Evaluation of information

If a topic is generally prevalent in information literacy, it is the topic of information evaluation. This can have a media level, where this area is becoming one of the dominant parts of teaching - how to know the valid message from the fictional, whom or what to believe, what is misinformation? These are just some of the questions that may arise in this area. And indeed, if we return to Peter Jarvis, this is precisely the problem of the transformative process between the various states of development of society. It is difficult to know truth from untruth, and information has gradually become an excellent economic instrument of war and significant economic interests.  

We want to dwell on the question of who to trust, a most complex topic. The classical discourse of media literacy has long suggested that one verifies all information with the proviso that no one should be trusted. Everyone is a potential liar, they can be wrong, and a media literate person should be able to expose this mistake.    

But this is a hazardous and incorrect approach for two reasons. Although it follows a particular critical tradition in philosophy, rooted in the continental climate of thought since Descartes, its breadth is unrealistic. One cannot verify all the information, nor does one even have the opportunity to do so effectively. For example, disinformation sites have an intertwined network of links and connected newsrooms,  making verification a near-impossible task. For example, a simple quantification method (that is, they write about it somewhere else, ideally a little differently, but with the same content) is entirely unusable. At the same time, world phenomena are so complex that the outside unsystematic observer cannot understand them in depth.   

The natural human need to look for the good and the evil in the world, for example, in the war in Syria or the reflection of the Kurdish pursuit of self-determination, seems extremely difficult to realize. This, together with the skepticism above, which proclaims that no one should be trusted, leads to one of today's most socio-political severe problems - that is, distrust of the media in general. Media education (focus mainly on the first module) in its sharpened and simplified form in the context of a complex world has done a disservice, which is manifested by people not trusting the media.     

So what do people believe in? The data show that the primary source of information for many people is what they see on Facebook. That is reports and information that verify their position or opinion. This results in a very rapid closure into the information and social bubble, which results in an extremely high susceptibility to manipulation and the loss of the possibility of critical reflection on the information. It is risky to trust people who are socially active with a clear value and political preference. When it comes to a divided society today, this is one of the crucial roots.   

What are the turnover options? Extreme relativism is offered - the truth is a purely socially constructed concept in it, and therefore everyone has their own (like Trump and his ''alternative facts"). A position is challenging to use and, when thought deeper, leads to the disintegration of society. Everyone has their law, and there must be no authority that determines the truth, such as the court, leading to the damnation of language and communication as such. The choice of radical relativism is, therefore, dystopian.     

We cannot answer this question in our text, but we can at least offer a  suggestion. First, there is a strong difference between the state media in the Western cultural circle and the media. Western state media is directly or indirectly controlled by political representation and has mechanisms that allow it to maintain at least some independence while governing the quality of its work. This does not mean that they can do without problems, but we probably have nothing better. The second possible source of information can be the media, which has a transparent code of ethics, and one has confidence in the specific personalities who work here.  

The question remains whether critical thinking about the media is something wrong, or a step that generates more problems than benefits. First of all, it must be said that, for example, Twitter, Seznam, Google, and other such significant information accessors carry out specific filtering of content, which they consider untrue. This may undoubtedly be perceived as censorship, but at the same time, it is probably one of the few possible effective ways to reduce the impact of undeniable fake news or hoax. For example, sites such as Choose Info, Demagogue, or Manipulators try to show how to quickly identify at least some of the relevant information through a critical approach to messages that one considers potentially problematic or possibly manipulative.        

However, it turns out that the main problem is not false facts but the selection of information. The media can never report everything. They must filter and select. And depending on the interest of the owner or prospective readers, they choose from the news. And this is an area where critical thinking will help little, where it is necessary to read and search a lot, but which returns one to the time complexity and its relationship to actual implementation.  

Let's move from general media considerations to formal possibilities of evaluating information. One is probably reminded of the first CRAP test for professional texts and SMELL test for social networks (similar to, for example, the mentioned manual from Choose info works ). These tests contain questions or categories with which one should look at specific information. All tests are very formal, and if you do not use them as a method of scientific work (for example, assessing the quality of the information in online encyclopedias), it is challenging to sit down and fill in the table test.      

But these are instructions that have particular usefulness. First of all, it is their formal grounding. Although the CRAP test is based on some “objective parameters" (and other subjective ones), in real work, one can easily recognize that they are all subjective. However, it can be used as a tool for evaluating information for your needs (for example, using it to select sources for writing an article or seminar paper), or for instance, in more people to evaluate specific sources and their systematic description.    

The second area, probably even more important, is the setting of thinking, a certain mindset, i.e. how we look at a professional text. Suppose a person tries the CRAP test several times. In that case, he usually does not do it in a professional article; it does not have any table, which it fills in step by step, but it has elements in the text or document in general, which he looks at, often without thinking about it. The SMELL test also works the same way - it's not about answering all the questions carefully but rather training the “eye" to notice if something is seriously wrong. And then having a tool at one’s disposal to identify, analyze, and critically reflect on this discrepancy.  

Critical thinking is certainly not something without value or meaning. On the contrary, with artificial intelligence and technology development in general, there are two significant shifts. The first is the ever-decreasing memory requirement. Not even the best historian can win a competition with Wikipedia to see who will remember more names or dates. Such a match is before it has begun (e.g. pp. 13-15). At the same time, however, this does not mean that all dates and names at school should not be taught. You have to look for what makes Wikipedia (or better artificial intelligence) weaker than humans. If it succeeds, it opens up an excellent chance for the critical development of science and art, services, trade,…        

Technology, however, not only reduces the meaning of memory but will interestingly touch on what was the pinnacle of the human spirit for modern science - clear, structured, analytical, sharp thinking. If a thing has rules, the computer will likely learn to do it better than a human. Here it is necessary to make a slight detour. The original idea of ​​machine learning in games was that, for example, in chess, the computer gets a database of a vast number of games, remembers them, and then in an actual situation on the board, chooses the variant that will be most advantageous by some simple metrics. This is how the first programs worked. But it turns out to be more efficient to use one more step - let the computer find its moves using the metric. A computer that does not learn from many people, but he devises strategy is better than one as in chess, as in Go.

In mathematics, everyone already knows that, for example, deriving or working with numerical methods is something that one should be able to do. Still, they will never be as good at this as a computer. But without understanding how the approach works, it would find it difficult to solve real problems. Similarly, for example, in astrophysics, modeling cannot be avoided at all. One must hand over part of the work to a computer which then cannot be determined algorithmically. Thus, simple analytical thinking is also at risk - analytical thinking has a future in complex and challenging or ambiguous situations, such as critical analysis of a text or the study of a philosopher's line of argument, or synthetic reasoning, all of which are extremely difficult to algorithmize.       

One of the things that algorithms take a long time to complete if they are able to at all, is critical text analysis. The ability to understand a text, find facts in it (which can be verified), axioms, lines of argument, etc., is essential. Such a procedure can lead to a critical assessment of a given resource. If one learns to observe how the other person's thinking is constructed and how it proceeds logically, it will also reveal weaknesses or problems in reasoning. 

The ability to perceive the logical construction of the text is essential both at the media level when we can see whether what the source claims at least make sense as a whole. It has the meaning presented, for example, that conclusions lead from the assumptions. At the level of professional work with text, it is a critical researcher skill: to find a problem they would like to investigate, a gap in knowledge, a false assumption, a traditional myth, etc. A good understanding of that logical construction then affects whether they can research something themself, find a research method, interpret data, and/or write a text.