The people who are really good understand sourcing and how important it is for critical thinking. The education should be focused on helping people recognize and refute bullshit. Step one is the critical thinking necessary to say, “This makes no sense,” or “This is just fluff.” The people who are professionally trained to be really good at understanding the quality and history of a source, and to understand the source’s access to information or lack of, are librarians. We should probably steal shamelessly from librarians. Data journalism, same thing. There are lots of parallel professions where we could be learning more to improve our own performance.
The folks that I’ve seen who crush it, they’re like a dog with a bone. They will not let go. They’ve got a question, they’re going to answer the question if it kills them and everybody else around them. It’s a kamikaze thing. Those people, the tenacious ones who care about sources and have critical thinking skills, or at least tools to help them think critically, seem the highest performers to me. As a rule, they all keep score. It’s part of their process.
That is from Santi Ruiz interviewing Rob Johnston, interesting throughout.
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