How do I know what's True or Not?

Question

How do we know what's fact or fiction, and what to believe or not? I'm curious, and I don't have a lot of time to mull this over every time I learn new information.

Answer 1

Just consider EVERYTHING to be propaganda, then listen to your heart.

Answer 2

Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.

Answer 3

Above all consider your source.  Things you see in the newspapers, on TV, popular magazines (including the science ones) are good to know about, but not necessarily authoritative.  Time Magazine picked Hitler as Man of the Year  TWICE.  That goes triple for what you read on the Internet.  Books and college classes are still the only reliable source for information on things like chemistry and physics, which is what climate involves.  They are among the least intuitive things you will ever encounter.  By intuitive I mean "common sense" and that sort of thing.  It can be a hard row to hoe, but it's way better than living your life in the dark and believing what is easy to understand regardless of whether it is true or not.

Answer 4

If you don't know THAT how can you accept any asnwer anoyne gives you here?  You won't know what is true.

You could always research your questions.

Answer 5

believe half of what you hear from people tv ect...

Answer 6

check the resources

check the science

ask HOW DO YOU KNOW

do not take what the media gives you at face value

Answer 7

you can never know the truth. you just have to know who to trust.

Answer 8

The short answer is that you do enough research into various SOURCES of information, then trust the ones that seem the most reliable.  

This is true whether people are looking for movie reviews, political analyses, weather predictions, automotive diagnostics, driving directions or medical advice.

For example, I answer a LOT of questions about STDs on Yahoo!Answers.   When I look for STD  info I trust the Centers for Disease Control, WebMD, and ASHA (an STD information organization that I like.)  I do NOT trust www.herpesmiracle.com or advice columnists or respondants on Yahoo!Answers.

I look for sources that are independent, have been around for a while, and with at least some information that I already know to be true.

So if Al Gore tells you that the earth is warming, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,  NASA's temperature readings, and a group of Scandanavian arctic research scientists say that it isn't - I'd say that Al has his numbers wrong.

It's hard to know who to trust with some things (like climate change, global warming, or the green house affect).   And there are some things that I just decide are not worth knowing because the amount of research required is just too daunting (like Jesus's divinity or subatomic string theory, for example).

Good luck.