So much info.. what is right?what is wrong?

[MasterChat]

How can you make sure that the replies and info we receive are correct? Yeah, I understand that we can always look it up in the internet however how reliable it is??????? so much true in an untrue world!

[happygeek]

You can look to see who is replying and determine whether they are to be trusted, in exactly the same way you do when interacting with anyone in the real world. Just as you would trust your professor to give an accurate answer (probably) and maybe not so much the drunk chap on the street corner (depending upon the question of course) so you will probably trust a developer on DaniWeb who has a high reputation and has been helping others for a long period more than you would a newbie with no rep called 'lovepotionsforsale' and a sig link pointing to a site selling witchdoctor services...

[Gribouillis]

Karl Popper invented the notion of falsifiability in his extraordinary discussion on the meaning of truth. Following this idea, to make sure that answers are correct, try to refute them by all the means. If they resist all your attempts, you can describe them as correct.

[almostbob]

there is always the infamous
I'm always right, every body who disagrees is always wrong
approach
it may not always work

Incidentally, be careful if you meet Miss Right, find out if her first name is Always

[deceptikon]

How can you make sure that the replies and info we receive are correct?

Trust, but verify. If only one source tells you something and others contradict it consistently, that source is likely in the wrong. If multiple sources say the same thing, it's probably correct.

[Warrens80]

I have no problem looking up something if I think something is untrue.

[sneekula]

News is often falsified on government orders, and the media seems to go along with it. That's too bad since a working democracy needs well informed, not missinformed, voters.

[Agilemind]

Always verify and double check. Sometime this takes as little as checking the logic of suggested/supplied code and testing it prior to using it yourself. Sometimes this means reading a dozen scientific papers. Then in many cases the 'truth' is simply unknown or unknowable in which case you have to either: (1) trust in other people (eg. experts), (2) take a guess, or (3) accept and acknowledge the uncertainty.

[Reverend Jim]

If multiple sources say the same thing, it's probably correct.

Keep in mind the maxim that no amount of belief establishes a fact. Quantity does not trump quality. Three billion (possibly more) repetitions of the statement "a duck's quack doesn't echo" doesn't make it true. For the record, a duck's quack does echo.

[ddanbe]

If multiple sources say the same thing, it's probably correct.
I know you meant a different context, but it seems a very dangerous sentence to me.

[sneekula]

"If you lie often enough, it becomes the truth."
-- Karl Rove (?)

Has it's origins here:
"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."
-- Vladimir Lenin

[stultuske]

this one explains it pretty well.

[vegaseat]

I like Wikipedia's approach to weed out the not-so-true stuff.

[Zorrro]

@stultuske And this one.

[MasterChat]

I agree with you Sneekula. Even news is no longer reliable at this time. It has been manipulated by the government.

[vegaseat]

You may take a look at Quora, a search engine that is dedicated to the truth. It is based on a system of real name users voting up content. Quora was co-founded by two former Facebook employees in 2010 and is written in Python (PyPy).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora

[vegaseat]

I feel like the US news media more and more marches to the same drummer. I still trust the BBC, not sure if our friends from England feel the same way. According to some German friends, the German news media is hopelessly government controlled.

[Reverend Jim]

It think it was John Oliver who, twice, aired montages of many different local news shows reporting the same story with exactly the same words. This shows that in spite of having many different sources we are actually being fed exactly the same pap.

[Agilemind]

IMO news isn't so much controlled by the gov't as it is maximizing efficiency/laziness : Most news organizations just copy stories from other news media or straight from press releases because one person can create way more stories/hour (and per $) that way than if they actually think about what they are writing.

Publicly funded news media (NPR, BBC, etc..) is usually better because they are mandated to create original content and don't have as much pressure to just churn out as much stuff as cheaply as possible as the private broadcasters.

PS I would bet $100 that each of the 24 hour news networks has someone behind the scenes watching each of the other 24 hour news networks so they can update their own story as soon as other of the other networks gets 'new' information.

[Reverend Jim]

Nobody wants to be left out of a big story. A case in point is when Fox News called the 2000 election for Bush. Instead of doing any "newsy" type stuff like, say, fact checking, the other networks just jumped on the "me too" bandwagon and the rest was history.

[deceptikon]

It seems the subtle humor of my response was lost on everyone. ;)

[Reverend Jim]

It was so subtle it was practically homeopathic.

[vegaseat]

Must have gotten lost in my Truth Filter.

[MasterChat]

It is all about CONTROL and MANIPULATION. We are like puppets, we have strings attached to us without us noticing it. They want us to think, feel and act the way they want us to be.