epicurious
11th November 2009, 01:08 AM
Good afternoon, all. (I was thinking opening with "take me to your leader" but decided it was probably not a good idea in this place)
This is my first post here, so I'll try to not to make a bad impression. I'd hate to start off on the wrong foot with you lot, as its not often I get involved in discussions with others who actually seem to like thinking. It gets lonely out here!
From a more practical standpoint, its doubtless unwise to antagonize a forum full of hardened critics.
Anyway, to the point: I have carefully read Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. I appreciate the effort to provide the layman (such as myself) with a set of tools by which one may dismantle fallacies, rhetoric and many other forms of baloney.
It even provides some positive direction by default, in the sense that having dismissed obviously misleading paths, whats left is probably worth investigating.
Now, I can't see anything wrong with the Kit and along with a good deal of common sense (though I amaze myself with how commonly I lack it) its probably all one needs to sort most wheat from the chaff.
My problem here, is one of speed. If the kit shows its age at all, its here, in that over the last decade, the world has gone through massive changes in the volumes and preferred mediums of communication.
The consequence is that misinformation/bunk-memes propagate about the globe at incredible speed. It takes time to dismantle such information and during that time they frequently do much damage - and that, I suspect, is why rhetoric and propaganda remain such powerful and popular tools.
So, my essential question is, how would one go about building a 21st century B.D. Kit?
What tools or components for tools - and what methods - are there by which one may rapidly check source data, such as the peer-review and intra-industry reputation of the source-authors, the statistics behind the alleged facts, their relevance and so on.. ?
Obviously, search engines provide a lot of this, however its not always as easy as you might think, to extract relevant and useful info through the zillions of results you get from a given 'googling,' especially if its a contentious issue.
I guess a more fundamental question then, is how can one 'sharpen' the focus of these kinds of investigations?
I'm curious to see what methods other thinking people use, please don't assume anything is too obvious to add, as said, I am very much a layman and am forever discovering my own shortcomings, especially in terms of methodological thought.
This is my first post here, so I'll try to not to make a bad impression. I'd hate to start off on the wrong foot with you lot, as its not often I get involved in discussions with others who actually seem to like thinking. It gets lonely out here!
From a more practical standpoint, its doubtless unwise to antagonize a forum full of hardened critics.
Anyway, to the point: I have carefully read Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. I appreciate the effort to provide the layman (such as myself) with a set of tools by which one may dismantle fallacies, rhetoric and many other forms of baloney.
It even provides some positive direction by default, in the sense that having dismissed obviously misleading paths, whats left is probably worth investigating.
Now, I can't see anything wrong with the Kit and along with a good deal of common sense (though I amaze myself with how commonly I lack it) its probably all one needs to sort most wheat from the chaff.
My problem here, is one of speed. If the kit shows its age at all, its here, in that over the last decade, the world has gone through massive changes in the volumes and preferred mediums of communication.
The consequence is that misinformation/bunk-memes propagate about the globe at incredible speed. It takes time to dismantle such information and during that time they frequently do much damage - and that, I suspect, is why rhetoric and propaganda remain such powerful and popular tools.
So, my essential question is, how would one go about building a 21st century B.D. Kit?
What tools or components for tools - and what methods - are there by which one may rapidly check source data, such as the peer-review and intra-industry reputation of the source-authors, the statistics behind the alleged facts, their relevance and so on.. ?
Obviously, search engines provide a lot of this, however its not always as easy as you might think, to extract relevant and useful info through the zillions of results you get from a given 'googling,' especially if its a contentious issue.
I guess a more fundamental question then, is how can one 'sharpen' the focus of these kinds of investigations?
I'm curious to see what methods other thinking people use, please don't assume anything is too obvious to add, as said, I am very much a layman and am forever discovering my own shortcomings, especially in terms of methodological thought.