Although I am a conservative, I’ve never been enamored with Reagan. I will concede that he was a much better president than I gave him credit for back in the day but a saint, he wasn’t. Still, one thing I always knew he had right was ‘trust, but verify’.

Now, Reagan used that slogan in the Cold War talking about nuclear disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union but it’s really a very common sense approach to all information. We don’t need to verify unimportant stuff but we shouldn’t take any information as definitely true just because it comes from a trusted source – or an expert.

First off, under the best of circumstances and with the best of intentions, sometimes people just flat get it wrong. They aren’t lying or out to deceive – they just goof. We’ve all been there – the problem is that too many of us assume that sticking letters after a name makes the person immune from error. Hopefully it does cut down significantly their error rate in their field of expertise – but even Einstein occasionally made simple mistakes. Error comes with being human and letters behind your name don’t get rid of it, not ever.

This includes me. I have a lovely set of letters: BA, MPS. Aren’t they pretty? What they tell you is that I have a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Political Science degree. What they don’t tell you is whether or not I know what system of government is used in Djibouti. As a matter of fact, I don’t – I’d have to look it up.

My area of expertise is in American Politics, not International Relations and certainly not African Comparative Politics. So I have BA, MPS behind my name – but that only tells you what degrees I have, not my actual expertise.

Or if I even know what I’m talking about. The only way to find out is to check out what facts I include – if I can’t even get that right you shouldn’t pay any attention to my analysis. This trick works for most fields – it’s also central to most investigative interviews – check the stuff that can be verified because liars are often lazy or giving false facts to cover the lies.

Same is true when someone has made a dumb mistake – nine times out of ten, they simply remembered wrong and their analysis is based on that factual error. So if you check the facts, you uncover the error.

So, that means we can rely on the fact checkers, right? HECK NO. That’s just creating a new layer of people who can both lie and make mistakes. You shouldn’t assume the worse – stupidity explains a lot more than malice – but don’t assume they are right because they have a made up title that doesn’t even require high school graduation. Search engines are no substitute for actual research; a great tool shouldn’t be mistaken for a great analysis.

So rely on your own review of the source – and no, Wikipedia doesn’t count. If the article says ‘so and so said’ X then it should also tell you when and where so and so said X – so go watch that part of the video or read an actual transcript. If you can’t track down the source in two clicks or less, the entire article is suspect. Bad journalism and activism look a lot alike – neither should be used as a source for good information or analysis.

Academia has a few other tricks to help weed out the good from the bad information. Science has the easiest of all – read the methodology. If the methodology is crap, so is the paper. It’s not worth the effort trying to figure out if the conclusion might be right because bad methodology can only be fixed by good methodology. Unless you plan to repeat the study, just toss the thing.

First you’ve heard of that, huh? Worse, you haven’t a clue where to start either. Don’t feel bad – that’s because you literally were never taught actual science in school. Science isn’t the facts derived from it; science is the methodology that determines those facts. Literally, an ancient Greek guy in a himation* could take a stick, some string and a long walk and prove the circumference of the Earth to within a few miles. He could do real science (okay, mostly math but still science). Most of us can’t.

Where to start is easy – grab a methodology textbook and read the thing. Read three of them and some folks would call you an expert – and they wouldn’t be wrong. But what you’re looking for is basic methodology – don’t worry about how to set up electron microscopes – worry about how to know that the experiment is measuring what it thinks it is measuring and that those results mean something in the real world.

The fancy terms are internal and external validity – but don’t get hung up on the wording. You’re just making sure this thing does what they said it did. It’s not as hard as it sounds – if a guy in a himation can measure a planet with a stick and some string, you can tell if a sample is randomized or not.

Final tip: any media that uses Wikipedia as an information source, ESPECIALLY about issues and individuals, should be ignored. It’s just a game of Round Robin where articles cite articles that cite Wiki which cites the articles – there’s no original source in the whole mess. That can safely be assumed to be nonsense and ignored.

Looking up the facts, understanding the basics of methodology and knowing good from bad sources is all you really need to sort out 90% of the trash information. Reading a couple books and using Duckduckgo will make you a great little fact checker in no time – and you don’t even have to hire anyone.

*Okay, toga would have sounded better – but the Romans wore togas, not the Greeks. And it was the pesky Greeks who first figured out the circumference of the Earth. Can’t get my own facts messed up in a blog about how to get facts straight, now can I? 😉