Investigate & Filter Online Information Like a Pro
It's getting hectic out here
We’re coming back around to election cycle in the United States and everyone is throwing their brain away and replacing it with their favorite political pundit. During these times knowing how to filter information is the key to survival. Even people that usually put out good information seem to be slipping up, pundit brain is highly contagious, here’s the cure.
What To Look Out For In Articles
Date - Check to see if the date on the article is relevant
Who? - Look up who wrote it and how respectable these people are
Bias Check - Do you see bias towards one thing or the other or is the writer sticking to what they can prove?
Sources - Sources will either be at the end of the article, hyperlinked (underlined),
Source Quality - Check to see if that source is trustworthy and how that source is gathering it’s data.
Ego - Try to remove your own ego, biases and attempt to understand what the writer is trying to say.
Information Filter
This info I already put out in one of my older articles so I’ll copy and paste some of it here and update it a bit:
What is information?
One definition from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary describes information as “knowledge that you get about someone or something : facts or details about a subject”. Sounds great right? No! You’re no idiot right? So for us, information is anything and everything. Objects, labels, smells, everything you can see, everything you can hear etc. EVERYTHING is information.
Information is everything and everywhere, so there is no way you can store all of it. Your objective is to gather as much of it as you can that is relevant to you and your goals.
What to do with information?
I should just gather a bunch of relevant information and act on it right? NO! Just because your best friend tweeted that the price of bitcoin is $7000 doesn’t it make it true and blindly acting on it can cause your capital to get rapidly liquidated.
Ok so what do I do with information?
Just because you got information doesn’t mean it’s “good” information. There is true information and there is also info that is false and malicious. Most people don’t know this but information is meant to be filtered.
Information you have should be in different phases in your brain. You can even label folders on your computer that contain documents in different phases.
5) Unfiltered info: This is everything from tweets to emails, news, sounds and even smells
4) Gather Sources: Take that piece of information that has your interest and with no ego gather info from all the sources you can get from it even sources that you may not like. Example: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Euro News, Aljazeera, Independent journalists, regular people etc.
3) Confirmation: Put all your sources side by side look at what they cited as their source. Take all the information that overlap from at least 3-5+ different sources, use your own discretion here. The more sources that say the same thing the closer you are to phase one.
2) Test: The weather man and weather app on your phone told you it’s raining right now. Go outside and test if that’s actually happening. You’ll have to get creative here. I’m sure a scientist can tell you how to run tests better then I can. The information you confirmed tells you what you need to put in your beakers.
1) Knowledge: After the testing phase the information that makes it through is now knowledge. You can now disseminate that knowledge to others and act on it with a high level of certainty that you will succeed. Some people never succeed because they’ve been acting on bad information. Take me for example… I’ve been lifting weights since I was 17 but had bad information on nutrition.. I was strong but never grew past 170. later in life I filtered down my nutrition information down to the knowledge phase and started to grow way bigger.
It’s ok to have information stuck in a certain phase, just know that you can’t trust it until you can filter it down to knowledge. If you’re in a urgent situation and have to act on it make sure you’re mitigating the potential risks.
The cycle of information filtering never ends. You’re basically running an oil refinery 24/7
Bad Actors
Clickbait - Some people write clickbait articles just for the sake of making money from ad revenue.
Idiots - Eh…
Foreign actors - Foreign intelligence agencies post on social media, write articles, start political groups to cause chaos in competitor countries. Typically they will try to play into your political biases to raise your level of hatred for other political parties. If you’re stuck fighting each other, you can’ t get anything done, that benefits them greatly.
Wait
You’re never going to get the best information while something is unraveling. As an event is unfolding, while it’s entertaining to try to come up with the who what when where, It’s always better to wait it out and get the actual facts. Plus, don’t you have better things to do fren?
As always, thanks for reading.