From time to time I get those messages from folks around me - "have you seen that?! 😱 vaccines don't work!" with a link to some anonymous video on YouTube. For the sake of freedom of speech, it's great to have alternative points of view around. I totally support an open discussion, it's a wonderful feature of the modern world with minimum censorship on the web. But we cannot or rather should not assume that just because something is asserted in a YouTube video, spoken, printed form - it is true and we have to agree with it. Abundance of information imposes certain responsibilities on an audience and requires certain skills of consuming information. The skills that weren't in such demand half a century ago now become essential for day to day life. Here I gathered a list of basic flags that can help to identify a majority of misleading statements and escape falling into the trap of fraud.

Hygiene#

Throughout history people acquired a similar set of skills in the practice of food consumption. Those weren't very useful for hunters and gatherers, whose life was bright, but short, full of perils much bigger than microbes on unwashed apples. To find an apple at all you might have been considered lucky, so there was a great danger of starvation. With progress in agriculture and population growth, lack of food becomes less of a problem than wars and diseases. To fight the latter one people started practising baths. Thanks to Islamic Golden Age we now have a hard soap 🧼. Thanks to Dr John Snow in the late 19th century, people started looking after water sources 🚿. We now wash hands routinely, wash food before eating, clean and air our houses. It became so natural, we don't even think much about it, we just wash our hands after using a loo or before a meal. We learned our lesson with the black death, cholera and many others. It cost us the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, it's actually a shame that it took us so long.

📰 Information#

We generate and consume more and more information every year. We rely on it when we take medicine, when we choose our diet, when we vote or decide where to live. Therefore the price of taking inaccurate data and making a decision based on it is quite high in certain cases. Obviously not everything that was spoken, printed, published on Netflix or communicated in any other way is true. People do make false assertions not only because they want to trick an audience, but also due to carelessness or ignorance. Such false assertions can take various degrees: from a little exaggeration or rough guess up to a total deception. It doesn't mean that we should start doubting everything, as we don't sterilise every little piece of food we put in our mouths. But we should be a little more careful - should keep an open and inquisitive mind.

🔍 Signs to look out for#

Questionable, suspicious and untrustworthy information usually has certain signs that we can routinely look out for to avoid a harmful piece of advice and vote for a liar. The same way as we avoid eating spoiled food.

Perhaps the simplest one is the freshness of information. Advice to cure tuberculosis with lemons and fresh air used to be somewhat effective 100 years ago, but today antibiotics work a little better. Obsolete information can be dangerous as well as expired food. You won't eat rotten potatoes or drink expired milk.

The source should be known. We naturally don't take food or drinks from unknown people, we don't buy a sandwich from some guy with no licence on a street. We don't accept a drink from a stranger risking being poisoned or infected. Same way we should question and be exceedingly careful with information received from an unknown guy on the internet. We don't know their names - they don't even risk their reputation should they delude us!

Information with no references to data sources, to scientific articles, laws, official regulations should not be trusted the same way we don't trust food with damaged labels or no label at all. Would you risk eating a protein bar with no label on it being allergic to peanuts?

Request to take it on faith is a bad sign. Nothing should be taken on faith. No matter how long this person lived, how confident they look or how wise they claim they are. Trust is something that is deserved over an extended period of time. And even with trustworthy people, vital information should be checked, because they simply could be misinformed too. You won't accept a piece of bread that your naughty dog fetched for you from the litter bin, no matter how friendly he is. In fact you won't allow a dog to eat it either.

Flaws in logic are certainly a red flag. They mean the author is trying to deceive us, deliberately or not. Claims with no reasoning or with reasons that are not relevant or don't even belong to the argument at all. Insufficient reasons. Jumping into conclusions. Missing pieces of an argument. Claims that are in fact assumptions are probably the most common. And many other argument fallacies including the classic one that even has a Latin name "post hoc ergo propter hoc". We should become alert when we spot a flaw in the claim, as well as we become alert when we spot mould on a strawberry or bread. We immediately dispose of such food (if you don't, please do, it could be very dangerous).

🏁 Summing up#

This is not a complete list of flags to detect fishy messages of course. But rather a basic one, over the time we devise a lot more principles that work even better for the environment where we live or work in, for our occupation and culture. But one thing is assured, the world of information around us changes pretty fast, more and more intricate gimmicks are developed to deceive us, so we have to improve our defence accordingly. There is a good book and a few videos related to this I read and enjoyed and can recommend for you, please check out the "references" section below.

References#

I hope you find it useful. Did I miss anything here? Is there anything else I can read about "critical" thinking? If you have any questions or disagree with me please let me know, I’m always happy to hear from you!

I hope you have a great day!

🥰 Thanks to Sergei Nikitin and Liubov Danilenko for reading drafts of this!