[kzzzznot]

It’s quite alarming how much misunderstanding I find in articles the mainstream media channels in my country write about about anything I have professional/deep knowledge in. I wonder how much nonsense I’m reading and perhaps blindly accepting about subjects in which I am not as knowledgeable.

[msrenee]

I run into that all the time. I've got a solid grasp of biology and have a lot of knowledge about animals. It's pretty rare that I find an article that draws the conclusions I feel should be drawn from the information. I had to stop reading an article posted on this site the other day, as early in the article, they claimed that no one knows why plants produce latex. Obviously, that's not true so I went to see how hard the info would be to find and it's right there in the Wikipedia article on natural latex. I can forgive not knowing, but I can't forgive making a claim like that when the information is so accessible.

So what am I being told about economics or international relations that's just completely untrue? I don't even know enough to know what's an obvious lie, so how do I know what to read up on to verify the claims? How do I know that the source I'm using to verify the article isn't complete bunk itself? It's kind of terrifying.

[UncleMeat]

But isn't this evidence that you should rely on the conclusions of experts? What you are describing here is that amateurs fail dramatically to synthesize correct beliefs about a subject, but if you spend years immersed in that subject you are much more capable of doing this correctly.

[datavirtue]

Same. I take raw video with a grain of salt.