Whenever you’re looking at information, no matter how trivial it appears to be, or how authoritative it seems to be, you need to keep a critical mind.
- Who is presenting this information?
- The number one question to ask about any information you receive over any source is, who is saying this? Many items get passed along and passed along. Just because it appears in a newspaper doesn’t mean that the newspaper investigated it. Just because it appears in an e-mail message from an IBM employee doesn’t mean that IBM said it.
- What are their sources?
- If they don’t present sources, chances are good that the information is either made up, or twists the source material to an extent that it might as well be.
- What are the stated facts?
- What is actually being said in the information? Many times the same facts will be repeated over and over in different words to increase the ‘amount’ of fact. Or individual events will be presented as representative of general truths, without any evidence that the individual events are representative. And finally, many times perfectly good facts will be paired with completely erroneous conclusions.
- What are their biases?
- That is, why are they presenting this information? That’s what all of the above questions aim at. Everyone has biases. Sometimes they’re aware of them, sometimes they aren’t, sometimes they don’t care. Biases do not invalidate information. But they do give you clues that can tell you where to investigate if you want to verify or disprove the information.
- Evaluate everything
- These questions should be asked of any information source, not just those on the Internet. The Internet merely made it obvious that information doesn’t have to be true or relevant just because it’s available.
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