(2021-02-18) Warzel Don't Go Down The Rabbit Hole

Charlie Warzel: Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole. For an academic, Mike Caulfield has an odd request: Stop overthinking what you see online.

Mr. Caulfield argues that the deck is stacked even further against us. That the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.

“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”

Caulfield argued that the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.

You won’t get less racist reading Stormfront critically, but you might be overloaded by information and overwhelmed.

*Our current information crisis, Mr. Caulfield argues, is an attention crisis.

“The goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention,”*

Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue

In 2016, Mr. Caulfield met Mr. Wineburg, who suggested modeling the process after the way professional fact checkers assess information. Mr. Caulfield refined the practice into four simple principles:

1. Stop.
2. Investigate the source.
3. Find better coverage.
4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

Otherwise known as SIFT.

Mr. Caulfield walked me through the process using an Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine (anti-vax) activist, falsely alleging a link between the human papillomavirus vaccine and cancer.

he navigated to Wikipedia and scrolled through the introductory section of the page, highlighting with his cursor the last sentence, which reads that Mr. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and a conspiracy theorist.

“Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best, unbiased source on information about a vaccine? I’d argue no. And that’s good enough to know we should probably just move on,” he said.

He probed deeper into the method to find better coverage by copying the main claim in Mr. Kennedy’s post and pasting that into a Google search. The first two results came from Agence France-Presse’s fact-check website and the National Institutes of Health.

What is potentially revolutionary about SIFT is that it focuses on making quick judgments. A SIFT fact check can and should take just 30, 60, 90 seconds to evaluate a piece of content.

“The question we want students asking is: Is this a good source for this purpose, or could I find something better relatively quickly?” Mr. Caulfield said. “I’ve seen in the classroom where a student finds a great answer in three minutes but then keeps going and ends up won over by bad information.”

SIFT has its limits. It’s designed for casual news consumers, not experts or those attempting to do deep research.

Christina Ladam, an assistant political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, has seen the damage firsthand.

“The students are confused when I tell them to try and trace something down with a quick Wikipedia search, because they’ve been told not to do it,” she said. “Not for research papers, but if you’re trying to find out if a site is legitimate or if somebody has a history as a conspiracy theorist and you show them how to follow the page’s citation, it’s quick and effective, which means it’s more likely to be used.”

Note: there's a risk here of accepting the "conspiracy theory" label from the MSM status quo.