Hacker News recently discussed a letter from Thomas Jefferson written in 1807 about the trustworthiness of newspapers. It’s just a couple of paragraphs—open it in a new tab and read his argument.

Through my readings of the sequences, I’ve grown slightly more aware of the information I obtain, and how some of it could be just plain wrong. To combat this, I want to start paying more attention to the handedness of information.

My excellent reader, you are of course aware of the different sorts of sources. You probably learned of primary and secondary sources in history, or perhaps high school English. First-hand information is directly from a witness, and is as trustworthy as that witness is. Taking into account not only the witnesses’ character, but also their limitations. No one is fully free of bias. A second-hand source takes from one or multiple primary sources, and hopefully tries to aggregate them into a nearer version of the truth. But in doing so, the second-hand source necessarily contains less information. Hopefully, it’s a distilled essence of their sources. But possibly it’s not—they have biases as well, after all.

Each level up gains you a broader picture. But, each level loses you information. The primary source is going off what they experienced—everyone else is going off what they wrote.

There’s no way to know the full and complete truth, but we can definitely get a better viewpoint. I’ve come up with some things that I hope to do more of in an attempt to reduce the handedness of my information.

• If using an aggregator like Reddit, Twitter, etc., read the source before the comments. You are already subject to the bias of the platform by finding that particular article there. Make sure it says what the title / the comments suggest it says.
• Go down a level from an aggregator, and find primary / secondary sources you trust. Perhaps people from multiple fields, locations, and backgrounds, who you can ask whenever you want to know something they have first-hand experience with. Aggregate your own news, subject to your own biases, and not those of others.

For completeness, there’s one last thing to mention. Reading lower degree-of-separation material takes more effort. It is certainly longer, but it could also be more difficult. For instance, reading a journal article would certainly be harder than reading the pop science piece about it. Information is another example of the classic three-choice tradeoff: Completeness, Conciseness, Truthfulness—pick two. Complete + Concise = Aggregate, Complete + True = Specialist Articles, Concise + True = First-hand accounts