Section 3.7 Solving for Change
Some of you have been hearing your whole lives that you “shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet.” But we believe that the skills in this chapter have helped you think through how you decide what to believe and what not to believe.
The section on error analysis focused on how easily small errors can add up to large ones and offered the Five Cs to help you decide how strong evidence is. At the low end of the Five C’s you can see how coincidence and correlation can easily contain errors whereas when you reach consensus, you have such a strong body of evidence from a variety of sources, errors are substantially less likely. So, when you encounter news that makes claims about what the problems are in our society and more importantly, what causes them, you can ask which C they are relying on to make this claim. You can also challenge others who try to argue for a claim with only the low C’s as their support.
Then we discussed how to avoid being tricked by misleading graphs in the news. Just because it’s a graph, it does not mean that the most obvious interpretation of the graph is correct. Always think about what a plausible range for the y-axis and the x-axis should be. Think through whether or not the difference shown is truly meaningful. Ask if there is more data in a trend that is not pictured to assess if change is really occurring or if it’s just a random shift over a year or two or among different groups.
We hope that these skills will make you a more informed consumer who will not be taken in by fake news either in the mass media or on social media. Just as the 15th century residents of Trent were moved by fake news to commit horrible crimes against their Jewish residents, the story spread throughout Europe and caused further bigotry and violence. The more people with the skills to stop the spread of fake news by refusing to share it and pointing out its flaws, the more likely we are to reach a more socially just world.