How To Really Know If Your Sources Are Reliable

I found this podcast to be very intriguing because I have never found someone so invested in knowing all the facts before making a conclusive opinion like Bryan did. I find that people go with their emotions rather than by research. For instance, for preliminary research to see if the resolution could impact his community greatly, Bryan went around town asking people if they were immigrants, but he could not find any, which is no surprise since his home town is in a small town in Alaska. In addition, he also emailed the chief of the police department to see if he knew about any immigrants living  within their community and the cop responded with no.

However Ben rather realized in order to make a informed decision on where he would stand in the resolution his community had made, he would have to look into multiple resources instead of relying on soley the people in the town. While reading the articles he had some problems that most of us run into when researching: bias. He realized that some articles only showed one side of the story and used pathos to move him in a certain direction. The way he tried to combat only hearing one side of the story was by looking for someone else’s opinion that is the total opposite of the article he read. For example, he read about an article discussing Arabic men raping women in Germany, but he also watched stories about war survivors fleeing war and how they would do anything to succeed. In terms of my research,  I always look at both sides of the stories and realize that they have a bias even if they don’t mean to. In addition, I try to go use sources that have been peer reviewed. These sources have been fact checked by multiple people in their field. Also, I look at the sources the paper grabbed the information from. If they grabbed it from a blog, clearly I should not believe everything that is stated. I honestly believe people can’t get talk about controversial topics without involving their bias. The reason it is controversial is because so many people have emotional ties surrounding the topic and it hurts when someone presents something different. However, I do people can minimize their bias by keeping an open mind when the other side is talking and acknowledging when they have good points, but I have seen few who can actually successfully do this. The community I want to be apart of at FSU is the the group of individuals who have studied abroad. The question I want to ask is how being immersed in another country’s culture makes you a better student at FSU. I decided to choose this topic because I have been obsessed with learning about another culture. I am excited to learn how going abroad can improve me as a student as I want to my junior year.