Information Literacy: Evaluate your sources and ID fake news Part 1

This series of posts comes out of a class I learned to teach while working with my good friend and colleague Dr. Vera Theil at Tokyo Metropolitan University.  It turns out the class was good for me, and perhaps my lecture was not as needed by our students as by those in my generation and older.  It seems modern college students, who grew up with the internet, are really good at evaluating false stories and fake news, but are a little weak against confirmation bias in identifying, using, and understanding information.  I thought it handy to break this down, so if you are interested in validating your own news sources, scroll down!

First: What is "Information Literacy?"

Literacy (from Webster): competence or knowledge in a specified area

Information literacy comes down to these five core competencies:

• identify needed information
• access information effectively & efficiently
• evaluate information
• use information appropriately
• understand information related issues

In this first post, I want to focus on the "evaluate" line.  I hope to convert all five of these points into short blogs over the next month or two, but if we start here hopefully it will be useful to a couple people!

Why can't I just Google and trust what I find?

Image credit: Link

This should seem laughably obvious to most, but we fall victim to this time and time again. Here are a couple vignettes for why you can't just automatically trust the top hits returned to you by Google....

Wikipedia is Created by Real Humans

For this one, see this post

Google (And Any Other Search Server) Saves Your Search Data

This is a particularly insidious issue.  Let me expound.  I was attempting to find a legitimate source against supporting man-made climate change.  All my searches returned stuff like this:

Yeah, pick on my search terms, I just wanted a quick example to show you.  At the time, I tried really hard for about 2 hours with all possible search terms.

In order to find the article needed, I had to download a new internet browser.  I have, in other words, trained Google and other search servers that I only respond positively to content that reinforces my "bias" that climate change not only exists but is man-made.
Digression: link to come

This means that everyone, everywhere, has trained their own internet experience to provide content that reinforces their bias, making it, eventually, exceptionally challenging to access content that challenges those biases.  Few, if any of us, realize that it is happening to us, because as we do more internet searches and respond to more content, we continue to train the system and continue to interact with content that "makes sense" to us.  We don't see a problem with our own world, but we do observe a problem with other people.  "They have access to the same information as I do, how could they possibly come to a polar opposite conclusion?" we ask.  It turns out we aren't getting the same information, and they, via a number of decisions in browsing history, have trained their information gathering systems to give them results that are probably telling them the opposite of what yours tell you.

Why Should I Care About Evaluating my Sources?

Not Every Retweet / Shared Post that Seems Informative is Legitimate for Its Purpose

Here's a poignant example.  This is a tweet obviously showing horrible things being done to a number of cats (and I love cats now, probably been infected, as my cat-loving started only after caring for a couple of them):

How horrible is that?  So many poor cats laid out on operating tables, tied down, having their life, liberty, and happiness ripped from them.  If you don't retweet this, you are a horrible example of humanity and everything we've worked against as a society.

Well, here's a link to the true story.  Those cats were taken in from a hoarding situation, and are being tested for rabies, etc... being spayed / neutered, and being treated for diseases coming from their horrible living conditions, all to enhance their adoption potential.  There were 697 cats living on the premises, which was described as the largest cat-hoarding case in the nation.  A little less than 10% (about 60) had to be euthanized due to the extent of their illnesses, with many more needing treatment for ringworm, mouth infections, etc...  In other words, your knee-jerk reaction to share / retweet that post would've been misled and misleading, because the photo is NOT from animal testing but instead an image of people trying desperately to rehome a very large number of cats all at once, many who were quite ill.

Not Every Anecdotal Experience Is Representative

People are people wherever you go, and we're really bad as a species separating "this one thing happened to my aunt's husband's friend's sister" from "this will happen to me."  Here's why this works:
My aunt's husband's friend's sister ate the berries of something that looked like that plant, and she died.
The woman in question in this example sampled nightshade, which is related to tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, which we can all verify are quite tasty members of the non-toxic vegetable arena.  However, when moving into new regions and determining edibility vs toxicity of new flora and fauna, our ancestors HAD to rely on this kind of anecdotal evidence.  Are you going to believe Grunt when he said his aunt's husband's friend's sister died from eating it, or do you want to test it on a member of your own family?  Yeah, you're going to go with Grunt's anecdotal evidence, because why risk it?

Black Nightshade.  Image credit: Link

However, if we as a species went only with anecdotal evidence, we wouldn't have tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant.

Image credit: Link

Obviously we must be capable of rising above this bias!  It's made more challenging in the modern era because we have instant access to whatever happened to Grunt's aunt's husband's friend's sister via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc....  Also, we may or may not know it, but Grunt's aunt's husband's friend is a pathological liar and doesn't even have a sister.  How do we parse that possibility while accepting her knowledge for the good of our community?

More to come:

Given that we have at our fingertips access to endless knowledge, but also infinite random musings of individual humans who we may or may not trust (turns out that Grunt's aunt's husband's friend is a real piece of work and you can't trust a thing he says), it turns out to still be somewhat easy to figure out what you can base decisions on, and what you can't.  This series of blog posts attempts to take you through it in a short piece-by-piece manner, so you easily tell the difference between Grunt's aunt's husband's friend and someone with true, honest information.