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Everyone says we live in the information age, but for some reason it feels like finding information is harder than ever. I have sort of explored this topic personally and a lot of projects I do revolve around the use of information that is otherwise easy to find but hard to use.
I don’t know how exactly we came to this era of having literally so much data that it’s impossible to filter and understand and use effectively, but here we are. And to be fair I don’t think this is the biggest of problems, but it is a point of passion and this is my blog post so I’m going to talk about it.
Just to make the post sexy, I will be mentioning AI.
There’s so much info available, but…
… it isn’t organized.
While I live currently in Sweden, I am still an American and am obligated to say the United States is THE BEST DAMN COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. One thing the U.S. does great is that it has some of the most open data policies for its citizens. Seriously, you have an open data bank, you have an open publications detailing what laws are being discussed or were even submitted, and don’t even get me started on how easy it is to “FOIA” most things.
Here’s the problem, though… it is incredibly impossible to find what is useful to you. Are you perhaps someone looking for information on the history of temperatures over the past 10 years? Well there is good news and bad news!
The good news is that it exists and for free!
The bad news is you will spend hours to weed through literally thousands of sources that sound like they are what you want, but really aren’t. Inevitably you will give up and probably pay for the commercial sources.
This applies to other information sources, too. This leaves one unfortunate inevitability which is that we rely on others to find and interpret sources as a default, despite the free information being available for us. Which brings me to the second point:
…it’s hard to separate fact and bias.
Information itself can contain bias and facts, but what I am more speaking of is how bad injected bias can be in, for example, most news articles or posts. Note that I am not speaking to just mainstream media like Fox News or CNN. Sure, those can be pretty bad at it, but even individual posts on sites like Reddit and X are guilty of the sin of trying to read their own bias into the facts they present. When I say bias by the way, I don’t imply there is an intended spin all the time, but there are a couple things that really make things easy to misunderstand or misinterpret information from others:
Lack of context
A lot of posts around information or data just lack context. Imagine you had a post talking about how cold of a year it is by telling you “The last 3 months of highs have been only 70 °F (21 °C).” Sounds reasonable right? Now what if I said that the 3 months of temps were collected during Winter?
Sort of makes things a bit muddier eh? This sort of tricky gap in info is hard to spot, even for people that are just trying to honestly post about something interesting. I wouldn’t say this always malicious, but this type of injected bias is SO prevalent.
Reporting interpretations as facts
This is where you will read something that is just an interpretation of something, without the disclaimer. I don’t really know how prevalent this in particular is, but I do see it now and again. Going back to an apolitical temperature example, imagine someone adds in the statement “According to data, the last 3 months of highs have been only 70 °F (21 °C). These colder temperatures indicate we are about to get rain.”
Nothing in the source indicates temperature meaning rain, but the problem is that this is not mentioned in a way you can reasonably separate that without looking at the source. And after all, the point of reading someone else’s post is to get a nice summarization so you can make your life easier, so it’s more likely people take that statement at face value.
…You don’t know if it’s true.
Yes, it’s true, now you can’t even be certain what you are reading is based on real information or events. You can’t even blame the wonderful advancements of AI alone, considering this is something humans have created bots to do for years. That being said, it is something that has become extremely prevalent in the last 5 years or so, and it’s so hard now to say what is reality and what isn’t. I normally don’t like the term “fake news”, but in this case it’s an apt name. I am not exaggerating, either. There are many, many, many, many posts on how the landscape has changed in terms of source reliability.
Because AI is now really good at generating content, it can be really hard to detect falsehoods without actually digging into the source material. And remember what I said in the previous point, that we don’t usually do that because the whole point of reading an article is to not have to do that. Nevermind the complication that if you do, there’s a chance that the primary source cited is also AI-generated.
So what do we do?
For the consumers of information
Just be aware and curious! There’s no silver bullet to dealing with anything mentioned in this post. It takes a little bit of vigilance, and a bit of practice to dig out some falsifications or misrepresentations of information. If you think something might have some sort of bias included, just go to the primary source. This is what your schooling has prepared you for ever since Wikipedia articles existed (if you still remember how to properly cite sources without looking it up, you are my hero).
For the producers of information
You share more of the burden here, and here is my call to action for everyone that produces information, whether in raw data or article form:
- Be better about describing what you intend to inform people of if you are an outlet.
- Be upfront about the limitations of what your information can and cannot be used for, and how it was obtained.
- If you curate data or information, have it contain a “Useful for: …” section so people can know if it’s useful for what they want to look up! Looking at you data.gov!
- If you are referencing data, don’t hide the source behind obscure links. Make sure it’s extremely clear and when possible reference the values that led you to your own findings.
- Make it clearer what is fact vs what is your opinion.
We have so much information at our fingertips. I would love to see us be able to benefit more from it.