Let’s face it, even the best of us use some heuristics when choosing information sources to consume. So it’s worth pausing to think which ones are the ones that you specifically use. For me, it boils down to the following three:
- The source must require many hours of focused human labor to produce. Evolutionarily speaking, people do not generally do laborious things for nothing; there is usually a good reason why they do things.
- Things that are filtered out: the social media in its near-entirety, tabloid media, images—in other words, all the things that take 0.5 seconds to produce.
- Things that pass that shouldn’t pass: stuff produced by bad actors with lots of money—think of all the garbage research produced by Coca-Cola, the cigarette industry, the social media industry, rich, corrupt governments.
- Source must not represent (undisclosed) competing interests. This one is meant to address the limitation of filter (1). Basically, this involves asking the question of whether the source of information stands to directly benefit from the information.
- Things that are filtered out: most propaganda that can be identified as such; Coca-Cola, New York Times, Fox News, the cigarette industry, the social media industry, rich, corrupt governments.
- Things that pass that shouldn’t pass: products whose production history cannot be ascertained.
- Source must be appropriate for the content. The medium, method, and process must be appropriate for the information that is being conveyed.
- Things that are filtered out: audiobooks of dense philosophical texts, ads in general (but particularly those claiming health benefits for anything), problems of the third world as depicted by outsiders with a savior complex, and many other less obvious mismatches between the content and medium.
- Things that pass that shouldn’t pass: Things masquerading as educational content—pseudo-intellectual podcasts, flawed educational material that sounds authoritative but isn’t.
All of these criteria require the user to gain a deeper understanding of the source of the information—not just what it says, but also who produces it, how they produce it, who pays for it, who benefits from it and in what way, whether it is the right way of tackling the topic, etc. As a by-product of this brief introspection, it is interesting to note how these common-sense considerations regarding information consumption turn out to be quite similar to those when you buy food in the supermarket. Perhaps there is more to the food-information analogy than meets the eye.