Referencing

Our collective genes and culture have evolved in a world where any information was deemed important as it was scarce. The internet era changed this by providing an overabundance of information, our issue now is not scarcity but validity. Nowadays, much of the information is not presented on the merit of its reliability but on the basis of getting our attention. Wikipedia has tried to combat the reliability issue by listing which sources hierarchically:

Figure 2. Oligopolies of media.

Figure 3. Scientific weighting hierarchy.

However, the word reliable simply implies they are not making things up, it does not take into account potential biases of each source framing issues to make it more digestible.

Imagine all the information fictional and non-fictional that could ever be produced was produced and available to anyone via the internet. Every fact would have an equal amount of arguments for and against it irrelevant of its source. Borges in his book The Library of Babel, creates a thought experiment where all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set are available to anyone. Essentially, within our own confines, this represents all knowledge humans could possibly produce. It would take several lifetimes for one person to read each and every book. Similarly, it would take multiple lifetimes to read everything on the internet, understand its source and bias and whittle out the truth. This is especially difficult as our media is being aggregated into oligopolies which often serve a specific agenda (see Figure 2).

Critical Appraisal

Critical appraisal skills should be paramount in the fundamentals of our education. Before we learn anything we need to understand that facts are not binary in nature. This would allow us to:

• reduce information overload by eliminating irrelevant or weak studies.
• identify the most relevant papers.
• distinguish evidence from opinion, assumptions, misreporting, and belief.
• assess the validity of the study.
• assess the usefulness and clinical applicability of the study.

This is illustrated in Figure 3 and is the key filtering technique that Burnzero uses to write articles. In fact on every page, at the bottom is a section named Reference, by clicking on the link next to the individual referenced article ([1], [2], [3] etc) you will be taken to an abstract or full article which is only featured if it fits within the higher levels of this hierarchy. Therefore, no news sources are used, only verifiable scientific papers, the intention of this is to bring us closer to fact than fiction.