How do you know, which news should you trust or not? Whom to trust?
We believe that the Sun is much larger than the Earth, that the earth is warming roughly spherical planet that rotates on its axis every 24 hours and it revolves around the Sun once every 365 days. And we believe that we were born on a particular date, that we were born to two human parents and each of our human parents on an earlier date. We believe others think and feel like we do, and we know we aren’t surrounded by robots, read headlines every day, but it’s hard to know which news should you trust. We often rely on authorities and experts instead of checking everything ourselves, so learning whom to trust really matters.
Why We Can’t Trust Everything We Hear
We believe many things without direct observation because we can’t verify everything ourselves. Instead, these beliefs are mostly based on what you’ve been told. Without testimony, we couldn’t pass knowledge to others or to the next generation..
We would know much, much less about the world around us. Asking experts helps us learn, but it doesn’t always give correct knowledge. Even the most highly respected authorities can turn out to be wrong.
If you want a practical framework to evaluate claims before reacting, read our article “Changing someone’s mind with facts”.
How Authorities Mislead Us: Even When They Don’t Mean To
Sometimes respected authorities lie and claim knowledge they don’t have. Sometimes it happens just because they make a mistake. They think they know everything when they don’t know. For example, a number of respected economists expect the financial collapse of 2008. They turned out to be wrong.
Maybe they were wrong because they were overlooking some important evidence. Or maybe they were wrong because they were misinterpreting some of the evidence they had noticed. And they could be wrong simply because they were reasoning carelessly from the total body of their evidence. But whatever the reason, they turned out to be wrong an many people who trusted their authority ended up losing lots of money, losing lots of other people’s money, on account of that misplaced trust.
Appealing to authority can teach us, but it can also cause major errors. It’s important to all of us to be able to distinguish those occasions on which we can safely and reasonably trust authority from those occasions on which we can’t.
How to Know Which News You Should Trust
In order to do that, nothing is more useful than an authority’s track record on a particular topic. If someone performs well often, they will likely keep performing well in similar situations. And this generalizations holds true of the testimony of authorities as much as of anything else.
If someone consistently predicts winners, we can trust them in those areas, not in unrelated fields. If other forecasters have a poorer track record on those same two topics, then we shouldn’t trust them as much. For a detailed checklist on how to spot fake or misleading news, refer to How to Spot Fake News by FactCheck.org.
Just as intellectual maturity means learning from evidence and refining our judgement (see “Age Is Just a Number for Being Matured”), so does recognising which news to trust.
Conclusion: Which News Should You Trust
When judging an authority, ask first: What is their track record on this topic? And notice that you can apply the very same lesson to yourself. Your instincts tell you that you’ve just met the right person, but what sort of yrack record do your instincts have on topics like this one? Have your instincts proven themselves to be worthy of your support? Just as we judge other people’s testimony by their track record, so, too, we can judge our own instincts by their track record.
And this brings us one step closer to an objective view of ourselves and our relation to the world around us.
Our Social Accounts
