Full Title: 🌲 Secondary Sources Are Pretty Great, Actually
Highlights
Conventional wisdom says that primary sources — which is to say, first-hand accounts, genuine artifacts of the ‘physical evidence’ type, and hard data from original research — are ‘best.’ Frankly, this is a great example of a time when I disagree with conventional wisdom. (View Highlight)
Secondary sources are fantastic at distilling information, and while it is often useful to go back and confirm that a secondary source is in fact accurately representing a primary source, the fact of the matter is… a lot of the times laymen (and everyone is a layman in at least one field) do not have the expertise to evaluate that. Sometimes, the best way to confirm the reliability secondary source is to just read a lot of other secondary sources. (View Highlight)
For a variety of reasons, teachers in a schoolhouse setting often have a hard time teaching students how to evaluate the reliability of sources, especially the modern stuff. This should not surprise anyone; teaching critical thinking is hard and so is teaching notetaking. One reason source evaluation is tricky is that teachers must navigate the political waters of their district and parents can get pretty angry if teachers criticize their preferred news outlet. “Herotodus was the first historian but you can’t trust everything” is easy. “The Atlantic doesn’t typically outright lie but does occasionally shade the truth” can get you into trouble. Another is because we’re required to teach fine-grained distinctions between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources … but due to time and cognitive constraints it gets oversimplified down to “primary sources are best!” even though primary sources are harder to interpret without context. A third reason is because students doing formal research projects are highly incentivized to “play it safe” by sticking to obviously reliable sources and therefore get very few chances to learn by experimenting with edge cases, because then they might “fail” and failure has consequences; lost time, lost prestige, and shame, among others. (View Highlight)
New highlights added January 19, 2024 at 8:18 PM
If you give somebody a primary source that is a snippet of text and expect them to come up with something that makes sense, instead of a tertiary source that has written to educate and explain, they’re going to have a rough time. (View Highlight)
My biggest recommendation is to look for media (articles, videos, whatever) that cite their sources, or are at least willing to do so when asked. Plenty of accessible writing references more academic texts and even if you have difficulty parsing them, the fact that they’re actually basing their information off of real scholasticism is a good (although not sure-fire) sign. (View Highlight)
If someone makes a claim that you feel inclined to repeat, triple-check it. There aren’t enough man-hours to confirm everything you read, whether it matches your pre-existing biases (and everybody has them, they’re a natural consequence of having a knowledge base) or not. But if you’re going to repeat a claim or integrate it into your worldview in such a way that you might reference it in a discussion, it behooves you to be able to explain with dignity where you learned that little tidbit, and there are only some cases where a good response is “well I read it from some guy in a Reddit thread.” (View Highlight)
