Referencing

Historically information was scarce, but now due to the internet information is in over abundance. Its difficult to know what to trust. Wikipedia has tried to combat this issue, by listing which sources are most reliable and excluding those which prefer clicks over fact:

Figure 2. Oligopolies of media.

However, the word reliable simply implies sources are not making things up, it does not take into account potential biases of each source or framing of issues to make it more digestible to specific consumers, which is arguably worse from popular media. So for fact we need to look at the scientific literature, which should take framing and bias into account.

Scientific Bias

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. Independent scientists publish scientific papers via journals. These journals more often than not are owned by private corporations which can reject or accept the articles based upon their own interests. This maybe the root cause of something called the replication crisis, which is the fact that the majority of scientific findings published in journals cannot be reproduced by another scientist.

So whilst the scientific information may be more rigorous than popular media, it is still subject to bias. To overcome this BurnZero has adapted a critical analysis weighting system.

Thought Experiment

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, created 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).

Whilst cheat sheets like these are useful they are not infallible. The best way to be able to determine fact from fiction is via Critical Analysis.