Submitted 1 year ago by ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Also: how do you identify a work as peer reviewed?
A small thing, and only for “creator” content and people. If they say multiple things, some you know about and some you don’t, then evaluate the stuff you know. If you detect bullshit in the stuff you know, throw it all out.
Someone that lies on one thing is fully untrustworthy.
Clearly doesn’t work when you are wrong.
No person nor source gets it right all the time, I like your idea as an evaluative technique but I think the assumption that being incorrect here is necessarily because of lying might mean discounting a lot of sources/creators who are otherwise reputable. I’d look at it more like degrees of doubt cast over everything else they say where you don’t have the expertise to evaluate the accuracy. Much like a driver’s licence, you get dinged enough times for more and more infractions and eventually you lose your license. If they keep continually getting things wrong where it’s something you know something about eventually you can probably discount them on anything else as well, but if it’s just once or twice, especially where they’re not egregiously wrong, some benefit of the doubt could be beneficial to all concerned. Better I would have thought to take what feels like their salient points on the content they produce on topics where you aren’t knowledgeable and check if other people are claiming anything similar and where something is verifiable, try to verify. Of course theoretically you should do that all the time but in practice at least each time you know someone is wrong about something it’s an indication that for them specifically further checking is required.
I dont have an answer other than vet with an authority you trust (be it wikipedia, a teacher a friend, a parent)
But this is not a stupid question. Its probably the most important question when making a decision in this modern techno era to have an answer for yourself
There are different standards in different fields of knowledge. Medical science is different than journalism, which is different from history, which is different from public safety.
In general, a given field has sources that publish information with the highest standard of credibility. In many fields, these are peer-reviewed journals. They may be published by large universities (Harvard Law Review, Oxford Review of Economic Policy), by government bodies (e.g. Smithsonian Magazine, NIHR), by professional organizations (eg. JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine), or operate independently (e.g. The Lancet, Nature).
Credibility is earned by being consistently credible. A source that posts misleading or false articles can be assumed to not be credible, and I don’t trust them just like I don’t trust people who say stuff that ends up being not credible.
With newer information, concensus between difference sources us a good indicator as well.
What I am far more likely to use to dismiss something is checking out the purpose of the group. If they have a website and their description sounds like a weasel pretending to be a benevolent protector of a hen house then I just ignore them. Anything that sounds pie in the sky, like revolutionizing or disrupting an established industry is probably another Theranos and easily dismissed. If they say anything that sounds like conservative doublespeak, they get ignored.
It seems to be a pretty reliable system even if the occasional thing that is too good to be true slips in because I want it to be true. But having low expectations and recognizing potential being different from the results helpas a lot with being pleasantly surprised when things turn out better than they sounded.
Media literacy crash course https://youtube.com/watch?v=sPwJ0obJya0&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtM6jSpzb5gMNsx9kdmqBfmY&index=1&pp=iAQB
If we can agree that all “news” sites slant to the right or the left. Then you should check out the story at a few of both leaning sites.
The main point is to be able to handle uncertainties in a normal basis, the greyness of reality, despite the temptation of blacks and whites of our minds.
For sure it costs a lot. The consideration of the superposition of possible truths and the weight of potential biases is a huge burden without granted full coverage, but allows you to accumulate a landscape of plausibility of things: yes, is not 100% precise and is still built by personal prejudices but, with a systematic acceptance of new bits of information regardless of how comfortable they are, it can grow a mostly reliable understanding of reality with a variable amount of temporary uncertainty on some facts… and you can still convert greys into quasi-b&w once they reach a decent amount of independent evidences, you now, to free a bit your RAM.
Ok, so, OBVIOUSLY, you know absolutely zero There’s not even a such thing as ‘consensual ass spankings’ so I don’t even know why you brought it up.
If OP wants more oreos in his cereal? Fine, so be it. But that doesn’t change the fact that you fuckin suck at Diddy Kong Racing.
I swear man.
It's peer reviewed if it has the name of a peer-reviewed journal on it. If it's on arxiv (a pre-print server) it's not. (Or not yet, or published on several platforms/journals.)
It’s peer reviewed if it has the name of a peer-reviewed journal on it.
Where do journals indicate that they are?
A lot of them will have a front matter, a Wikipedia article. Be cited a lot. And you'll find them in a university library. You might even have access to a library's catalogue without being a student or member.
I don’t fully believe anything I can’t test and verify myself. Thank fuck NASA left things on the moon you can ping to prove they went there.
…Does NASA have something on the web that lets people ping the Moon, by any chance?
This is not exactly what you’re talking about but it’s close and actually is available on the web: check out the camera feeds from ISS. Pretty incredible to just watch the world literally go by.
Sorta…
We left a bunch of retro-reflectors up there, if you got really good aim and a sensitive detector, you can bounce lasers off the moon. If you science hard enough you can probably pull it off.
I don’t think so. You need some special equipment that isn’t too difficult to get.
The short answer is you don’t. Even in philosophy, a leading model of “truth” is something like “a statement is true if it’s true”. We humans are doomed to be confused and unsure.
I’m not checking things for peer review, but a lot of bullshit can be filtered out by a simple Google search. If Aunt Brenda posts a major event on Facebook, but it’s not on any news site, she probably fell for a lie.
dustyData@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The discussions here are a bit prosaic, though valid, but on a higher philosophical view you can check Descartes Discourse on the method. It is the basis of all natural sciences and the philosophical foundation of science and rational truth establishment. Maybe grab an explaineer on those ideas.
There are further developments that discuss the sociological proceeds of the scientific community. But the best start point is to always check any statement of truth and fact for four things: controversies, criticisms, corrections and praises. With those four elements you can assert for yourself the credibility of a source’s claims.