I’m summarizing this from here: https://medium.com/stanford-alumni/youre-the-fact-checker-now-60103eaeaf3a#.ujkt5csqu I’ve found that I think I know things and even more dangerous, I think I do things. Like read something that makes sense and make sure it’s legit. Or when someone says a numerical figure in conversation it I go verify it. I heard a podcast a whole back and it was about an issue with per reviewed research. The gist of it was that most research only gets done once because the grant money is in novel research. So some researchers figured out a way to reuse those experiments to do novel research. I thought it was pretty cool. The crowd sourced quite few experimented to their peers and found that sometimes the original peer reviewed research couldn’t be replicated. The closer to pure science (physics, math, biology) the more likely it seemed to be repeatable. The hard sciences: psychology and sociology were more.difficult to repeat. To me that seemed like a reflection of how difficult human behavior can be. So consuming news on auto-pilot is easy to do because I think that I’m smart enough to go look up the research and understand it. But when I measure how often I actually do it its a pretty life number. THINGS TO DO WHEN CONSUMING THE NEWS.
- Answer: who is supplying his info and what’s their stance?
- Answer: how credible is this organization and do they take outside ‘funding’.
- Go past the ‘about’ page and find references others have made.
- Answer: who are their friends.
- Answer: who are their enemy’s and how do they treat them?
