Search results are useless, AI is poisoning Wikipédia. While I do have the patience to read primary sources in my field of study, it becomes a nightmare to repeat this process for every bit of information I want.
I’m almost signing up for Encyclopedia Britannica. I don’t know what else to do.
For news: the Bylines network in the UK. They have a source checker for every article.
Similar to the top comment, I learned leftist political theory (mindset in their case). Once you understand what capitalism and socialism truly are, you have almost like a shield to protect you from certain propaganda. This sounds arrogant, but its genuinely been my experience
I’m very critical on what kind of information I even need on daily basis. If my only reason for getting information on something is To Be Right On The Internet, I don’t bother. I don’t need to know shit about how a particle accelerator actually works and it has no bearing on my personal life. If I want to satisfy an intellectual curiosity about something, I can get some pop-science about it from a source that seems credible enough after a cursory glance (they need to cite studies/statistics at the very least, and I take a look at the studies too depending a bit on the gravity of the matter. I’m not going to scrutinize a cooking video about a historical dish too deeply, I’ll assume the general idea is close enough - but I will be very critical of anything talking about politically divisive topics, especially ones where there are people who have a very strong idea of what the “correct” opinion is), but I keep the awareness that it does NOT make me an expert and I should NOT inject myself into conversations about the matter (except to ask questions). And if some smalltalk touches on the topic, I can frame my comments appropriately like “I’m not familiar with the topic but my understanding was…”. Though even then I’d consider the critical thinking capabilities of the person I’m talking to. If I think they’re dumb enough to take what I say as a fact despite the framing, I’ll not say anything.
As for actually important information: local news, universities of good reputation, science organizations of good reputation. All the while keeping in mind that they’re not infallible. There’s just a greater probability that the information there is accurate and unbiased. In general I’ve taught myself to think of the world in terms of probabilities, not in binary “true/false” statements.
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What kind of information are you looking for?
You don’t really.
Skepticism is a practiced skill, rather than just “being skeptical”, you can learn how to assess credibility of a source, and develop a habit of doing so.
I quite like skeptics guide to the universe podcast. Although I admit I usually skip chunks of each episode.
Another avenue is researching about cognitive biases. We all do it.
Nothing is a panacea against slop, but for general search, I’ve become a huge fan of Kagi. Gave up Google years ago, went to DDG, but Kagi is a cut above. There is a subscription fee, however. (Not shilling - no association with them, just a happy user).
AI is poisoning Wikipédia.
Huh?
Yeah I don’t get that. Wikipedia is a fine source.
Wikipedia has an army of human writers that probably don’t take too kindly to AI.
It’s actually about 15 people that mostly maintain it.
[citation needed]
Anyone can make edits, but it’s mostly done by a handful of people.
This guy for example created 1/3rd of the articles.
https://youtu.be/JhNczOuhxeg?si=BkpyXFESIkJHHwOQ
Yeah, they clearly stated their need to find a way to get reliable information
I don’t know if it’s a location as much as a mindset for me.
I look for fallacies and falsehoods and should they arise at rates that would.be hard to chalk up as honest error, I stop trusting the source.
I’m a user of Brave Search and I get reliable information with every search. I wonder what kind of information you’re even looking for though. And Wikipedia is still pretty reliable for me… Maybe try Brave Search instead of Google?
I didn’t even know Brave had a search engine, is it any good? I use duckduckgo and it’s okay.
edit - you said it’s good. I wonder what others think/how it compares to DDG and the big evil one.
Brave gives higher quality search results than DDG but its not as good at niche queries. If you’re looking for something very specific then use DDG. But if your query is about a really broad, general topic then Brave will probably give you better results.
RSS ( multiple sources for current events) , Wikipedia, and forums.
Use the Google flag of “before:2022” added to any search. This will limit returned results to only those captured before 2022, which is when AI slop feedback started. Obviously this doesn’t work for current events, but if the data you’re looking for doesn’t need to be recent it can be useful.
Example:
this actually did show me slightly better results, although the results were nowhere near a slam dunk.
I just follow you around and read what you throw out.
really you don’t. you read forum posts and try to guess to what degree the information is credible.
Yeah, forum posts are becoming really useful again. A few years ago whenever someone posted a question to a forum you could often find the same snarky remark in the comments: ‘just google it’. There was even a website created to add to the snark (let me google that for you). And there was some truth to that comment. Usually you could find the answer pretty easily with a quick search.
But that’s not the case anymore. With AI slop, search engines are getting less and less helpful. Slop has polluted our search results just like plastic has polluted our oceans. It’s at the point now where search engines are almost useless for large subsets of common queries. So we are slowly returning to a pre-search engine era. In this new, post-search engine era, forum posts provide a very useful way of providing information. Long live the forum.
most news are from propaganda sources, look for how its being worded in the title.
And what photo they’re using. Most news outlets use unflattering pictures of the people they don’t like.
