who have reporters on the ground. Mostly they refer sources that are far removed from the action reported (e.g. blogs, commentators, etc.) and therefore unreliable. It's not bad advice to seek primary sources in this looser sense, such as sources with reporters in direct contact with eye witnesses. On a side note, reporting biases are normal and not a substantive problem as long as people can recognize the reporting of alleged facts and distinguish these from opinions and comments. You can test this ability.
  • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    > if you talk about a book this book is the primary source and everything else is not Just to add here - it's a primary source if you're talking about the book and it's discussing a new idea of some sort or events they themselves saw - if it's a history book and you're using the book to understand the events it's describing which the author is interpreting by their having read other sources (e.g. first hand accounts of the event), the books itself isn't a primary source. Otherwise I agree with what you're saying.
    • jonathanstrange 4y ago
      That's a good point and important. My background is philosophy so I wasn't thinking about books describing historical events.
      • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        Yeah, my background is history so that explains the difference in how we're considering things.