It takes a lot for me to trust a source, and I have never considered any information as absolutely true, because I believe that it is important to have a critical attitude towards all inputs I receive from the world surrounding me. Every source has it’s author, whether it’s a website, book, encyclopedia or personal experience. No author is free for opinions, emotions or personal prejudices, and therefore no author should be considered 100% objective. Every article you read has been written by a journalist which intentions you do not know. Is he trying do deliver a political message, advertise a product, tell the truth, or simply just make the paper sell more? Does he know what he’s talking about, or is he simply re-writing information gotten from another and perhaps less trustworthy source? And when it comes to the ‘author’ of personal experience, you, how can you trust what you sense? Do you see what’s actually there, or just what you want to see? Every input goes through your mind, and though you might feel that you’re in control of how your mind processes the information it receives, unconscious processes distorting the original input is going on. Stereotyping of not only persons, but also situations and opinions automatically takes place, simply because that’s how we from psychology know that the brain works, arranging what we experience in groups of what we consider similar experiences. Hundreds of other reasons for why different sources are biased can be mentioned, but the point is that no source is without bias. Now, how can you find the source with the least bias? Is it books, websites, newspapers, authorities or personal experience?
Personally I see no reason for why a book should be more or less trustworthy than a newspaper or a website. If a journalist chooses to publish his/her article on a website rather than in a newspaper, it does not make it any less worthy to trust, the article is still the same.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Ironic use of the word “know”, huh? This explanation of how the brain sorts its inputs is one of the many things I consider as “true”, and I use this “knowledge” of mine to explain why you should not always trust your mind. But to be perfectly honest with you I have no clue of how the brain works, but it makes sense, and this essay would be impossible to write if I did not “trust” anything. Or in other words, I just found another reason why not to trust my mind, it considers something to be true because it makes it easier (or possible) to explain something else. Shortly; This essay is heavily biased because I have to trust something to be able to explain anything, when really, I would prefer not to ;)
