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- Important Questions
- 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.
- Weasel Words
- I use “weasel words” as a catch-all phrase for any argument that is an attempt to hide a complete lack of knowledge on a subject or to hide or finesse around the facts.
- Spam and Chain Mail
- If you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time, you’ve received, and possibly sent, chain mail that purports to describe an incident that really happened. Some of these are simply amusing, such as the supposed ‘user services’ complaints. Others are more serious, because they either call for policy changes based on what they saw, dampen true activism by making the claim that you can effect policy change simply by forwarding the e-mail on,…
- Traditional Sources
- Everything that I’ve said here applies to any source of information. Most “professional” news sources simply repeat what they’ve heard: if it comes over the newswire, and it looks sensational, it stands a chance of getting in. No fact checking is performed for a significant number of those items.
- Acquiring Information
- Acquiring Information in Evaluating Information
- Trust No One
- It may sound like I’m recommending that you “trust no one”, and that’s sort of true. What I’m really recommending is that you know who you’re trusting. When I received the “Jane Fonda” spam, it came from a friend who “received it from a very intelligent, reliable chemist,” and was taken at face value because of that. But the very intelligent chemist didn’t write it. Someone much less reliable wrote it, and the chemist’s reputation should not have…
- Open Source License
- Open Source License in Evaluating Information
- Evaluating Information (full HTML)
- HTML version of Evaluating Information
- Evaluating Information (full PDF) (305.0 KB)
- PDF version of Evaluating Information
- Evaluating Information (full RTF)
- RTF version of Evaluating Information
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