Believing in experts

[Dill]

(07-02-2023, 11:02 AM)Stewy Wrote: Yeah well, I've gotten some push back in this thread, and it wasn't my intent to suggest we dismiss or ignore "experts" completely.  

One doesn't have to be a scientist to do things like find the job title of the author or the source of their information.  if they didn't provide links to that information, it is a huge red flag.  If they works for a politically leaning organization or a workspace that is ultra "this" or "that", then that is suspect.  

The worst these days are people who read blog read opinions (that come off as truth) on other "news" articles and then create huge click bait followings that then seem like legitimate news sources.  This is a huge problem in our Social Media world.  Example:  Our daughter is ultra liberal, but not broadly informed.  The govt would do something, she'd over react.  My wife and I would go to the changed actual law, actual news article, etc. and then the arguments would start, where she would be unaware of omissions that her source conveniently left out, partial summaries that mislead for a political commentary or just out right lies.  As she is indigent enough to dig in, every time she would come to us with political hysteria, we'd start asking her the source, were there links to AP articles, Reuters govt documents or peer reviewed information.  At first the answer was always no, and she'd try to push it aside to express her outrage and hysteria.  However, after 4-5 times in a row of us quickly looking up the actual/original source of the information, it was clear she was being mislead - EVERY time.

Summary:  You don't need a college degree to question the information you've read.  Google can reveal who holds an authors leash and an author's motivation very quickly.  YOU just have to give a shit to not be mislead and manipulated.

Yo Stew! One may not need a college degree, but one probably should have some idea of how to vet knowledge beyond whether it just agrees with what one already wants to believe.  That needs to be a basal standard if we are going to have a critically literate and informed population vetting political candidates and their policies. Colleges are supposed to be teaching students how to do that, but perhaps not as successfully as they used to.

How do you explain this standard to people who simply decide that sources "ultra" their side are GREAT sources but "ultra" the other side are "biased"--so much so they don't need to go beyond titles to examine method or construction of data? To me that indicates they are wholly unfamiliar with this standard. They do not know how to employ it as a base line for research, or recognize when others are holding to it. They use terms like "bias" with little idea of what would constitute bias.

I share your distress at how social media feeds and supports "bias hunters" looking for confirmation of what they already want to believe. SM has become a kind of "counter education" teaching people--especially young people--that THAT'S how you do it: Find links that agree with you and then confront others with opposing links, with no ability to assess an author's method on either side of the issue. Then go to personal attack if they still don't agree. If someone actually finds valid research (beyond confirmation bias), it's by accident.

Finally, you didn't say how old your daughter was. If she's HS age or a college undergraduate, I wouldn't worry to much. You are doing the right thing by offering counter points to her arguments. You've introduced her to the "peer reviewed" criterion, so she's already got the right influences around her.

By the way, here is a somewhat helpful chart used in many colleges today for students learning basic research. Anyone can find it by googling "CRAAP test."
It's only a start though. E.g., it asks 19 year-olds whether a site appears "biased," but most that age are still using the "bias=different from what I believe" standard. Learning how to assess qualifications requires some experience too. That takes time. Still, it jives with what you are doing with your daughter, checking qualifications, introducing the concept of neutrality via questions about audience and goals, whether and how citations are employed, etc. To this could be added simply things like whether a website is .com, .ed, .org, or .gov. to help assess purpose and reliability.