English 201 Home | Research Site Index | Latest update: 07 November 2001
So there you are, the proud
possessor of a mound of information. You've wandered the back roads of the Internet,
haunted the remotest corners of libraries, and exchanged email with people around the
world. You've collected your information, translated it, categorized it and summarized it
(keeping track of all your references, of course). Now, just one small question remains:
Is any of it true?
After all, when you get information from somebody else, at best you're only getting
an expression of the way they think things are. Even if you you didn't
misunderstand them, and they weren't lying or making things up, it's always possible that
they were just plain wrong. If you're after the truth, then, it's clear that you'll have
to have some way of checking the reliability of your sources. (And the problems
don't stop there, as we'll see later!)
So how do you know if a source is reliable? Let's consider an example:
You're at a neighborhood picnic, fixing yourself a peanut butter sandwich, when a man
named Conrad introduces himself and warns you that a plain peanut butter sandwich may give
you heartburn. He hands you the grape jelly, explaining that peanut butter is easier to
digest when you eat it with jelly. At that point a nearby woman named Vera joins the
conversation and says that she's quite sure that adding jelly won't make any difference.
As they argue, you learn the following facts about their backgrounds and how they reached
their conclusions about peanut butter digestibility:
Vera |
Conrad |
|
| Education | PhD in nutrition | MBA |
| Occupation | Research scientist for the Food and Drug Administration | CEO of the company that makes that swirled peanut butter and jelly spread |
| Information-gathering procedure | Conducted a double-blind study
with 1000 subjects in five countries |
Felt ill last time he had a peanut butter sandwich without jelly |
Which person would you be more likely to trust? Think carefully now, your health depends on it ...
So, evaluating the source of information is a powerful strategy, but it also has its limitations. Many of our sources of information lie in the gray area between Vera and Conrad; they have some idea what they're talking about, and they're more or less honest, but it's still quite possible that they could be wrong. We also get a lot of information secondhand, from people who got it from some other source that we know nothing about. This means that we need some way of evaluating the information itself, apart from the source.
One simple way to do this--so simple that you probably don't even
realize you're doing it--is to consider the basic plausibility of the information.
Does it make sense to you? Does it fit well with the rest of your knowledge about the
subject, or does it contradict something that you're pretty sure about? Can you imagine
how it could be true? Does it sound like things you've heard before that turned
out to be false?
These sorts of questions help you to determine the burden of proof. Once that's settled,
you can ask yourself: Do I really care whether this is true? If you decide that
it's not particularly important you can just assume that it's true (or false) and
get on with your life. If, on the other hand, you decide that you really need to know one
way or the other, then you must press on with your evaluation. You can still start by
making an assumption, but then you need to put your information skills to work. There are
two basic ways to do this:
Check other sources -- in other words, do some research.
Check the world itself -- that is, do some testing.
Before we move on, let's try putting your powerful new information-evaluation toolkit to work!
Written by Ilya Farber
Copyright © 1998 Encylopaedia Britannica, Inc
Gloria Floren, Letters Department, MiraCosta College, One Barnard Drive,
Oceanside, California 92056. U.S.A. |
| | MiraCosta College | MiraCosta College Library | Letters Department | Floren Home |Comments & Questions | |