This is the tenth in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and the Table of Contents with links to all the other articles in the series, click here.
Assuming that you are exercising a reasonable amount of critical thinking and discretion when you’re doing research, including when you’re looking for and at primary sources, it is also reasonable to trust most of your sources most of the time. This is particularly true if you hew to the principles I’ve articulated throughout this series and you’re doing things like
eliminating as much AI garbage from your online research as you can
understanding why Wikipedia and other online sources are less reliable than sources that use a traditional editorial review process
judiciously separating fact and argument when you review a source
understanding how the principles behind academic research support the validation of information and using it to your advantage
All these things, as well as understanding the inherent vulnerabilities of natively digital data and the value of healthy skepticism as discussed in the previous essay in this series, will help you become sensitive to whether or not the information you encounter passes the sniff test… or whether something smells rotten.
The best defense against getting taken in by bad information is a good offense, and the more robust and well-practiced your bullshit detector, the better off you are as a researcher. The more quickly and effectively you can evaluate a source and know whether it’s worth your time, the more quickly and effectively you can do your job.
The problem is that while these things are often clear, they are not always clear. Even with the horsiest of horse sense and the gain on your bullshit detector set to its very highest, a person sometimes encounters information whose validity, reliability, and worth just isn’t easy to assess.
When this happens, what is needed is a tidy whack of historian methodology plus a bit of old-school journalism practice plus a confidently measured quantity of differential diagnosis. Put them together, and you have a five-step verification system that has, so far, worked for me in every case where I’ve had to use it.
The steps of this method are as follow:
Is it possible?
Is it probable?
Independent Confirmation, or The Rule Of Three
What are the alternatives?
How badly do you want it to be true?
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