Quote:
Originally Posted by oolceeoo
In this Information age, I'm beginning to realize that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between information that is true or false. There is just TOO much information out there, it is becoming impossible to be sure that any of it is true or false.
The internet is the haystack, and the needle is the truth. Good luck finding it.
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Don't buy into that. Things are a lot better now. It used to be that you had the information your government or a newspaper gave you. That's it. Believe it or don't. And if you don't believe it you have no way to find out what the truth actually is without physically traveling somewhere.
These days you can find information from multiple sources. If you want to know about Kosovo you can read what the Albanians, the UN, and the Serbs think about every point in the relevant history and you can check and double check any fact you wish.
Luckily in most cases the sources mostly agree giving you a nugget of truth. Typically the disagree in "spin" and in details.
For example maybe in a given massacre you get figures of 2,000, 3,198, and 10,000 from very different but reasonably credible sources. Likely there are details of how they got those numbers and fair reasons why they may be different. But you can be reasonably sure that a massacre happened and a lot of people were killed.
Spin is a bit harder to deal with. Usually it involves selective ommision of facts and reinterpritation of facts, mixed in with some speculation. You just have to handle that as best you can. Multiple sources helps, as does considering the motivations of the writers.