No image search for “food service” gives an accurate picture. If you want to know what food service is like, imagine about 5-15 people getting really irritated in a hot, wet room full of knives. It’s a hard job and anyone who can work in a kitchen… — No image search for “food service” gives an accurate picture. If you want to know what food service is like, imagine about 5-15 people getting really irritated in a hot, wet room full of knives. It’s a hard job and anyone who can work in a kitchen day-in-day-out deserves your respect.

On Saturday, the retail establishment I work in reopened, and on Sunday I flew solo for the entire four hour period of operation. On Monday, I posted on Facebook about my frustration with the fact that people aren’t wearing masks. It wasn’t an attempt to persuade anyone: it was a shout into the void – something that every person working in retail or food service does from time to time. Of course, this time the void shouted back, as every libertarian I went to high school with and am still friends with on Facebook showed up to try to shout me down.

What followed was a staggered and rather protracted argument that lasted the whole day, with appearances by rather well-meaning people – including an ER nurse and a research chemist – who brought expertise to a fight that involved several poorly-constructed memes and at least one video that prominently featured carnival music.

Now, I could go on a tirade about how the resistance to wearing masks is indicative of fragile masculinity, like this piece from Esquire – which, in a fit of pique, I also posted (none of my interlocutors read it, though they certainly commented upon it) – but I don’t think I’m going to. None of that will reach them, because they don’t read, they simply comment. I’m also fairly confident that none of them will read this: the problem is that they don’t read anything that doesn’t immediately agree with them, and they already know that I don’t.

Of course, if any of them note this at all, me writing this is the height of incivility. Because we all know that civility is all about agreeing with the other side and immediately caving to any pressure put upon you. You know, like a free-thinking, clear-eyed philosopher king. And me making this prediction will probably be called the height of pretension or intellectual dishonesty, or whatever.

Okay, so the pique remains. It’s not even about the mask thing at this point, though: it’s about how terrible people are at vetting the sources they use.

The best received lesson I teach is one I call “Satan Day.” I don’t tell my students I call it that.

For two thirds of the year – excluding summer and winter breaks – I teach freshman composition. Though the move to online teaching has thrown a wrench in it, I like to think that I’m fairly good at – at least – some aspects of the job. One of those is the lesson I give in my research writing class on the evaluation of sources.

As a free service, I’m going to provide a truncated version of this lesson here. The people that really need it won’t even get to this portion of what I’m writing, but perhaps the rest of you might get some mileage out of what I’m going to share. It’s a basic tool, and many of my freshman students can use it with some confidence and a bit of prodding after about an hour. It’s known by the vaguely-scatological acronym “CRAAP.”

The CRAAP test gives you five things to evaluate a source on: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.

Rule 0

The first rule of using a source is to actually read it. If you try to take away something from just the headline, you’re failing to actually do research. Headlines are written to evoke interest, they’re written to catch the eye and stick in the mind. This is because revenue-driven sources live and die by attention, and non-revenue-driven sources have to compete with revenue-driven ones.

Only by reading a source does it become usable.

Currency

The currency of a piece of information is basically the question of how recently it came out. Different areas of human knowledge move at different speeds, and it’s important to keep this in mind. A month-old news article may be laughably out of date. A month old computer science paper is fresh off the presses – give it five years, though, and it’s old news. But a five-year-old paper in the humanities is easily usable as a viable source.

Famously, Heraclitus was terrible with computers.

The reason for this is that new information may come out and supersede the old. This happens in current events because they are, by definition, current: what’s happening now. On the other hand, something like engineering or computer science moves a bit slower: it takes time to prototype a process and put it into production, but it still moves fairly quickly. With the humanities – like my own discipline, English, the arts, and history – longer periods of reflection and analysis are necessary: the subject matter is, by definition, fluid and it requires careful consideration to pull out something relevant. In classics, my partner’s discipline, contemporary writers still regularly cite academic works from a hundred-odd years ago, though in fairness, they’re citing those sources to discourse works from over a thousand years ago.

In layman’s terms, it’s best to use the most recent verified information.

Relevance

Paris, TX is exactly what you’d expect. From Wikimedia Commons user Adavyd, put out under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

So let’s say you’re not going to throw something out because it’s too old. It passes the sniff test. But is it actually relevant to the conversation? In regard to the current public health crisis, the novel coronavirus and seasonal coronavirus behave differently: a paper talking about the latter will have no bearing on the former, the same as knowledge about Paris, Texas (an actual place, it turns out,) will tell you nothing about Paris, France.

In broader terms, the question of relevance is fairly simple: does what is being said here actually have a bearing on what is being discussed? If the answer is no, it should be thrown out.

This is, admittedly, more of a problem with freshman students who are trying to fill out a series of check boxes when attempting to write a paper – but it also happens in discussions of current events, when people do a quick google search and just grab whatever comes up first: it’s not always relevant, and it shouldn’t always be included.

Accuracy

Here’s where things get a bit more complicated. Accuracy is the question of how accurate the information being presented is – does it get basic facts about the world wrong? (Consider the map of the US states filled out by a German man, where the entire midwest is labeled either “Ohio” or “Kansas”.) This requires a certain amount of knowledge about the world to actually make a judgment on, and different audiences will have different thresholds that they’re willing to tolerate: for example, some people might entertain the idea that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else, but putting forward that conspiracy theory is a good way to get me to dismiss you. The basic facts that I know about Shakespeare make me incredibly disinclined to go along with that line of reasoning.

However, there are certain things that are generally acceptable across the majority of audiences. Where a lot of beginning writers falter is failing to make a sort of mental Venn diagram where one circle is “what I know about the world” and the other is “what I assume they know about the world” and working from the overlap. They assume that the second circle is contained by the first and work from that starting point.

Something else that falls under this heading is the design of an experiment: every credible research paper has a methodology section. For the sciences, this section will describe how a research study is conducted: the measures used, the sample size, everything. A poorly designed study – one that doesn’t have multiple groups receiving different treatment, doesn’t use a double-blind construction, or simply doesn’t have a large sample size – can’t be trusted. It’s not that it’s necessarily wrong – oftentimes, it’s not even wrong: it’s simply noise. It can’t be considered and must be dismissed until further testing has been done.

Authority

I’ve never seen the person I’m referring to block traffic, but I imagine he would do so with as much style as the nurse on the right side of this image (taken from Time and ultimately from Alyson McClaran at Reuters. — I’ve never seen the person I’m referring to block traffic, but I imagine he would do so with as much style as the nurse on the right side of this image (taken from *Time* and ultimately from Alyson McClaran at Reuters.

Authority here refers to the credibility of the author – do they have direct experience with the subject at hand? Now, in regard to the discussion that inspired this piece, I was rather baffled by the dismissal of the testimony of a nurse about the severity of the situation: here’s someone who is actually on the front lines of the issue, working in a hospital in a county with more than a thousand cases. Yet his testimony is disregarded.

I’m friends on social media with a small handful of medical professionals, and they all seem to agree that the situation isn’t getting better. I’m inclined to believe them, because they have knowledge that I’m aware that I do not.

The fact of the matter is that they spend hours upon hours, days upon days, dealing with the subject, and I don’t. If someone has direct, applicable experience, that experience trumps uninformed speculation.

It’s the same reason that you take your car to the mechanic: presumably, they know more about the subject than you do. It’s also why your mechanic is generally more irritated with the situation if you attempted to make a repair – someone without specialized knowledge attempted something that they aren’t capable of, and made the situation worse as a result.

Or, are they still willing to do the right thing, in spite of themselves? C. Everett Koop had some serious problems, but at least he took the AIDS crisis seriously: he was the only person in the Reagan administration who did.

Now, expertise should not be trusted blindly: not all expertise is created equal. This means, however, that there is a ranking when it comes to expertise, not that expertise isn’t valid. You need to look at track records: has this person been right before? More than once? When they make a mistake, do they acknowledge that it happened? Do they fix it? Do they adjust?

Someone who has made a genuine effort to correct what they have done wrong in the past displays an awareness of their capacity for error and a willingness to improve. Someone who doesn’t admit to fault, ever, can’t be trusted.

Purpose

I consider Purpose to be one of the more important factors to consider, and it’s one that is often mishandled. After you look at everything else: how current, relevant, and accurate the information is, how authoritative the author is, you need to ask yourself – what is this person trying to do?

Are they trying to inform you of something? Are they trying to persuade you to do something? What do they want?

There’s also some shady history with the Atlantic and its role in the development of American intellectual history that’s worth interrogating. But it’s worth interrogating elsewhere.

My inclination is to look at economic factors: are they trying to sell you something? If so, I say throw it out – the first duty of a salesperson is to make a sale. Everything else is secondary. It goes beyond this, though: look at the “about” page of the website you’re looking at – where does the funding come from? For example, I started to trust The Atlantic less after they started taking money from the Koch brothers for one of their projects. I generally consider them trustworthy for reporting, and analysis of non-political topics, but it’s very rare that an organization will do something that threatens their own cash flow.

Of course, non-organizational sources can’t be inherently trusted any more. According to analysis by a journalist that I generally trust, Robert Evans, – and confirmed by a number of other sources, including USA Today, the Washington Post, and even the Daily Mail, a conservative rag from Great Britain – the people behind many of the recent reopening protests are the Dorr family of Iowa. The speculation is that it’s mostly to build a mailing list, which is generally a pretty hot commodity in political circles.

Does this mean that the protests aren’t really happening? Of course not. Does this mean that the anger felt by the protesters isn’t real? No. But it does mean that the vast majority of them are being profited from without their knowledge and consent, and it also means that bad information is being fed into the media ecosystem.

The Most Important Part

Of course, none of this works if you don’t even consider sources that disagree with you. It’s easy to look at something and put it under a microscope to find a fault with it, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t apply the same scrutiny to sources that agree with you. Everything must be considered suspect and everything must be interrogated.

When you see something you want to be true, you have to try to destroy it. You have to examine every single fault and imperfection, you have to take a hammer to its foundation and try to break it down, and you have to accept it as truth only after it has survived that assault. The downside is that you have to accept everything that passes that test as truth – even the things that make you uncomfortable. If you can’t do that, then no amount of rigor in your attacks will make your point any more secure. No amount of fervor in your beliefs will make it any less of a fever dream.

In Conclusion

While I know that the people I want to start using this technique aren’t going to – mostly out of distrust for me, because I tend not to be diplomatic while venting – I’m hoping that other people will be able to make use of this in the future. There’s a lot of noise in the air, making it difficult for us to actually fix any of the problems that need to be addressed. A shared base of facts would be better, but I think that a shared criteria of judgment might do as a starting point.

Because if we don’t have that, then we might very well be lost completely.

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Serving Up Some Truth: On Informational Hygiene