Most clients I see have followed some advice from a so-called expert and have been sold a bill of goods. Oftentimes, the advice they were provided had a modicum of truth but was overemphasized, causing them to take some form of inappropriate action based on their situation. Lateral Reading is a technique to inoculate you against the winds of misinformation.
The entrepreneur should be skeptical of all the information they receive online. By definition, being skeptical means that you’re not easily convinced. Just to be clear- being skeptical is different from being cynical, which is generally a complete distrustful of everyone else’s motives. Being skeptical is okay, and improves our critical thinking and judgment while being cynical clouds our judgment with negativity and suspicion.
The problem with online information is that it was all created by humans, and as humans, we all have built-in biases. Therefore, whenever you are conducting online research you need to bring into question any motives that the author of the content may have in the way they present the information.
Lateral Reading
Every day, we as consumers conduct research by using an internet search. When we arrive at a page that was delivered by a search, we read vertically. We read through a set of arguments delivered by the author generally from the top to bottom of the page. When we went to school, we are taught that this is the right way to consume content. Unfortunately, the world is quite different these days.
In the past, before digital content, there were fewer sources of information. Informational content came mostly in the form of textbooks and was harder to get into the mainstream. It required an editor and a publisher to produce, and therefore the information was generally pretty well vetted before it made it to the public domain.
Today anyone with a smartphone can create and disseminate bogus content. There are no longer any barriers to publishing, which means that the information may be real or completely fake to encourage the reader to take a specific action.
In fact, with their algorithms that strive to provide users with increasingly more relevant content and well-optimized pages with internal and external links, search engines only help to make the problem even worse by leading the reader down the ideological rabbit hole.
Reading laterally is the antidote to a digital world filled with misinformation. Lateral reading is the process of attempting to find multiple sources to either corroborate or disprove a piece of information and verify that it is free of possible of biases. Rather than simply read a page from top to bottom as we have been conditioned, we should open up a new tab in your browser and do another search to verify the legitimacy of all arguments being made.
It is no secret that I have volunteered with organizations like SCORE and the SBDC, who are writing sponsors of this website, as of this post. That would make me biased towards a life of entrepreneurship. Writers like me may accentuate the positive attributes of business ownership and downplay the negative based on our biases. We may advocate tools where we may have a financial incentive to do so. The first lesson when conducting online research is to follow the money.
Follow the Money
The first step in evaluating digital information is understanding where the money comes from or who is behind the information.
An article about SEO written by an employee of an SEO firm will certainly convey their bias to SEO, and may even promote their services or tools. A firm that specializes in business law may write a story about the need for certain legal documents, and of course they have a dog in the hunt since they will offer to produce the documents for you for a fee. Even a CPA firm or tax service will produce content which will bring into question your own practices, and precipitate a call to them for accounting or tax advice.
Most so-called experts have a bias, and therefore an agenda to get you to buy something from them. While the digital content they produce may be accurate, you need to employee lateral reading to come up with a more objective conclusion.
A great example of following the money is related to online news. Let’s face it – most news sources are there to sell advertising. Media outlets create emotionally-charged articles that trigger passions in their readers, which in turn produces shares and thereby creates greater opportunities to create more revenue from ads. For most news outlets, it is less about objective reporting or journalism, and more about creating emotional-charged content that creates higher engagement that results in more ad revenues. Follow the money.
Show Me The Evidence
The next step in evaluating digital information is to look for the evidence that backs up the author’s claims. Has the writer backed up their claims with any evidence or is it an opinion piece? Is the evidence they provided from a reliable source or some bogus source that just supports their argument?
Another quick source to assess the reliability of a source is to look at the domain extension. Generally, information from a. gov or a .edu site is probably more reliable than something that comes from a .com site, since .com sites signify that they are a commercial- oriented site. Even .org sites tend to be pushing a specific mission, and may not produce unbiased content.
I recently saw a Ted Talk by Allan Savoy, where he postulated that we are trying to control climate change the wrong way. He suggested that climate change is caused by desertification or the fact that much more of our planet was becoming void of plant life. He suggested that we could reverse the effects of climate change by increasing the number of grazing animals like cows and turning them loose in arid landscapes.
Of course, I was skeptical of this conclusion and Googled if his holistic management of the grasslands was true or false. The first result was from a site that claimed that it was false, and presented a long list of reasons why it was false that seemed equally plausible. Then I extracted the domain from the article’s landing page to see what the business that reported this theory as false was about. What I discovered was that it was a .org site that promoted vegan diets.
Follow Up On Sources
Wikipedia is generally a very reliable source of digital information. Although it can be edited by many different people, it is governed by the masses. All of the references are footnoted and links to their sources are identified at the bottom of a Wikipedia post.
Finally, do not just take the authors word for it follow up on sources to verify that they are what they claim to be. Your job is to find credible sources who consistently give you credible information that you can trust.
Opinion
For me personally, I have achieved a degree of success in my life through entrepreneurship and of course, my message is that others should consider entrepreneurship as a viable option. That makes me biased toward entrepreneurship. A savvy researcher would employ lateral reading to validate what I have to say.
However, I do not earn my income by providing this information about small business. Although I have a few small business advice books they don’t generate significant amounts of revenue sources for me personally.
These days I no longer work for money and for me, helping entrepreneurs is more of a religion and not about making money from my efforts.
Sure, I would love to cover my expenses for being able to provide this information, which is why we have the SteveBizBlog Patreon Campaign but beyond that, my goal is simply to make more people aware of entrepreneurship and the benefits that they can have for the new economy.
When I write my posts, I endeavor to use lateral reading to validate my content with several sources. In fact, I spend about two hours each day reading articles, listening to podcasts, watching videos, and reading books to get as many different perspectives on a topic so I can draw my own conclusions. However much of what I write is from personal experience as an entrepreneur. While my advice may not be 100% bias-free as I’m human, I do endeavor to provide unbiased and accurate information through the use of literal reading.
What practices do you have in place to avoid fake and biased content?
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