Thoughts on Thinking
I came across this quote today:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-Aristotle
It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend the other day wherein I said I'd rather read a book I disagreed with than a book where I thought "By golly you're right!" every other sentence. Something I strive for is to question everything I read, even if it has the happy coincidence of agreeing with my opinion on the subject. This is something we should all be in the habit of doing, since journalism is as much about what you report as it is about what you choose to omit (whether to create a desired affect, or just because of space/time constraints). What are some ways to actually do this?
Go to Google News and read at least 3 articles (that are not all from Reuters!) on your chosen topic is one idea. I rarely find that reading just one (if I'm particularly interested in the topic) satisfies all my curiosity anyway. What new information do you get after reading something from the Sacramento Bee, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Post? How different is it when reported by FOX News and CNN?
I also like FactCheck.org. Their banner says it best:
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
See right there how fair-n-balanced I am? I went and quoted an elected Democrat on my blog! I've been looking in on this website since 2002, and I find they give pretty equal treatment to both sides.
...And there's always Wikipedia, which has articles on most anything you can think up, well except for my little test search where I typed in the full name of a Japanese band I'd heard of enough times to be curious about (Urban Dictionary has it though). Wikipedia makes a decent jumping-off point for understanding many things, as long as you keep in mind that anyone with some sense of personal authority on the topic can edit it...which brings me back to questioning everything you read and ends my essay with a nice little pink bow, so I'll just stop here.
posted by Stephanie @ 5:37 PM
1 Comments:
Very nice essay about independent thought.
The fact that anyone with a sense of personal authority on a topic is offset by the fact that you yourself can edit an article to remove or correct misstatements or to add missing information. In addition you can easily view and compare the entire history of revisions of an article. This allows you to make some inferrences as to why a particular thing was changed.
Also, if you didn't find an article you were looking for about a Japanese urban band, feel free to start one of your own. An article stub can need only consist of a few sentences.
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