673: The Way to Prevent Being Duped, with Mike Caulfield

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
We’ve all seen something online we thought was true, but turned out was a hoax. Annoying, but no big deal if it’s just an internet meme from a friend or family member but what if what you find online isn’t all what you thought and you make decisions or take action on it, that affects your professional credibility? On this episode, how to guard yourself from being duped. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 673.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:29]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. One of the ways we also try to find wisdom is through good sources online. How do we find information that’s the most useful to us, to our teams, and our organizations? That is a lot harder to do than it used to be. In, a generation ago, we’d look to the major newspapers, the major networks as primary sources for finding what was happening in the world and helping us to make decisions Today, it is so much more complicated given the state of the Internet and the web, and it requires a different way of thinking.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:32]:
Today, I’m so glad to have someone on the show who is an expert at helping us think about how do we make sense of what’s online, how do we avoid being duped or at least prevent it a bit, and how to think about this through some very simple and research based tactics that we can use that will help us to do a better job at finding the information that we need. I’m so pleased to introduce Mike Caulfield. He’s a research scientist at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. He has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops. His SIFT methodology is taught by hundreds of research libraries across North America, and a shorter version of SIFT introduction developed with Google has been taught in public libraries across the world. His work on web literacy for student fact checkers won the Merlot Award for Best Open Learning Resource in the ICT category. He was also a runner-up in the Rita Allen RTI International Misinformation Solutions Award. His work has been covered by the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the MIT Technology Review.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:44]:
He is the author with Sam Weinberg of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online. Mike, what a pleasure to have you on.

Mike Caulfield [00:02:56]:
It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:57]:
We should start this conversation, as I suppose any conversation about the Internet, with with Vincent Van Gogh.

Mike Caulfield [00:03:04]:
So Right. Right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:06]:
So there’s, a really fascinating story you tell at the start of the book about Van Gogh’s famous sunflowers painting, and it directly relates to what we’re talking about. Could you share that story?

Mike Caulfield [00:03:19]:
Yeah. Sure. So some people might remember this. Some people, at least people that are terminally online like myself. But, there was a video that went around, about a half ago at this point, of 2 activists going up to the Van Gogh sunflowers painting that is in the National Gallery in London, and they throw soup, right, at the painting.

Mike Caulfield [00:03:47]:
You’re watching it sort of stream down this Vincent Van Gogh sunflowers painting. And the Internet just goes ballistic. Right? Everybody is looking at this. They were I I they were climate protesters. So on the on the right, the political right, people are saying, this has gone too far, the destruction of art, you know, no better than the Taliban. On the political left. I mean, a rare moment of agreement. The political left is like, we sympathize with their political goals, but this is not the way the destruction of this $75,000,000 priceless work of art does more harm than good to the movement.

Mike Caulfield [00:04:29]:
Millions and millions of views on that video. And then, you know, what it turns out a little later, and you kinda see it dribble in in the in the comments the video, is the work is behind glass. Right? So what you’re actually looking at that tomato soup dripping down the glass of the painting. The real story of that is they took it out back after that. They wiped it down with a damp cloth, and they had it back out on the floor of the National Gallery in 45 minutes. Right? But a classic sort of example of how people jump to conclusions on the web about you know, you you might still think that it’s not a great thing to do in a gallery. It’s probably not the art crime of the century, though. So people look at the stuff they see on the web.

Mike Caulfield [00:05:17]:
They think they know what they’re looking at, but in reality, they are either fooled or they they fool themselves. Right? And often get their dander up about things that didn’t really happen.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:29]:
And we’ve all been fooled, haven’t we, on things? And if you haven’t been fooled, you probably have been fooled more.

Mike Caulfield [00:05:35]:
Yeah. Right. Especially if you think you haven’t been fooled, you probably have been fooled. Yeah.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:40]:
Yeah. And it it it’s so much harder to determine at first glance now because of the technology, like, is something true or is it not? And that tends to be the question that we ask ourselves. We see something online, we see a news story, we see a white paper. We see an article. And we might ask the question, is it true? And you invite us in your work to think about a very different question than is it true.

Mike Caulfield [00:06:10]:
Yeah. People jump to this question of is it true or not? But that question is kinda ill formed for most stuff that you see. If you take, for example, this incident with the Van Gogh painting, what actually happens there is you see something, you think it is something. Right? You think that the painting has been destroyed. Right? And the question isn’t really, is the video true? It’s hard to even know what that sort of question means. The question is, was my reaction to this thing I saw appropriate? Like, if I put trust in this thing, was my trust well placed? If if this thing moved me to reconsider something, is it good evidence for that? Is it not? You know, this sort of cluster of things. And the real question, since you already had a reaction to the thing you looked at, the real question is, do I actually know what I’m looking at? Right? You looked at the thing. If the thing is what you think it is, you’re mad.

Mike Caulfield [00:07:02]:
Right? You should be mad. It’s Van Gogh. But the question is, do I even know what I’m looking at here? Right? Do I understand what I’m looking at? And that’s where people go wrong. People immediately rush in to this question of, should they have thrown the soup or not? Is this good or not? Like, should they be in jail or not? What should be the punishment for this? When they have to ask themselves, first of all, does the video actually show the paintings being destroyed? Something like that. Right? So that’s that’s a different first question. We found that it’s it’s really useful. And it’s not just about the stuff around videos. Anytime you look at a source, you’ve already made an assumption about it being authoritative or not.

Mike Caulfield [00:07:43]:
You’ve looked at a website and you’ve assumed, for example, that it’s a local newspaper, and it might have some local authority because it looks like a local newspaper. But is it a local newspaper? You’ve looked at an article in a magazine and thought, oh, well, this is interesting. This article is covering this topic that I’m interested in. But isn’t an article in that magazine, or is it a piece of sponsored content in that magazine? Right? So this question of making sure before we start to engage with things, we actually know what the thing is. That’s a more fundamental question than is something true or false, and it’s the place where people most often go wrong.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:18]:
Yeah. And this is where this becomes so relevant for us in our work, our organizations, finding information that we might make decisions on with our team, with strategy. And you set a big piece of it. This is where this comes home for, I think, a lot of us is we might think, Van Gogh painting, interesting, but not necessarily something I’m thinking about. Unless I’m in the art world, not necessarily something I’m making decisions on in my work. But what all of us are seeing a lot more is sponsored content, ads, things that present themselves as new stories, credible information, and look very much like that, but in a lot of cases, actually aren’t.

Mike Caulfield [00:08:59]:
Yeah. And the thing about that again is, you know, so you’re in a magazine, you read some sponsored content or a white paper that doesn’t initially look like a a white paper. And it’s not that the reading a white paper on a subject would be bad. That’s part of what you do in business. Right? But you you have to know if you’re if you’re reading an IBM white paper when it’s making a decision about cloud computing, you have to know it’s an IBM white paper. Right? That’s part of the lens through which you’re going to evaluate this information. And on the other hand, if it’s a piece of investigative journalism or if it’s an independent research report, you wanna know that. Right? So that you make appropriate sorts of judgments.

Mike Caulfield [00:09:40]:
You have an appropriate interpretative context for the thing that you’re reading. And what happens on the web in particular is the web is this relentless stripper of context. Right? So stuff arrives, stuff sort of teleports to your doorstep on the web, and you make assumptions about where it came from, about who wrote it, about what their purpose in doing that was. But those assumptions are very often wrong, and sometimes those assumptions are manipulated by people that would that feel as to their benefit to look a little more like one thing than another.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:17]:
And one of the invitations you make to us is to just take another few seconds. And the one of the things I love about your work, Mike, is this isn’t something where you need to go on a 45 minute research project on everything you find. And in fact, I think you’d advise against that. But taking 15 or 20 seconds to do a couple of things, which we’re gonna talk about is really key. And just one example of that is, like, going to the bottom of a post and looking for some of the words, especially for sponsored content that tend to come up, brand partner presented with in partnership with, hosted by. Those kinds of, you call them weasel words, are sort of like you know, they’re a little fluffy sounding, but, actually, they often indicate that there’s some sort of financial relationship, partnership, sponsorship. And dare I use the word ad versus something that maybe is more objectively credible.

Mike Caulfield [00:11:12]:
Yeah. I mean, so people understand the word ad. Right? But you put a phrase somewhere on a page where it says in partnership with, you know, or something like that, people’s eyes sort of skip over it. They don’t necessarily notice it. Those words don’t jump out at them. They don’t realize that someone, for example, may have paid money to get this thing placed. And so part of it is, yeah, stopping, taking that minute to say, hold on a second. I think this this is an article.

Mike Caulfield [00:11:39]:
But let me just check to make sure that this is what I think it is. And part of it is developing a bit of a sense of the sorts of words that are used so that they jump out at you a little more because people are always sort of futzing with these words to make it a little more subtle. And I don’t mean yeah. I I don’t mean to make everybody cynical, like, this is sort of vast were world out there to get you, but people try to blur these boundaries. And, again, what you’re reading might be useful to you, but you have to know where it came from. You have to know why it was produced. You have to know why it landed in the thing that you’re looking at to give an appropriate to have an appropriate context to understand what it might mean.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:25]:
Yeah. Indeed. And just one example I was thinking of as you were, mentioning that is it was maybe 6 or 9 months ago. I cannot remember what publication it was in, but there was a really interesting article about a practice, speaking of podcasts, on some podcasts, that have developed some popularity of podcasts asking for guests to pay to come on to the show. Just to be clear, by the way, no one has ever paid to come on Coaching for Leaders nor have we ever paid anyone. That’s not the way we do business. But there are podcasts that do business that way. And if you go to those sites and you look at the very bottom of those posts, you will see words like, oh, portions of this may have been sponsored.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:11]:
It’s in really tiny print. It is there. It’s legally compliant. But to your point, Mike, it’s the kind of thing that technically it’s compliant, but it’s the thing that people don’t really want you to see. They don’t really want to give you the full picture of this is a, in a sense, an ad. And so, like, just taking a few seconds to look for that language, at least here in the states, that’s the law. So a lot of those things do tend to be disclosed, but they’re just really subtle. If you could take a few minutes to not even a few minutes, a few seconds just to look for that,

Mike Caulfield [00:13:41]:
it could make a big difference. Yeah. Yeah. And a and a podcast is a great example because you’re about to invest your attention in a podcast. I mean, that that could be, like, 30 minutes. That could be an hour of time. And, again, what we find is, like, the main point of the book is to both develop a set of habits and a set of skills. And the thing that we’re trying to get people to do is by spending a little more time upfront, and again, 30 seconds, 90 seconds upfront before you engage with what you’re looking at, whether it’s a video, whether it’s an article, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s a research report, whether it’s a research paper, whatever it is, by spending just a little time up front before you engage with it.

Mike Caulfield [00:14:23]:
You’re gonna make sure that your in your investment of your your attention is rewarded there. And we’re so both the the environment, of the of the Internet and our own natural habits tend to push us to sort of rush right in. You know? We see a paper that’s on, a or an article that’s on a certain subject. We’re immediately thinking, do I agree with this? Do I disagree with this? Like, you know, what is it saying? Like, how do I feel about this? We see a podcast. We’re like, oh, well, that looks, like something interesting to me. I’m gonna click forward. So everything is sort of prime to sort of pull us immediately into engaging with the thing in front of us. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to show not just to stop and try to get that context.

Mike Caulfield [00:15:10]:
We’re trying to show the couple of things that have the biggest return on investment. Right? Because what what we found is if you make every project like this a a 20 minute research project well, before I listen to this podcast, I’m gonna have to go and and figure out, you know, who is this from? Where is your funding? You know, all all of this stuff. I mean, no one’s gonna do it. Right? Yeah. But we’ve actually found that there’s a very small set of things, a limited set of things that people can do very, very quickly that are very effective at giving them that context. And then that means when they engage with the thing, they’re gonna get more out of it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:48]:
One of those things that you invite us to do is to do lateral reading instead of reading vertically, could you tell me about that distinction and what’s different than how we tend to approach our reading?

Mike Caulfield [00:16:04]:
Yeah. So we tend to approach our reading, and we know that people, no matter what people tell you, this is what people tend to do is we look at the thing in front of us, and we tend to evaluate it by what we call surface features or or weak signals. Right? So we happen on a web page, and it looks kinda like a local newspaper, say. Right? You know, it’s called like the the Tennessee ranger or something, and it’s it’s got a certain font, a certain look, a certain layout. Right? It’s got a certain style, right, a certain style of prose. And we use those surface features, those weak signals to say to think, oh, well, this is a local newspaper from Tennessee. Right? And then very often, we’ll go vertical reading is because we’ll scroll down. We’ll say, well, is it really? We’ll scroll down, and we’ll look at the article.

Mike Caulfield [00:16:59]:
We’re like, well, yeah. Look. It’s got a journalistic style. It mentions local events and so forth and so on. Right? Lateral reading is the practice of the the sort of quick way to summarize is you open up another tab, on your browser, And instead of looking at the thing itself and saying, what does this look like to me? You go and you find it what other people have said about it. And you do that first. Right? We do find sometimes people do do lateral reading, but they’ve already spent all this time engaging with the thing in front of them, making all these assumptions, and trying to, you know, play Columbo with the web page. Whereas we try to get people as their first step to go see you know, if it’s a local paper of any size, there might a Wikipedia page about it.

Mike Caulfield [00:17:45]:
Right? So go and see if there’s a Wikipedia page about it that can tell you what this is all about. If it’s a local paper of any size, some other publication probably has mentioned it at some point. Right? So go and see what other people have said about it. And that’s what we consider to be a strong signal. It’s a strong signal because it’s very easy to fake a look. It’s very easy to fake a style. It’s much harder to fake a decade worth of reputation. Right? It’s much harder to fake, you know, a series of news articles about what you’re about.

Mike Caulfield [00:18:19]:
Right? So so I can I can for example, you know, I can on my LinkedIn page, that’s under my control? I could go and say that I’m anybody, right, on my LinkedIn page more or less. Right? But if you wanna find out if I’m who I say I am, actually, I I’ve got a record in the press. Right? You can go and you can search my call field, and you can find my record of both places I’ve worked, things I’ve said, stuff I’ve engaged with. There’s other sorts of records too. Right? But the idea again is things that are under the direct control of a person trying to project a sort of feel about themselves or a story about themselves, things that are under their direct control are weak signals because they’re easily fudged, they’re easily gained. Things that are sort of outside of their control that sort of external reputation that you can use the web to mine. Those are the stronger signals. You wanna look at those first, and then maybe come back to the thing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:08]:
I’m so glad you mentioned several of those things that I I wanna dive in in a few of these, including Wikipedia. But one of the things, like, we all have to sort of do a bit is unlearn a bunch of stuff…

Mike Caulfield [00:19:19]:
Yeah.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:19]:
…that worked for us, like, a generation ago, and also gasp go against our middle school teachers who taught us some of these practices, which was like, okay. Does the website have typos on it? Do the links work? Is there an about page? Is the author qualified? Is it a dot org? Those were really helpful practices 10 or 15 years ago, but like you said, those are so easy to duplicate, make look simple these days, and you it’s fascinating actually in the book. You look at some of the websites that check all of the boxes for all of those traditional things that many of us were taught. And then it turns out if you just take the the title of the website and go put it in a Google search and scroll down a little bit, you find that there’s special interest groups, there are fringe groups, there are I mean, it’s the political organizations, like, you get behind it really quickly if you do some of that lateral reading versus just kind of, like, spending all the time on that site.

Mike Caulfield [00:20:19]:
Yeah. And conversely, there’s a there’s a lot of websites that are legitimate, which have an error or or 2 on them or, you know, a lot of legitimate websites are parts of these sort of unfortunate ad networks that throw up, a disturbing ad or 2 about I don’t know. I always see the one where they’re, like, boiling bananas, and they’ve got, like, some secret lesson about my metabolism or something. Right. You know? And so but, you know, the nature of the you might look at that and be like, this is very untrustworthy page, but, you know, it could just be that the ad network that they’re using is is is putting putting those things on in the in the reporting is is very good. We had a example of a paper called the Vindicator, which I’m trying to remember if it was out of Pennsylvania or Ohio or something. You know, paper has been around since, like, the 1800s. And if you looked at it, you’d be like, yeah.

Mike Caulfield [00:21:11]:
What high schooler put this together? But they spent their money on the reporting, not the layout. And so, yeah, we we tend to, you know, I I guess you can kinda say judge a book by its cover. But I’m not even saying judge the book by its contents. I’m saying before you open the book, ask around who wrote this book, what do they know, why are they qualified to talk about it? And then maybe, you know, open the book, but but get that initial context first.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:38]:
The this just happened to me yesterday. One of the practices I have is when I get pitches for guests from agents or publishers is all, if I’m not aware of the person at all, I’ll just start doing some Google searches, or I’m actually using right now, which is a different search engine. And I’ll start to go and, just, like, put in that person’s name, see what other people are saying. I’ll often put in that person’s name and then put in the word criticism on the search title. Yeah. And I expect there to be criticism from almost every guest. That’s legitimate.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:09]:
It should be there. And this person, like, great website, all everything checked out, good publisher, everything. But then when I did the criticism search, there was a ton of criticism, and it wasn’t criticism of the normal nature. It was a whole bunch of other stuff, and it gave me pause, Mike. And if I hadn’t done that, I probably would have gone down a path further with this person because it was a good topic. Everything looked good. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get into it, and I’ll I’ll figure out other things. But the practice of, like, going and putting in web searches, going on Amazon and reading reviews of people’s books from real people.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:47]:
I sort of use all those things as, like, just individual data points. Like, none of them are in and of themselves make a decision, but I started look at the whole picture. I’m like, well, let me go around and see what are other people saying about this person’s work, and what’s the perspective that I don’t have because I don’t know this person. It’s fascinating how often that will surface things pretty quickly, especially if you scroll down a little bit on the search results. You get to, like, the 7th or 8th or 9th thing. It is fascinating what comes up sometimes.

Mike Caulfield [00:23:13]:
Yeah. And so you hit on another thing we talked about which is click restraint. Right? Part of the thing is you put in the search, and you actually hit on a number of things. You’re using criticism. That’s that’s what we call a bare keyword. Right? So you’re you’re looking for something about this person, and then you’re adding, like, a little clue to Google about the type of things that you would like to find out. Right? And you’re doing it in a really simple way. Right? You’re adding criticism there.

Mike Caulfield [00:23:38]:
So some sometimes we use bare keywords like Wikipedia or fact check if I would like to see a fact check. Like, put fact check after it and see and see that it surfaces that. And then you’re you’re pointing out another thing that we point out in the book, which is you wanna take in that whole Google page, and we show a couple quick techniques to read what we call the vibe of the Google search page. And you’re you’re looking at that page, and you’re asking yourself 2 questions. 1 is you’re you’re trying to figure out what’s what’s the best resource on here, not necessarily the the stuff near nearest to the top. And the second thing you’re trying to figure out is given the results I’ve gotten back here, did Google understand what I’m looking for, or has Google maybe misunderstood the sort of thing I’m looking for, and should I maybe reform that that search? And then to to your your larger point about this, I I sometimes hit this from the other side with people. I get a lot of press requests coming in. They want me to comment on this thing or that thing or to talk about the method or a new piece of misinformation that’s going around the web.

Mike Caulfield [00:24:48]:
And so you just get a lot of them. Right? And it can be so easy to just immediately start engaging because, you know, you’re in the middle of your case. It’s it’s habit. Right? But, of course, that’s not what you want to do. If you don’t recognize the reporter, because it’s important for you to understand where you’re going to appear, like what sort of article, what sort of publication you’re lending your credibility to, you just gotta bite the bullet and take the 10 seconds to look up what’s that publication is and make sure that it’s the sort of publication that you think it is and not, for example, some sort of fringy thing that, you know, maybe borrowing your credibility to try to piggyback on it or or do something else. The core thing with that, again, though, is you have to develop it as a habit. It has to become something that’s almost muscle memory for you. And the thing that we found going wrong with most of the stuff out there is that it was so much formulated on think about these deeper questions, like ponder it a while.

Mike Caulfield [00:25:52]:
You know? Look at all these look at 18 different factors. And when you tell people to do that, they don’t do it. So getting it down to these short little techniques and formulas, it’s much more important to do this stuff every time than to do it thoroughly once in a while. And that’s the big structuring principle of of the way that we’ve we’ve designed our advice.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:17]:
You and Sam, right, a joke amongst disgruntled web advertisers goes like this. Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Answer page 2 of the search results. You know? It’s so true. There’s such interesting things there. I I wanna, like, dive in on just using search engines a little more because I think that’s another, like, key thing that some people have as a practice, but many people don’t. And you use an example of the book of just a public policy thing that’s come up is some local governments organizations taxing soda as a way to discourage people from purchasing soda to keep people healthier, all those things. And one of the invitations you make is when you’re going to do research online, is to ask a question in a neutral way. Because if you add in words, you’re going to tilt the results that are going to give you what you wanna see, and you actually wanna be more neutral.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:14]:
Thinking about that through something like soda taxes, what’s the way to do that? How do you how do you prompt for something that’s more neutral?

Mike Caulfield [00:26:16]:
Yeah. So, I mean, you can do it one of 2 ways. You can one way is neutral. You might do something like impact of soda taxes. Right? Not soda tax is good, soda tax is bad. And what that’s saying to Google or whatever search engine you’re in is show me stuff on the impact, and you’ll see some stuff that says, look. So the taxes have a bad impact on this. They have a good impact on this, or they have no impact.

Mike Caulfield [00:27:44]:
You’re leaving that as sort of wide open. You know, if you can’t think of a word like impact, something that that is rather neutral, you can try putting in 2 searches. Right? You could try putting in, soda taxes, you know, bad, and then soda taxes good. And what you’ll see is you’ll get different results because Google or any search engine you’re using is is trying to find the most authoritative results, but it’s also trying to give you the stuff it thinks you want. And if you say soda tax is good, it thinks you’re I’m I’m looking for stuff that shows the beneficial effects of soda taxes. If you say soda tax is bad, it’s looking for the for the opposite thing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:23]:
Just by putting in that one word, it’s giving you entirely different result because it thinks that’s what you’re looking for, and it gets you to where you wanna go and, you know, of course, Google’s running advertising off all that. It I mean, just thinking about a word or two makes a big difference on that.

Mike Caulfield [00:28:22]:
Yeah. Yeah. And if if you’re really interested in making the best decision, the thing you really want out of the web is you want the web to maybe challenge your belief. Right? So if your belief is, look, soda taxes are great, and you go and you put soda taxes good, what are you gonna see? You’re gonna see a bunch of stuff that confirms your belief. And that kinda undermines the value of research. Right? I mean, the value of research is to challenge your assumptions, to deepen your understandings, not to simply provide you an arsenal of things that support what you believe before you typed in the search. Right? So paying attention to that and making sure that you modify your searches in ways that show you sort of the wider view of these things instead of just confirm your belief.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:30]:
Speaking of wider views, you said the word Wikipedia a couple times in this conversation already and coming back to a lot of the training many of us had in school, we’ve all heard don’t use Wikipedia. Don’t cite it in papers. There’s tons of errors on Wikipedia. It’s not research based, you know, all the stuff we’ve all heard and been told many times. And you challenge some of that in your research and your work that, no. Actually, that’s a really helpful place to start. What is it that makes Wikipedia helpful?

Mike Caulfield [00:30:00]:
Well, I mean, if you’re unfamiliar with something, you don’t wanna jump into the thick of a conversation. Right? You know, an ongoing conversation. You want to get a sense of, you want to get a summary of things. Otherwise, you sort of end up in one person saying that that you you’re getting everything sort of in pieces. You need something to sort of summarize things before you look at them. And, also, for things like figuring out what an organization is about, you don’t wanna have to sift through 18 articles that mentioned in half a paragraph, some organization and look how they describe it and so forth. You’d like something that says, look. It was is founded in 1902.

Mike Caulfield [00:30:40]:
It was meant to address these things. It has 500 employees, whatever it says. Right? You need something that kinda has that sort of boring work of summary that kind of grounds you before you engage with something. So it’s really useful, in that. The critiques that we hear tend to be about a Wikipedia that doesn’t exist anymore. So, you know, Wikipedia is known as the the encyclopedia anybody can edit as we show in the book. That’s not really true. Like, for the more high profile and more contentious pages, there are limits on who can edit.

Mike Caulfield [00:31:12]:
You have to build up some credibility. If you put various types of edits into Wikipedia, there’s a whole machine learning architecture. A series of bots that go around the site and reverse changes that look like they might be vandalism or note things that have been added that haven’t been properly cited. So there’s sort of the Wikipedia of 2006, which was was, I think, in many ways, a lot of the jokes about Wikipedia at that time were spot on. But, you know, it’s not 2006 anymore. You know, it’s a decade and a half later, and a lot has happened to Wikipedia in those 15 years. There’s a lot of controls in place, a lot of processes in place that make Wikipedia for the sorts of things you’re probably going to it for a very reliable source.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:01]:
Yeah. And it’s I think it’s really telling, and you point this out in the book, like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple Siri, all site Wikipedia. Now it’s the 5th most visited website on the entire Internet, and the controls are, like, it’s really fascinating when you get in, like, what they’ve created is amazing. And by the way, it doesn’t mean Wikipedia is not without bias as you point out in the book too. There’s certainly bias everywhere. And they know that, and they’re working on it, and they’re making some progress. But it’s one of many data points that gets you to do that lateral reading of, like, okay. Let me go, like, I’m reading about this person.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:37]:
I’m reading about this organization. Let me go do a quick Wikipedia search. And it’s interesting, like, so many of the things you cite in the book and the examples of websites that look like as soon as you do a Wikipedia search and you, like, read a little bit about organizations, you find out pretty quickly, like, okay. What? Who funds this? What is this organization affiliated with? It’s really fascinating.

Mike Caulfield [00:32:57]:
Yeah. And sometimes that may show you the site is fine for your purposes and sometimes not. Like, an example we give is, you know, you come to a a website that seems like, oh, this is just a normal web publication. Turns out it’s an advocacy group for something, what whatever it might be for, yeah, I don’t know, more urban development, less urban development, or so forth. You know, you go to Wikipedia and very quickly says, hey. This this is an advocacy group. Now if that’s what you wanted, that’s fine. Right? Yeah.

Mike Caulfield [00:33:27]:
You know? Maybe you wanted to go to an advocacy group and see, like, what are the strong arguments that they’re they’re advancing here. But, again, if you went to that thinking, oh, this is a site like, I don’t know, like Axios or Vox or something. And, no, it turns out, no, this is a this is a urban development advocacy group. Yeah. That’s a frame through which you’re gonna view the stuff. And Wikipedia is just really good at not only doing that, but very often they get that stuff in the first paragraph or 2 of that Wikipedia page. So you don’t gotta go hunting through it to find that stuff. Very often, it’s right up there at the top, and then you can decide whether you wanna continue to engage with it or not.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:05]:
Mike, I so appreciate the work you and Sam have done. I mean, we’re just skimming the surface on so many practical things in the book. And I think the thing that’s really powerful about this is 15 or 20 seconds doing the right thing. Like you said, consistently can really help a lot. And I think this is helpful for all of us to get better at, especially those who are doing a lot of work researching online, sharing lots of content with stakeholders, clients. It’s just essential to get into. So I hope folks will get the book, take a look into the SIF model, start to utilize it. Mike Caulfield is the coauthor of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:49]:
Mike, thank you so much for all your work.

Mike Caulfield [00:34:51]:
You’re welcome, and, it’s been a pleasure to be here.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:48]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, a few related episodes I’d recommend. One of them is episode 499, the way to make better decisions. Annie Duke was my guest on that episode, one of the top researchers on decision making, some real practical tips on the big picture, which is behind this conversation as well. Right? Not just on wine, but how do we broadly make better decisions with the information that we have in front of us? Annie walks us through in that conversation. Some of the key models from her research. Her book’s fabulous on this episode 499 for more of that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:33]:
Also recommended episode 666. Get people reading what you’re sending. Todd Rogers was my guest. Of course, so many of us do send out messages online, credible messages and we want to enhcance our credibility in order to get people to read what we’re sending. In that conversation with Todd, we looked at some of the key principles for keeping things concise. So much more in his book and his work. A great starting point for being able to get people reading what you’re sending. Episode 666 for that. So many of you have told us that that was such a helpful conversation to you.And then finally, I get asked fairly regularly, how do you sift through everything that you find online? How do you go through the process of seeing things and deciding on books and guests and other things to pass along in the weekly leadership guides. I aired an audio course a while back called How to Enhance Your Credibility.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:30]:
It is about credibility, of course, but more specifically, it’s the process that I utilize in finding things, getting onto my radar screen, what I do with them, how I make decisions, how I then categorize things and pass them along to you either on the show or in the weekly leadership guides step by step exactly how to think about that and how to think about that for you as far as enhancing your own professional credibility. It’s one of the free audio courses available inside of the free membership. And if you haven’t set up your free membership, you’ll need to do that in order to access that audio course, along with the whole suite of audio courses that are on the website. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership. It takes just a few moments, and you will have full access to all of the audio courses, all of the episode library from 2011 searchable by topic, my own personal library, and a ton more inside of the free membership. And if you’re looking for more beyond that, I’d invite you to discover more about Coaching for Leaders Plus. It’s an opportunity to hear a bit more from me each week and each month to support you in your leadership development. 1 of our members just reached out to me this past week and said, I’m finishing up a big project.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:48]:
I’m getting a lot of attention for the good things that have happened with this project. And everyone’s coming up and praising me personally for it even though the work is really the work of the entire team. How do I accept praise in a genuine and appropriate way but also share it with the team? We talked about how to accept praise in a way that’s really credible and how to share that with an entire organization. I wrote a journal entry on that just recently and sent it out to all of our plus members. If you’d like to get those weekly journal entries from me on email, a short entry each week with something very practical practical that’ll help you to do better inside of your organization. It’s one of the key benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. For more, just go over to coachingforleaders.plus for details on that and everything else.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:41]:
Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Ethan Malek to the show. He’s an expert researcher on AI, and we’re gonna be talking about the principles for using AI at work, a key key conversation right now. So many of us are thinking about AI. How do we use it? What’s the implications for organizations? Ethan’s gonna walk us through some key principles and starting points for all of us on using AI. Join me for that conversation with him, and have a great week. Take care.