Comments on: IdeasProject: What Can We Each Do to Get Reliable Information?

By: Raouf Eldeeb

Raouf Eldeeb — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:58:49 +0000

I think that the one thing that anyone can do is something that some already do but could make more explicit and more systematic.

By this I mean a continuous evaluation of the reliability of the sources of information and base future assessment of the reliability of new information on the accumulated trust one has acquired (or lost) from those sources.

For areas with which I am totally familiar, I don’t need a process of evaluation. I can see what is a factual or procedural error. If it is on a Wiki, I would correct it on the spot.
With areas that I am partially familiar, I assign a probability of trust to the source.
If a certain news item intrigues me or if I smell a bias, exaggeration or error from that source, I would get as many other sources for that story that I can until I am satisfied that I got the essence of the story and can evaluate the original source and adjust my trust level for that source.

I wish I could share my trust probability with other people that are similarly minded. It would expand my trust network beyond my areas of competence.

By: John Pagonis

John Pagonis — Mon, 31 May 2010 10:56:02 +0000

Oh I agree, but good info is already there. It is in our human nature to produce good, good enough, not so good, bad and excellent info (articles, music etc). Sometimes we capture it, sometimes it gets lost on ether. But it is certainly there.

Of course a problem is when such valuable info is lost in the noise (of not necessarily bad, but irrelevant to oneself info). For example I just discovered your work, although I’ve consumed content from The Guardian so many times before and your writing is of interest to me. “Better filters” could have helped me to do so earlier I think.

Filters don’t create, but help surface the valuable info buried by the garbage, that some are accustomed to accept in apathy.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 26 May 2010 09:55:30 +0000

Garbage In, Garbage Out. No amount of “better filters” is going to create something which isn’t there.

By: John Pagonis

John Pagonis — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:32:51 +0000

On one hand over-abundance of information has lead us to information overload, which is one of the problems. As a consequence we need to filter through the plethora of good stuff to get to the bottom of things. On the other hand, I think that increasingly misinformation will become the raw material that we’ll need to process in order to make decisions.

In such a setup we need better filters not only to guard our limited cognitive resources but also to discover the contrarian angle and critique to what info we consume.

To get to reliable info we’ll need to be able to discover the thesis and antithesis and have a mechanism by which to pipe them through our congested cognitive channels.

I think that this can be achieved by the co-operation of man and machine.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 24 May 2010 07:04:56 +0000

The manure could just be from large productions of bovine excrement, with nary a pony to be found.

By: Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor — Sat, 22 May 2010 16:01:08 +0000

Inna, fair enough — but I was using “good” and “bad” in the most generic way here.

By: Inna

Inna — Sat, 22 May 2010 07:01:58 +0000

Your post is an example of the difficulties of sorting out “good” and “bad”. You encourage exchange of ideas and provide self-disclosures. At the same time, you promote products and create positive brand images. Good or bad?
Most of the time, information can be both good and bad. The question at ideasproject is too broad and without any context to be answered meaningfully.

By: Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Fri, 21 May 2010 23:48:42 +0000

You might not find the pony by digging in the manure, but if there’s that much manure in the first place there must have been a pony. ;-)

And that’s exactly the sort of critical thinking and logic that one has to apply to the questionable information one finds out there on the Net.

By: Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:07:13 +0000

Seth, I think we need both.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:04:43 +0000

“But with the huge amount of new stuff out there, this also means that there’s an enormous amount of good stuff, too.”

Not necessarily. Going through more manure does not mean one will eventually find a pony.

That’s quite a serious point, by the way. If the idea is that all one needs to do is to build a better data-mining machine, which then means throw money at data-mining startups, that gives quite a different answer than an idea that what’s needed is to re-invigorate civic and non-market institutions.