This week’s readings of Verified consisted of the final two chapters and postscript. The two final chapters return to a more grounded approach to researching. That being evaluating how certain claims affect your emotions, and how not every piece of information is worthy of your time and effort.
Chapter 10: Emotions
The chapter explores how sources appeal to your emotions (pathos) to distort your reaction. The anger, sadness, and shock that claims hope to instill you with usually signify faulty information. However, people are easily swayed by those emotions and ignore the red flags. As Verified says, “people tend to skip past those quick checks they should do before engaging with it or sharing it.” Essentially, articles wish to spread misinformation as quickly as possible. Social media just makes that job way easier. On the other hand, recognizing when an article headline is trying to appeal to your emotions is often a good starting point. It can help you “separate trivial issues from dealbreakers,” which naturally flows into the next chapter.
Chapter 11: Critical Ignoring
I resonated with this chapter, since ignoring things that I probably shouldn’t is a specialty of mine. In all seriousness, that isn’t what this short chapter is about. Caulfield and Wineburg are essentially saying “attention is our most precious asset,” so you shouldn’t waste your energy on claims coming from “dubious sources.” Identifying the dubious source is the tricky part. However, putting in the effort to be efficient in fact checking is much more important than extensive research. Especially in a time where information is spreading so quickly
Postscript: AI Revolution
I don’t like AI, and I don’t like direction Caulfield and Wineburg go in. It does feel inevitable, but I just don’t understand why these things are necessary.
If there is one thing that LLMs seem to be making clear, it’s that a lot of what we do when we write and summarize is more automatic and predictive than we might care to admit.
They talk about how it is possible to use AI to aid in lateral reading. Basically summarizing other sources to speed up the verification process. Disregarding the fact that it wouldn’t even be entirely reliable, I just don’t like it on principle. This quote bothers me since it removes the human element. I don’t really care that something is bothersome and/or simplistic. I would rather do it myself.
Comments
2 responses to “The End of Verified”
It was super satisfying to finish Verified and come full circle with the discussion of AI, something we discussed at the beginning of the semester. I don’t like AI either, and have never understood why people use it. I like to do everything myself as well. It is satisfying to work on something from start to finish. I know a lot of people use AI to jump start their writing process, but it has never worked for me. I think we should scrap the whole thing. I feel like we’re only creating more problems, especially when it comes to media.
You are the third person, not including myself, to say that they are prone to ignoring. I think that it is a generational issue. Our generation tends to be less involved compared to the older generations. We may be critically ignoring, but we waste our attention in many other ways. I think it’s important to get more involved in crucial conversations.
This is a really great summary of the end of Verified! I do think that emotion is really interesting to consider alongside what is or isn’t factual especially when you think about the fact that people on social media and the internet in genera make their money by preying on our emotional reactions. This topic seems to connect really well with the next section on ignoring things because why would you want to give emotionally manipulative content your attention? It’s like how people intentionally ignore rage bait. I also don’t think AI would be very good for lateral reading. To me it kind of just seems like an additional and unnecessary step using a product that seems pretty unethical to me (because of the way it’s sourced).