<ul><li>Decide whether someone else truly knows their stuff or is mimicking others.</li><li>What you want is to get as close to the truth as you can with the information available.</li><li>Knowledge is not static, and we need to be open to continually evaluating what we think we know.</li><li>Ask the right question, which is not “Could this be the case?” but “Is this actually the case?”</li><li>Not using the same data that gave you the clue to make the conclusion.</li><li>The plural of anecdote is not data. We must use proper statistical sampling.</li><li>Realize that we are missing information that we don’t know we’re missing.</li></ul>

Feynman's 7 “Tricks” for Evaluating Information

Most of that information is irrelevant. If only we could sort what matters from what doesn’t. The good news is that you can train your brain to evaluate the quality of information.Not only can you quickly determine if someone knows what they are talking about but you can sort the important information from the irrelevant information and focus your time on what matters.How? It turns out that Nobel Laurette Richard Feynman thought about this problem and created a series of “tricks” that he used repeatedly

We Are Drowning In Information

“We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?”

Richard Feynman offers a list of seven tricks that you can use to quickly sort important from irrelevant information and focus on what matters.

We Are Drowning In Information

Similar ideas to We Are Drowning In Information

Limit the amount of information

Notes On Small Talk

We are rewarded for being negative