Source critisism and making an informed choice

Boy, is this ever getting harder to come by. As a sort of disclaimer early on, I will not provide any kind of links or such to back up eventual claims to any of my opinions or statements here.


There exists a hypothesis that this age of information technology and the access to the vast amount of information that it brings is actually making people dumber. Or, I guess you should say misinformed. It’s not really difficult to understand where this is coming from. Many people tend to only take in information that can claim some sort of consensus with their already state opinions. Coincidentally, in discussion boards all over the internet, the debate rages on in topics you had no idea people invested so much time in. But they are there and people invest vast amounts of time into them. And what happens when you invest vast amounts of time and interest into something? You tend to become pretty good at it. From my experience, there is a growing internet-specific type of rhetoric surfacing all over the place and the one well versed in this rhetoric can usually out-debate most people without much effort. Never mind that they have little to no actual insight into the topic at hand and the person they are having the discussion with have actual credentials. I’ve been caught myself once or twice until I stopped contributing to these boards at all.

One of the things these new discussion board experts have in common is their attitude towards source criticism. They constantly demand a source to every statement that is being made and when a source is provided, unless you can pinpoint them to the actual quote, they will inevitably nit-pick it apart until your whole argument is turned around. If the quote is actually present, they will find some way to completely write the whole source of. Commonly by using an argument involving sponsorship and/or investment. “Follow the money” is rarely spoken out loud, but that’s basically the motto they go by.

Seems fair you think? Maybe. Allot of the time at least. But as always, people tend to take things to the extremes, in order to protect their perceived truth. I’ve seen examples of nit-picking a valid scientific research paper to the point of where the whole thing just became absurd. Also people completely writing of anything at all reported through western financed media, because they of course have their own agenda and can’t be trusted. Wow. In a period of enlightenment, surely the existence of conspiracy theories should decrease? But apparently not. They thrive (pun intended).

Of course, the conspiracy theorists usually are the ones most versed in the art of internet rhetoric and are not slow to point out that since you cannot out-debate them, you the fool for not seeing the truth.

So where is this post going you ask? Well, I guess I just want to mention that I see a danger that skilled people (yes, these internet rhetoric are undoubtedly skilled, albeit sometimes misinformed) can show so much devotion and intellect in their debates but still be hung up on an idea that is completely off the charts stupid. How, in their search to destroy their opponents’ arguments, is it possible that they never seem to start to question their basic standpoint in the matter? Because that, my friends, is something you very rarely see on a discussion board anywhere. I guess there is just something fundamentally frightening with smart but misinformed people to me. The situation seems like a paradox, yet I see too much of it for it not to be a concern.

I realise now that I haven't adressed the "informed choice" part of the title yet. Well, suffice to say, even if you are versed in source critisism and you don't have a subjective stand on anything, it can be really hard today to actually find our oppinion on the matter. In fact, sometimes it's so hard you end up envying the rhetorics simpler approach of taking a stand and refusing to budge, instead jus learn to more fiercly defend your point or/and attack other points of view...