Media Literacy Checks
I figure books are a bit too high brow, but I thought I would write a review of roughly 5-6th grade media literacy 'cause I've found a lot of people have forgotten and that's sad (I'm not sure what these are in other countries). I tried roughly in order.
Check everything you find for a source before you believe it. Check opponents and yourself.
If a source is given, check that source. (Usually I check the most used sources and then choose a random other on a key supporting assertion).
Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Source
Check your sources' reliability
Check left, center, right leaning bias
Check for Media Bias
Remember that Google's algorithm is f*ed.
If given a medical journal/article, read more than the Abstract, particularly read the methodology, bias, funding, and conclusions.
Check for your own biases in information.
If counter attacking, with a fact check, check your own sources.
Quick checks:
Is the population of the study 250+?
What is the confidence level/error rate of the study?
Who is in the population of the study/experiment?
Does the methodology make sense or is it filled with bias?
Check everything you find for a source before you believe it. Check opponents and yourself.
I see people plain believe it because it was posted to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, without earmarking it that it might not be true because it fits with your worldview, also not updating what you do or don't know.
You buy more because a guy said when you're hungry you buy more. Proves to be untrue and was updated since.
A simple fact check sometimes is really quick. Is this true?
If a source is given, check that source.
Trump posted a source, I checked that source. It turned out they looked at the graph without reading the text above the graph. What they stated what the graph meant was contradicted by the text. Two second check.
Trump made a wild statement about insurance. I fact checked the number given. He stated it was about ALL of the US, the original source, of which I could only find one, was about a particular state of which the number spanned a long period of time.
(BTW, this this the power of the quotation mark in Google and the minus before a word).
Someone stated that burnt carbs leads to cancer. I checked the source. The source said they made the material purposefully radioactive and applied it to skin. I pointed this out, so they linked me to other sources, like cancer.org. cancer.org had taken down the page apparently after reading the original study. The other sources lead to dead ends (i.e. 404s). I pointed out that this was true and they still did not answer me. (BTW, it was the org that did the OMG, we made something radioactive, and it was the material that made the person have cancer, not the radioactivity. We made an apple radioactive. Therefore the apple gives people cancer. WTF. You don't think it's the radioactivity that you ADDED to the apple or selection bias?)
Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Source
But I heard it from my VP, who heard it from a Facebook page owner, who heard it from her neighbor, who might have heard it from another neighbor, who might have heard it from 3 more chains of people, but I'm not sure who they are.
So this is the grapevine problem and if you've been paying attention, oral storytelling often has exaggerations inherent in it to make it easier to remember. (Often with hand gestures too)
Primary sources, Secondary and Tertiary aren't always reliable. But when it's down 10 without primary sourcing, then yes.
Primary sources, if you were paying attention in school, can be unreliable because of the adrenaline messing with memory issues. But having a primary account can often help clear what they actually said (Say, finding out that Freytag is a pre-Nazi ideologue who centered emotion as the story driver instead of listening to the very wrong internet on what he thought the story driver was and giving you the real story, which I bothered to do.) So, for example, having the bill of sale of George Washington's slaves helps clear up date confusion.
Secondary Sources
At the same time, Primary sources won't clear up different PoVs on a large event. So answering, "What really happened during the civil war" you need a secondary source to do an overview. Secondary sources have the weakness of selection bias and confirmation bias. They can select the accounts that confirm their suspicions without investigating the primary source. This is why having multiple Secondary sources helps.
Tertiary is anything outside of the first or second hand account. Second hand can be still too close to do an overview. But this has the weakness that if the primary sources are missing, (See Samguk Yusa's weaknesses.) that the tertiary source cannot be checked.
I didn't check back with my source
This lady lost her cat, must be Haitian neighbors. News reporters check back with source. "Oh I found the cat months ago in my basement and apologized to my Haitian neighbors... why are you asking me again?"
If you don't check back with your source, you can also make up whatever you like about the source, not give credit and then say crap like OMG, Shakespeare created the five-act story structure, even if that's historically untrue as I well covered over and over and over again and the myth of the Black Friars candles still persists in Lit classes today to tell everyone this is how plays were done, not that it was invented much later in history and retconned into place mostly by AH genocidal Gustav Freytag.
Thus you get Kenneth Rowe plagiarizing 2 people. Lajos Egri hating on women repeatedly, mostly Dorothy Brande (not named, but sideways mentioned) and poor Gertrude Stein again (though by name) and failing to mention Freytag, etc.
Check your sources' reliability
Right posted this claim from this guy in a town hall meeting saying that "Cats went missing in the Park" and then conveniently cut out the part where he advocated for red lining, making him wholly racist. The beginning of the statement talked about how the residents were afraid of Black people moving into the town and how there should be a segregation between where Black people were going to live and the white residents. How reliable is the "But cats are missing" statement then? Not very. That's why that part of the speech was cut off.
Check left, center, right leaning bias
This is a pretty quick google source, but there are resources that do this for you.
Check for Media Bias
Covered by our sponsor, XO Bagel, which is why we rated them the top number one bagel on this list of bagels.
Sponsored by the EA game changers network. I got a free version of the game for reciprocity bias.
Remember that Google's algorithm (all Algorithms) is f*ed.
Google automatically has set your search results to go towards your political spectrum. You can turn this off. But remember that it's customized to you. So if you do 300 searches, say on how cats are a figment of everyone's imagination. And click through to those articles, then when you say search for Are dogs real compared to cats, the anti-cat articles are going to show up. Just because it shows up first on Google, does not mean it has rigor. They let go of that model in the 2010's.
This goes for Facebook, Twitter, blue sky, etc. The Algorithm will show more of the thing the more that you click and interact on. certain subject. It's the terf raging in the comments, OMG, why, why do I keep seeing trans "surgeries" that must be an uptick of the occurrence of the phonomena. Nope. It's you clicking and posting under those things that made it happen more frequently without checking the source's reliability before believing it.
If given a medical journal/article, read more than the Abstract, particularly read the methodology, bias, funding, and conclusions.
Do I have to cover the monkey pox thing again? Again, articles from science orgs are particularly paid for put shocking things in their abstract that do not pan out in the actual paper if you read it in order to get wider funding because the government pays them shit amount of money, so they try to state things that aren't true.
Burnt carbs cause cancer—what the article says, we made burnt carbs radioactive, put it on skin and then were "Shocked" when it mildly caused cancer, which then through rigorous testing without the radioactivity--other orgs were "shocked" that it didn't cause cancer, and then we were called out about it, and then linked to the orgs who had disconnected their websites because the rigorous testing had failed and oh fuck, now our funding is looking terrible.
Bacteria in mice causes AUTISM.—Never mind that autism isn't really defined for mice, but whatever. Let's roll with that title, though the experiment was only done once in only one country and we might have fudged the results of the final study to get funding and there was never a repeat of the experiment to say it was true, and the news media ran wild to try to say that mice==humans. And then people try to say from there that vaccines cause autism after the initial bad study where that doctor's license was revoked. Mice are not humans.
Women are not likely to have period pain and are faking it, declares article conducted with only men. lol
This is why you look at the methodology of the study. Does it pass the benchmarks? Or are they publishing early to only get funding because the governments of the world don't want to fund it and they are fudging it anyway? Looking at you Dunning Kruger effect.
Check for your own biases in information
Common ones include things like loving the fancy name of a study to memorize to look smart.
Chekovsky-Ledding Syndrome, sounds cool and plays into my confirmation bias, even though I didn't read the original study, so I'm going to abuse it even though I don't know an ounce of psychology because man, don't I look smart when I say if you go to a grocery store hungry you buy more even if this hasn't be rigorously tested?
BTW, this is a made up syndrome, and the actual study was debunked: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2019/01/16/do-people-actually-buy-more-groceries-when-they-shop-hungry/
Methodology is a video game? Oh c'mon. And the population is only 68 people. No.
I see all of you out there abusing Imposter syndrome, trying to look smart when what you really mean is inferiority complex, but you don't want to use inferiority complex because Oh man, that doesn't sound as cool.
I'm telling you, if you feel like 250 words written is imposter syndrome, your ego must be to the distance of Kuiper belt. Go back and read the original assertions and article instead of blindly parroting others. It says, something fantastic happens to you that you feel you do not deserve. And I'm sorry, if you think 250 word written is the equivalent of being from a minority group that has been historically marginalized and being told all of their life that they, from a poor broken down neighborhood with an unprecedented amount of gun violence, and trauma were never, ever going to make it was going to end up in an IVY League school as Cum Laude of their class, such that they have an out of body experience, that they feel they cheated and did not deserve it then seriously, seriously, unless you really did overcome like inspiration porn level odds, like losing both arms and legs, and losing all speech and then having to type only with your eyes to write those 250 words, then your ego is sure something. Your hubris at claiming imposter syndrome sure is high there. You can be angry at being called out, but it doesn't change the fact that you fell for a bias because you didn't want to call it what it was, inferiority complex. But dude, it doesn't sound as cool. Seriously, my fellow writers stop falling for but it sounds cool type of bias and actually know what it means before you use it.
Is this thesaurus syndrome? Did I just make that up? Yes. Does it sound like a good name of a syndrome and bias? Absolutely. Should I give it a more sciencey and false basis so you believe it.
In a study of 5 participants who were given fancier versions of words, done by the University of Halifax, in St Paul, New South Wales, 10 people were given fancy long words they did not understand, but 5 were found to be too smart for the study because they actually looked up the words they were assigned with search engines and dictionaries and thus thrown out.
The remaining five stayed in the study and failed to use a dictionary to actually look up the words and proceeded to use the words wrong in everyday speech for one month. We never gave them an actual thesaurus, but only gave them the category of meaning the word was in such as mood, object, subject and then watched them fail and recorded all of their speech flagging only the sentences they used with this speech.
We found that two of the people in the study were writers and they were the worst offenders.
We would like to know why one of the participants used "amalgamate" to mean to gather together in a large set of groupings, when Websters defines it as, "transitive verb : to unite in or as if in an amalgam; especially : to merge into a single body;" but didn't bother to ask them why this is and so we're making wild conjectures.
We are calling this thesaurus syndrome and are calling for more funding, but we're hoping you didn't read this far into the article and only read the abstract and were attracted to the stunning reality and great title given to this syndrome... because ya'll are suckers who don't read anything when you're over-saturated with information.
Other things are such as false attribution, because things like Author didn't say this about Rue being Black even though she said it over three times.
And the more famous, Tolkien would have hated Black elves, because clearly he loved the Nazis. (He didn't BTW). When what you're really stating is you didn't read shit from Tolkien past The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and don't want to bother with Silmarillion even though that's the source material for Rings of Power, and you're really disappointed that not all of the cast is white. And you can't figure out that 30 degrees north has all sorts of skin colors of humans on Earth where the Elves spawned because you never looked at a map. That's how deep-seated your racism is going that you need to attribute your racism to the author without evidence that your assertions are true without research. (Looking at the list of writing advice books, dudes, and dudettes and everyone in between, are we writers that made of weak sauce that we have to make out that our own opinions are all Shakespeare and Aristotle?)
If counter attacking, with a fact check, check your own sources
I admit I've fucked this one up royally a few times. *slinks off in corner*.
But yes, check your own sources, and if you can't wait some time before hitting send and give yourself time to check.
Especially if your surname is Trump. OMG, fact checking him is a minefield of I saw where you got that, but that's not what is said because you didn't even bother reading the full sentence.
And then repetition error. Where people copy-paste the orange one without checking his basis in fact. Because ya know, sounds good and shit.
Quick checks for paratext aren't a bad idea
Historicism, queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, critical feminist theory, critical queer theory, authorcism, cultural relativism, etc.
Death of the author, does not mean death of any context at all or over attribution to any of the former because you have an opinion supported by nothing but your opinion.
Problems with the source
Circular sourcing with a wrong argument
Particularly East and South Asian sources have issues with this, though the flavors of how and why are different.
So, I'll give one. Popular FICTION book states unnamed historical figure is Sriratna. New discovery about this character is found, so Korean source states popular book with this name is doing X and X. Indian sources, think because Korean sources state that her name is Sriratna, that's really her name. Korean sources think then that Indian sources confirmed for real that her name is Sriratna, but when you backtrack the sources and go back, it cites the Samguk Yusa. The Samguk Yusa says no such thing. The only name given is Heo Hwang Ok. Sri, BTW, is an honorific in this case (Mr. Mrs. ssi, etc), not supposed to be a part of the name. Furthermore, there are issues with the name Ratna, as it is a Hindi, but not Sanskrit name. But the circle jerk of confirmation bias in a vacuum of information makes it more likely that people will repeat a falsehood.
I had one where someone made a wrong statement based off of the Samguk Yusa. I picked up the book which referred to the Samguk Yusa, and it turned out that the Samguk Yusa said no such thing. The author noted it was interesting that... etc.
Another one that I've pointed out before is the whole sourcing on Ace. Where one particular author on ace, who is not ace himself, absolutely fucking insists (with his anti-trans ideology) to be inserted into every single paper about Aces and discounts primary sources as a valid way to source. And had a little fucking fit about it. !@#$ BTW, I hate him doing this and outright mocked him several times. And given there are only three major scholars on the subject and only one is actually ace and 2 out of the three are women, you probably can find who this one is. If everyone is (forced) to cite one source without any refutation, then yeah, that's circular sourcing. If he sources everyone that agrees with him, and shuns everyone who doesn't (even though that person is fucking ace. WTF dude you have no idea the rage I have, you ego that fragile when you aren't ace?), then they source him, that's not a great way to go.
Check for basic fallacies
Confirmation bias, Selection bias, and false equivalency are the most frequent ones I see. But I also often see Ethnocentricism trailing behind, but I think that's selection bias on my part being an anthropologist type. (Double here. I'm more likely to see it, and I'm more likely to post about it.)
Biased population
The famous one being, of course, studies about females using males as the primary test subjects. Look, these people who can't ever get pregnant nor give physical birth had no adverse side effects hormonally on this birth control pill and... look never got pregnant. Therefore the birth control works!
You have no idea how many studies are like this. Look, Black people don't have racial stress because we sampled only white people...
Always check the basis for the population. Age, etc.
Rats and Mice are not humans
Just that. Dogs can't eat chocolate. Humans can. Rats and mice are a far way off from humans. They are useful models, but it doesn't mean it 100% translates to humans.
An example of this, but a study of rats fed only mustard oil in really high concentrations caused them to have cancer. They then said it applied to humans. This would be equivalent of giving you nothing but mustard powder with scientifically concentrated to take out the mustard compounds and then being shocked, absolutely shocked that you got sick after the thirtieth day of feeding you nothing but this.
Biased opinion with Confirmation bias
"Vaccines cause autism" says anti-vaccine doctor funded by the Koch brothers...
I had a dicier one where there was a study done on mice where they found a gestational bacteria from the gut might cause autism-like symptoms in mice. But there were people who could not read scientific studies saying things like, "Oh, then vaccines cause autism." What~~? Because you can't understand the study, doesn't mean that it says what you want it to say. I had to point out that the title was sensational. That the paper specifically was asking for more funding, that it was a first experiment, and Mice are not humans?
Lacking one of the following: Logos, pathos, ethos
You need all three. Pathos makes no sense without logos. And if you don't have the correct ethos, then how are you really expecting that say, the experiment is true. If you skimmed on the experiment to make sure the results are true, how reliable are you?
Pathos is emotional appeal, which helps appeal to the emotions of the audience. Sometimes you do need empathy. But empathy and emotions can't be the sole argument.
Check the Experimental model for errors or overstatements
The amount of overstatements I've found in scientific studies is amazing.
We fed these rats nothing but this really specific compound found in soy at 400 times their body weight and intake for over three years and were shocked to discover they developed cancer. Several of the subjects died, and in the fifth year they were all dead. We do not think it's because the lifespan of rats is only five years long that they died, but because this compound found in soy is poisonous to humans.
Yeah, red flags. Where is the control? Are the amounts really terrible? Is the margin of upgrade negligible? a .05 increase with an error margin of + or - 5.0.
Was it even peer reviewed? Was it replicated?
Quick Statistics rules:
Margin of error is 2.5% on either side.
This is called outliers. Anything within the margin of error can be cooked numbers, statistical anomalies, etc. It's not confirmed. OMG, polls went up 1%. Within margin of error, so might be wrong, plus what's the population and bias of the researcher?
You want a confidence level of 95%. What is the confidence level of the stats before you?
Population error in most papers is a lot more common than you think.
Anything less than 250 does not count as a statistical certainty.
Anything that samples ONLY a certain group without examining why they are examining only that group, without it being part of the stated statistical model should be deeply questioned. For example, if they are asking, Why do women have period cramps? And the sample is examining ONLY cishet white men, you should be asking lots of questions about that.
Going back to the Monkeypox research article where people concluded that Gay men were more prone to Monkeypox without reading the paper. First off, it was in East London, which has a population bias towards the gay community. Second, East London is a poorer area. Thirdly, the paper stated the AIDS epidemic meant that gay people are more likely than straight people to report rashes, etc. Fourthly, and I don't know why I have to say this, any additional gay men they added to the paper and stated were "more likely to have it" were not reported evenly through their statistical analysis as the location of the clinics was not disclosed to vet out other population anomalies.
The old "But we researched on psychology students." "We collected on 45 Psychology students and found out that..." OMG, none of them are old and have a partial college education, but we're going to test them for Alzheimer's and found out that it doesn't exist.
We test 50 IVY League college PHD students in 2020 without financial aid and found that none of them suffer from poverty related illnesses. That's selection bias. A lot of the time science papers will come out with sensational titles to get people to read and then fail the selection biases or population biases. See, they need funding because they pooled 15 people to (excuse this because this is real) "find the cure for Autism." (Gag me.)
Most of the time human-based studies fail basic scientific/statistical rigor. 'cause sciences are underfunded, and they are doing more time marketing than they are doing actual rigorous experiments.
68 people is not enough. Then all being grad students is a terrible sample. Make sure the basis on what you are reading isn't coming from their ass. Make sure they checked for their own biases and gave their sources. If you flag them for not doing these things, and they react by being all indignant and failing to realize basic things like wheat is produced in the "Middle East" (as said in the video), so the first likely pasta is likely to come from there, rather than it coming back and that there is a huge amount of humans trying to retcon their own history because they didn't hire an anthropologist to check over their work, then yeah, I'd pretty much throw that work out and do your own research when you have time. Wild assertions to connect points is something a lot of docs do. Even some beloved documentarians I like very much do it to make the transitions look smoother.
The point is that a little doubt and be willing to pivot isn't a bad idea. Focus on getting the facts correct rather than your pride in being correct.
Oh and for those that love to overattribute to the greats without reading the people's paratext, please don't. If we had this schooling and people adhered to it all the way back to Aristotle, I wouldn't be banging the keyboard so much about wrong assumptions and miscalculations about story structure and finding out that people seem to have absolutely no idea about literature history at all.
Just saying, that you should at least understand 19th century lit, minimalism, modernism, post modernism, and structuralism before you make wild assertions about Elmore Leonard. And don't worry, I'm calling myself out here too, since I barely understood what advice I was cherry picking in the beginning either. But now that I understand the wider context, and where we are now, and how much our education system has failed us, I can make better assessments of if the advice is still useful. And YES, it does matter if the person is a raging misogynist on if their advice is good or not because they are discounting more than half of the population of writers and likely also LGBTQIA with it which means learning how to express yourself authentically with those voices and that point of view would be lacking in their discourse.
And then you sound really smart. But remember to check back with the sources... which is why I spend an inordinate amount of time citing page numbers and giving you screen caps of them. I mark assumptions too, and cite the larger book in a findable context. Because I am often wrong. And this might be a wrong assumption on my part, but I suspect every human on the planet has been wrong at one point or another during our paltry life cycles and terrible memories.
