Are you sure about that?

We all want to hear what we want to hear. Regardless of our purpose in looking for information - be it personal edification, a research assignment, or trying to find something to prove somebody else wrong - we always gravitate toward the side of the issue that we most closely align with. But there's a problem here: how do you know the information you're getting is correct? 

I tried an experiment tonight: I typed in to my search bar "abortion is evil." Now obviously I expected to get some seriously biased information here, but there was a point to my experiment, just wait for it. The first result was the site for an organization called TFP Student Action, a project of The American Society for the protection of Tradition, Family, and Property, which works with college students on over 700 campuses across the nation to take a stance on prevalent issues. This organization had compiled a list of 10 reasons why abortion is evil. Some of these reasons are theology based, but there are also a good deal of precise statistics. Initially I thought, "well, how do I know these stats aren't incredibly skewed?" I knew, though, that the article at least had some sources to back up the information, so I was momentarily reassured. When I scrolled down to check out the sources, however, my doubts came flooding back. It looked a lot like TFP Student Action had done exactly what I did: they looked for some of the most convincing arguments that abortion is evil, from some very biased sources. I find this disconcerting. 

How am I supposed to find decent information if everybody that's compiling the information is just as biased as I am, and they're getting their information from sources that are just as biased as they are? This sounds like a vicious cycle. Of course, we all know about google scholar, and that's usually a good source for accurate studies and findings, but those reports are often very difficult to muddle through, and can get a bit dry. What am I supposed to do when I don't want to spend the time that I would researching for paper, but I want some solid information for my own benefit? I think one way to do this is to seek out information on both sides of an issue, and somehow try to reconcile the information to the most reasonable conclusion. It's not foolproof, but it's not doing us any good to constantly yield to our desires to read things we agree with. 

The fact is there are a lot of issues that are hotly debated, and it's not always good enough to do a google search and take the first hit on their word. Like David Perkins pointed out in his post, sometimes you have to take the path of most resistance. Sometimes you have to go the extra mile to uncover a bit of truth from the muddled and distorted information pool that we love so much.