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I guess the only way to combat this in fields where you aren't knowledgeable is to read many sources and synthesize your own conclusions? Alternately, you could
by alanctgardner2 14y ago
I guess the only way to combat this in fields where you aren't knowledgeable is to read many sources and synthesize your own conclusions? Alternately, you could accept that there are good and bad journalists, and trust some of them?
- dromidas 14y agoI believe they call that 'research' :) It's the right way to do it usually.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI get your point, but only ever trusting primary sources would require you to be an expert in everything. At some point you need to trust that someone else synthesized the data correctly. Or else you simply have no opinions on topics you don't know from first principles.
- Torgo 14y agoI have tried to treat information I gather from news sources as preliminary. When I relay information I've learned from these sources, I try to say "I read in the new york times" instead of repeating the information as fact. There's a lot of information that I know I'll never get around to researching thoroughly, but it still is good to be able to use as a working base of knowledge until what seems to be better info can replace it.
- Turing_Machine 14y agoI have not noticed that the New York Times is any more reliable than other sources on subjects that I actually know about.