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Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?
60 points by Llamamoe on April 21, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 68 comments
Aside from the obvious trick of appending "reddit" to searches, or going straight to wikipedia or scientific literaure, how do you actually find anything?

In many cases, there's forums, wikis, clever people's blogs, but none of them are easy to find through Google/DDG, and essentially rely on manually "indexing" them in your head/bookmarks/notes.

How do YOU go about this?




You look for information from the original source, not opinions. You take that information and come to your own opinion. You validate your opinion with an open mind and curiosity - look out for people who can challenge their views. You introspect and change your mind. You also say that some information is beyond your comprehension and “too hard to understand”.

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”— Charlie Munger


Good luck reading just the 10-Ks or local equivalent for all the companies that you're interested in (not even as a shareholder but as a stakeholder). Will take a lot of hours each week.

Same with research papers, data sheets, raw press releases, etc. Like it or not - you have to rely on 3rd party summarization and information selection.


FWIW, I do read 10-K and research papers regularly as I find that investment worthwhile for me - even if it is several hours a week. You may not, that's fine.

> Like it or not - you have to rely on 3rd party summarization and information selection.

I don't necessarily disagree. I have a slightly different viewpoint. I do rely on 3rd party summarisation as a first step. Beyond that, I dig deep myself and form ym own opinion.

Your answer seems to suggest reliance on credible 3rd party sources. No issues with that - but if you should also accept the implications with reliance on expert / wisdom of crowds. <Insert Aswath Damodaran's lemming cartoon> If you are fine with those implications, good for you. I am not, most of the times - at least in areas that I care about. Therefore, I read research papers and 10Ks myself.


This is a shameless plug for my site but it provides features[1] that helps users efficiently read lengthy 10-K/Qs for all publicly traded companies without having to take a lot of hours each week.

[1] https://Last10K.com/features


To add to this: if you grow into this approach, it's almost impossible to become a "radical" believer in anything; usually any serious discourse has very solid points on both sides, which are formulated by very smart people. It's quite hard to live with it, actually, humans are not built for seeing nuance everywhere.


Although you have to be careful not to fall into "Enlightened Centrist" mode all the time.

While there are usually solid points on both sides of an argument, you should take one side on many (most?) issues.


I agree. Everything can be morally relative until you get punched in the face


why should one do that?

truth is often undefined, and you can simply weigh sides with probabilities.

There is however 100% certainty this post will be downvoted.


> you can simply weigh sides with probabilities

Absolutely.

And is most cases one side has a 60%+ probability. That should be your side.


Why? Especially if the outcome of the argument doesn't matter to you, why take a side?


If you're surrounded by "radicals" and you have a balanced and well reasoned opinion then you will be a radical among them.


Define what you mean by radical.


When seeing a trend of a common narrative, even if it's socially or corporate driven, look for opposing ideas.


Look for them, sure. And consider the opposite. But if you believe the opposite of the Current Thing all the time, you're just a mindless contrarian. A good recent example of this phenomenon is all the people who denied that Russia would invade Ukraine -- not because of any primary sources or facts, but because they reflexively countered the mainstream consensus.

The good news is you can spot these people easily by just asking them to explain why they believe the opposite. And if they answer with empty platitudes or lofty statements that don't really address the specifics of the issue at hand, you can keep searching.


Simple, dumb contrarianism explains a lot of radical political beliefs, esp support for Trump.

Obviously, he got votes from a lot of normal Republicans, but there's a decent segment of support for him where people were apolitical before, but latched on to him out of sheer, immature contrarianism.


This. But you'll be seen as troublemaker.


"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." — W. Edwards Deming


This is irrelevant quote. All data could be collected and interpreting in different ways based on actual knowledge.

We have data for knowing that grass is green. But it is not true at night.


This. There’s just no substitue for genuine curiosity paired with extensive reading.


It’s not perfect, but here’s what I do, when I run into a new domain:

1. Click bait title? Immediately bail.

2. How many trackers were blocked (ublock). If there’s a ton, then I’m now extra suspicious and might even bail at this point.

3. After that it’s really just specific words I watch out for that could tip me off that it’s fluff or content marketing crap.

4. I will often follow up on sources / searching for corroborating articles or if it’s just a regurgitated press release.

Over time you recognize good sources.


It's a classic formula: A diversity of sources, and learned experience at understanding who lies, about what, and how much. The "truth" is something you must compose and maintain from multiple sources on a regular basis.


This concept helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience


The main thing would be to never trust a single source all the time, and question everything, no matter how much I agree or disagree with it. The process of analyzing how credible information is and how it came to be is oftentimes more advantageous than simply finding credible information

I try different search terms for the same topic. Differences between the articles presented help in finding areas of disagreement that can be explored further.

When I find a result that seems interesting, I search for the opposite to find opposing point, and ask which one seems more reasonable. I try to allow any stance to be changed as long as I manage to find anything more reasonable than what I had thought.

I search for different categories of media: articles, videos, podcasts, forums/comments so that regardless of the creator's preferred media platform for delivery, I can look at it. Longform videos are oftentimes helpful because they go into a topic further and it is easier to find more points that can be investigated further. Many books are not online and can be an equally good resource.

I go to the sources linked in the article. Sometimes, I use the time or location search filter to find what the search engine suggests for different locations and geographies.

When I come across something that seems outlandish, even over Group Messaging or comments sections, I search for those even if I know it is wrong because there is oftentimes something to be learned in how it became a prevailing view for some or many.

Of course, this is for online information only. Information you get offline is as important and in many cases more important.


To that I would add a healthy dose of questioning "qui prodest?" or "follow the money".


More and more, I'm acknowledging that finding credible information online that requires any depth is a futile exercise.

The return on time spent is horrible and I also realize that more often than not, I don't have the time and knowledge knowledge to sift through and evaluate the information that I find.


My main trick is simply to know a lot of really smart people in various fields.


This reminds of a talk Donald Knuth held at Google a few years ago. In the QA someone asked how he'd search online for abstract mathematical concepts.

Don Knuth smirked and said (paraphrased from memory): "I'm x years in the field, you can bet I made a few friends along that I can ask."


The thing is, smart people can be wrong ( or being bought ) as well, and if OP is looking for facts (things that actually happened) "smart people" could easily present a different version with hidden biases of what happened. I hope by smart you didn't meant "people I agree with". I would try to find news sites without opinions, or social media posts from people that live in the place where the event happened and/or opposite takes showing different evidence, most of the time the "truth" lies in between.


Smart people active in a field usually aren't bought or wrong. They can be but as a rule they're not and even if they'll typically know a lot more than I do. And nobody stops me from knowing more than one smart person in a field so I still get to play 'multiple sources'. Agreement you can have on facts or on opinions. Agreements on facts are easy as long as whatever you are looking at is stationary or can be looked at again, outside of that it is always going to be a matter of consensus. Disagreement on opinions outside of discussion forums where people usually don't come to have their minds changed - particular subreddits excepted - are usually fruitless and a complete waste of time.

Social media posts, both-sidesism (aka the false middle), people claiming to live in a place where some event happened (or did not...) doesn't move the needle factwise. It's all just different degrees of hearsay and that does tend to converge on 'what you agree with'.


For news and journalism, do they publish retractions/corrections in a clear and transparent way? If you can't find the page/list then they're not interested in being correct.


Prioritize sources where I understand some motivation beyond traffic/ads for the existence of that source. Non-profits dedicated to providing information (Wikipedia, MDN), individual people I am familiar enough with to believe genuine interest in their topic, publicly-funded yet independent journalistic outlets, documentation written by the actual author of software, etc.

I often find these in my Google/DDG searches, after scrolling past the things I know to be “otherwise” motivated.


I think taking into account human motivation is a very smart system, but the motivations of a lot of what you mentioned aren’t necessarily aligned with everybody.

Take Wikipedia for example: it started nobly but has become an ideological battleground for petty editors to wield influence when you look at what kinds of edits are made to important current day topics.

Or take non-profits: I’m sure many of their employees have fine motivations, but in a big picture sense the organization dies if they actually solve the problem they’re designed to solve. It’s hard to perfectly trust the motivations of even non-profits.

As far as publicly funded journalistic outlets, do you mean stuff like NPR? Without getting into an argument about NPR, there’s a substantial amount of real criticism about them out there. It’s hard for many to perfectly trust them either.

The best system I think is trusting independently minded journalists who have developed some credibility: namely those willing to take real shots against their own “team”. I’m open to finding others, but the best one in this regard that I’ve come across might be Glenn Greenwald. Time and time again, he’s willing to take shots against his own political side, even when it damages his career: that carries some credibility with me. I’d love to find more independent journalists like that.


You're correct that every individual source has biases and imperfections, so I think it's also essential to have multiple sources. I think that as long as you have a set of "good enough" and "diverse enough" sources, you can form an accurate idea of the truth by synthesizing what you read. Greenwald is a great example of that - definitely seems to be motivated in the right way, but wouldn't be a great single source of news. By publicly funded I mean things like NPR, the BBC, or their equivalents in other countries. Not perfect, but I believe that there's enough motivation there related to doing good journalism for its own sake, that I would include those sources in the "good enough" category.


We had to wrestle with this question a few years ago, and stakes were very high. TL;DR is to try to appeal to the scientific method. I don't think "online" is special here.

We desperately sought help for our child who was reading at pre-k reading levels while in the 3rd grade. In many US school systems, after 3rd grade, if you haven't acquired basic reading skill, then you are completely screwed: the curriculum moves on. Finding useful information was astonishingly hard -- what we learned is that within the US, an entire industry has evolved around dogmas that are completely uninformed by reproducible research. If you search for reading help, you find appeals to emotion, "this-one-trick-worked-for-me" type books, self-help conferences and such. We also learned that professional teaching programs are built around dogma, and publishing "research" in the field of education requires strict adherence, and does not meaningfully apply hypothesis testing or reproducibility.

The practice of reading pedagogy lives in this sweet spot where it kinda-sorta works for just enough students that school districts and admins can assert that kids for whom the system does not work should adjust their expectations in life.

We were lucky to discover that reading problems are well understood through neuroscience (not education), and there are decades of reproduced research supporting useful ideas. We were also lucky that my wife happens to be a good teacher (I could never do this!), the two of them get along well, she left her paid job, started homeschooling our child full time, and our child now reads far above grade level.


Reuters, AP, AFP.

Websites which strictly reporting events and stick to the 5 Ws (What, Who, When, Where, Why).

They don't even try to make predictions and only talk about the past, not the future


There are a range of sources that I will trust to a very high degree.

A trick that I've heard about in this video [1] is to focus most on information in this order of publication style:

1. books [2]

2. research papers

3. articles from respected [3] news sources

4. anything else

[1] https://www.jw.org/en/library/videos/#en/mediaitems/VODOrgBe...

[2] caveat here: garbage books exist, but when you draw a "web" of bibliography (references in books to other books) you quickly see which books are by the authors considered to be noteworthy books as well.

[3] A "respectable" news source will, for example, retract a statement if they later on discover it to be a false claim.


For me, it's less about finding the best source and more about knowing how to detect and ignore obvious junk like "Top 10 Best X for Summer 2022!". Once you filter these out, you will often end up compiling your own list of good links.


I check Hacker News regularly for credible information. The comments help me with this.


How do you approach things when there's an argument in the comments with diametrically opposed views? And did you see the person who admitted to inventing stuff in the comments to sound knowledgeable about subjects they had no idea about?


JSTOR, Cochrane reviews, trade journals, and live blogs. Mostly I've gravitated away from "news" to sources.

Picking good sources is hard, though. Generally I find it has to be the case that specialists writing about their specialism are the people who knowledge originates with, even when it isn't lay people.

Where curation is worth it is in reviews. The London Review of Books will introduce a wide array of new literature to me and prepare the ground for approaching those books by explaining the content and critically analysing it.

Statistical literacy also helps - for this I've read David Spiegelhalter's Art of Statistics, which is for the lay reader.

News-wise, single generally credible sources are hard to come by. The Guardian does good live blogs, especially on UK parliamentary debates. The New York Times has a solid but anglocentric newsgathering operation, but tragically partisan opinion. Le Monde Diplomatique is good for international stuff from a francophone perspective.

tl;dr, navigate institutions, not search engines. Institutions are in effect communities with a culture that guards against rot algorithms can't perceive.


How is this not getting more ups? You directly pointed to sources.


I guess people are reading the request as one for search engine technique. It is a reasonable interpretation, to be fair.


I pay people to verify information on finclout.io For investments its critical that information is free from pump and dumps, scams, etc. you get the drill. Hence, I have a clear incentive where payment makes sense.


For now at least, try Telegram. It appears to me not to be as censored/manipulated as the american social platforms, though the limited number of search results might suggest otherwise. At least I find there a lot of information which is not visible in the west. It also curiously has the feeling of the internet when it just started: you find concrete people who speak up their mind, in a usually more free way than on today's internet.


It looks like you have different problems here:

1. Credible sources. 2. Tools and methods for searching and matching.

In my opinion:

1. It's very subjective. Pepople just believe in different things. It's hard and time consuming. There is no the single point of truth. 2. For this purpose I wrote https://github.com/livelace/gosquito and I extract different keywords (tech, people, orgs etc.) from information flows. It frees my time heavily.


RSS helps me a lot recently. But it is only for "subscription" method.

For knowledge try search in https://teclis.com

And forgot about idea of having credible information. It is always a way of looking for truth.


/r/conspiracy subreddit but the credible information is mixed together with fake news. But it's easy to figure out which is which if you do a few searches online. A lot of stuff on there just seems insane, but then you start searching and sometimes it all checks out.


I'd call this a case of "humans are really good at noticing relationships but not their nature".

Yeah, much of the time people are on to something - and most of the time they have no idea what, just that something is amiss, whether it's their understanding, media coverage, or an actual systemic issue.


Sorry to be memey, but X.

Do you have concrete examples of stuff from r/conspiracy that "checks out"? I don't frequent that sub, but every time I've visited it's been just.. crazy talk without a shadow of a kernel of truth.


Find one well-reputed or authoritative source and then find a second independent source to verify and corroborate the claims of the first. Basic standard of journalism. When a claim is made, the burden of independently verifiable proof is on the person making the claims.


I sure as hell don’t go to Reddit. If you think that’s an “obvious” trick for finding credible information, I don’t know what to tell you.


A trick for finding information that comes from humans, at least?

I find it's good for e.g. opinions on products, experiences with treatments, etc. that come from actual humans.


Having a strong bullshit detector and seeking out a primary source if what I'm reading sounds implausible.


This is a tricky one, but in my main area of interest (energy) I ask myself whether a source is "falsifiable", or whether it would be theoretically possible to come up with some way to prove their claim wrong:

Claim 1: "Wind turbines are committing genocide upon wildlife and if they weren't subsidised by Daddy Government they wouldn't exist"

Claim 2: "The levelised cost of energy is $40/MWh for electricity generated by wind versus $50/MWh for electricity generated by natural gas, and capacity factor for wind can be 35-40% in the UK"

It's a little bit of an extreme comparison, but if I feel like it would be impossible to find a counterexample to prove a source wrong, then I find it less trustworthy. If it would theoretically be easy to disprove the source, but my independent searches keep confirming it? I trust it much more.

And there's one other trick: if I don't have a basic grounding in a certain field then I will just reserve judgement. I am pretty happy to evaluate claims across engineering disciplines, but once it gets into medical fields for example? I just outsource my judgement to government health websites - they might be wrong but they are NEVER going to be more wrong than me.


Does trusting the government depend on administration or jurisdiction? Should Russians heed your advice?


On wikipedia: don't trust it blindly and always read the talk page.


First I ask myself who profit from a certain news, how realistic can be, how can it be part of the real world along with other news (if the big picture does not appear coherent something is wrong/false), secondly I try to trace sources, especially looking for governmental, academical PUBLIC sources. In general I consider no source reliable, but certain things can't be hidden, certain normally escape here and there.

So I follow various media via RSS save articles I think interesting and reason on them looking in my notes/feeds history for link and correlation. Such "manual indexing" is mandatory now, propaganda is too powerful to be contained otherwise...

On finding sources: try to scan for news from various countries then select between those in a language you can read. For instance in many countries there are journals in English, few random examples:

- Helsinki Times

- Korea Herald

- Norway Today

- The Citizens (south Africa)

- Japan Times

- Ekatimerini (Greece)

- B92 (Serbia)

- Astana Times

- Ulambataar Post

- TASS / Moscow Times / Siberian Times (not much updated)

- Der Spiegel International (Germany)

- Bangkok Post

- Jakarta Globe

- South China Morning Post

- Taiwan Times

- Sermitsiaq (Greenland, not much updated)

- LRT (Lithuania)

... Pick some, look for others depending on the language you know, check their quality, quantity of posts and put them in a feedreader, consider scoring, and that's already something. Than look for think tanks from various political areas and countries. Than look to well know geopolitical journals. Collect much and test. Then cleanup until you reach a manageable level of news. Collect them in a timeline, annotate correlation anytime you spot something, look for similar stuff (full-text search) when you add a news. In an year you'll already have a certain mass of news-base to spot trends. The rest is up to you: decide where to look for, decide how to evolve your collection. Enjoy and profit from the new awareness.

You can't know "The Real Truth" but in fuzzy logic you can form a reliable enough vision of the world and with it + experience you'll improve. Do not expect immediate results, like for investments or life choices, but in a small number of years your comprehension of the world likely change and if you select well enough your sources and keep adjusting them you likely been able to spot enough propaganda to filter much of the crap out.


A site I use sometimes is https://allsides.com

Shows news articles from the whole spectrum so you get more perspectives.


I use hn.algolia.com a lot, Google is dead!


Get in addition to mainstream media also contradictory opinions and non mainstream media then do some thinking about where the truth lies


I crack open the latest textbook. For fun. Multiple sources helps as well. Podcasts, videos, and online articles.


I actively look for it instead of hoping a libertarian echo chamber tells me what to see.


Rule of thumb: The longer and more complicated the article, the more reliable the content.

NY Post article citing 'scientists' or 'a study' about how doing handstands increase your sexual capabilities in 250 words or less? Unreliable.

Scientific paper linking biweekly handstands to increased cardiovascular health in 40-50 year-old Asian men in the Baltimore area, with raw data attached, in 12500 words? Reliable.


Not that simple

Articles: Not really, a lot of SEO practitioners and expert storytellers use these tactics to their advantage.

Scientific papers: You have to be technically trained a bit to see the nuances - ex: journal impact factor (citations), methodology (sample size, variables controlled, stat. significance...) affects results, analysis & interpretation; conflicts of interest with industry sponsors (often stated, but sometimes hidden), etc.


You should actually be careful if you're really seeing the third line there. That's a form of p-hacking. Don't find a statistically significant effect in your entire study population? Fine, just segment it into 20 subsets, and in an average study, you can now expect to randomly find at least one population subset in which the effect is statistically significant.


With, however the caveat that scientific papers can be embarrassingly wrong, and the error can not be spotted for 17 years, and the paper can go on being widely believed and quoted many years after the full debunk (and the case I link is apparently an honest mistake, not fraud which may be obfuscated).

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...


That is the nuance of the scientific method in order to advance knowledge: it is not perfect, but the peer reviewed process is rigorous


In a perfect world, yes.

Statistics is a HARD subject, specially when you get a juicy believable story in front of you. And a lack of credit to do confirmation research because for administrators "it is not new".

Richard Feynman :

    We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
He is overly optimistic, it only works if the "other experimenters" get the money and time to check.

A big part of modern science is very expensive, and controls aren't made.




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