SIFT

[cos]

This twitter thread describes a very good method for dealing with and sharing online information about breaking news, very relevant now with the invasion of Ukraine but it's relevant all the time: https://twitter.com/holden/status/1496889691936727042

S - Stop, and consider whether you know what you're seeing/reading and what you know about it.

I - Investigate the source, with an eye towards a) is it a source likely to know about what they're reporting, and b) does this source have incentives to check themselves and get things right?

F - Find better coverage. Search for others reporting the same thing. Look for sources you know have credibility.

T - Trace the origin of the information. Sometimes several articles report the same thing, but when you read you find they all attribute it to the same source, and that initial source may have unknown reliability.

Click the link to read Mike Caulfield's thread summarizing it, or here for more: https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/

Comments

[bluepapercup]

Holy cow how have I not heard of this guy’s blog before? I’ve just spent the last hour reading it and I am so impressed. I will absolutely be sharing SIFT with people, most especially my parents.

[wotw]

This is good stuff and I'm glad you're amplifying it. But like all good advice, it sometimes threatens to get misapplied. Yes, if you're evaluating an argument based on facts, you want to investigate the source. But if you're evaluating an argument based on logic, you only need to investigate the logic. Abraham Lincoln used to make this point a lot, usually with Euclid as an example: "If you tell me Euclid was well known as a liar, it won't make me doubt his proof that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees".

In the last few years, I believe I've seen a massive increase in false factual claims (which is bad), a massive increase in warnings to be skeptical of factual claims, and in particular to check the sources (which is good) and a pretty substantial increase in people (absurdly) rejecting logical arguments because they don't know enough about the source (which is bad). I suspect the latter is a consequence of the many public warnings about checking your sources, and that it is perhaps the price we have to pay for those warnings. Of course it might well be a price worth paying.

Re: SIFT

[cos]

This does not even purport to be advice about how to evaluate arguments. It's about evaluating news and information about current events, mainly. It doesn't even hint that it's applicable to "logical arguments" and there's nothing about this process that suggests it makes sense to use for such a purpose. It's about seeing reporting of facts and evaluating whether to trust or re-share those reports.

Now, maybe you're right that lots of people out there are mis-applying "check the source" to refute logical arguments because they're seeing a lot of warnings about unverifiable or false reports. I haven't seen that. Or maybe you're misunderstanding what people are doing, because you don't often get that people mistrust biased arguments that have some valid logic in them, because they can't tell whether the source is leaving relevant things out, and checking the source is a valid way of deciding how much leeway to give them and how much to trust the picture they're giving you. That's not an attack on the logic itself, but I have noticed that you sometimes interpret it that way. So... I can't tell if what you're saying is really prevalent, but try to be thoughtful about why people might distrust what you think is a purely logical argument, because you may not be seeing those interactions fully.