Why checking your sources matters

We recently watched a movie from 2004 called Shattered Glass, a movie about about Stephen Glass. He was a journalist who made up stories in the nineties, and passed them off as fact. At the time, he worked for the New Republic, a well-known and influential magazine. Most of the staff were recent grads trying to make a name for themselves, so they didn’t get paid much, but they partied hard. Somehow he circumnavigated their fact checking process, and managed to blag his way into story after story. Until his editor caught wind of what was going on…

Most journalism is based on improving what we already know, by building on what we already know. You need to use external inputs as data points to your own investigation. In school before the internet existed, there was a lot of emphasis on minimizing plagiarism. Cite your sources. Make it clear what is your thinking and what you got from somewhere else.

Robustness

At a high level, the same is true of the scientific process. Academics cite other papers, to then extend the state of the art with their own thoughts, data, and investigations. Cite your sources. And document your experience. With popular approaches like Lean Startup, the scientific method has been simplified into experiment-based entrepreneurship.

In both cases, this is about robustness and reliability of information. If we can’t trust what we see and hear from others, it undermines most of the “systems” in society. Media. Political systems. Business. Education. Research.

Check your source’s credentials

I bring this up because there is a flavor of advice and advisors in the entrepreneurial world who just repeat smart sounding soundbites from others. But not necessarily based on their own experiences. They are “plagiarizing” from an intellectual perspective. Which seems like it’s not that big of a deal. It’s academic. A white lie. In business, it’s not that important to credit others, especially in marketing material, right?

More importantly, though, advice plagiarizers are not able to go deeper and explain the logic and trade-offs which are relevant. They only Know; they can’t Do. They get the dopamine rush of looking smart, without needing to actually do their own work. In short, they benefit themselves without necessarily benefiting their advice takers. Or worse, harming their advice takers by giving inappropriate or irrelevant advice, causing additional problems if followed.

The real issue here isn’t plagiarism; it’s pretending you are saying something from experience when you haven’t earned the right to do so.

There was an article about the bullshit industrial complex a few years ago, which is what really pointed out how important this is. If everyone is just endlessly repeating advice they hear somewhere else (and often passing it off as their own) then we pretty much have a big echo chamber. No one is doing any original thinking or work or testing from direct experience. It’s all just received wisdom, which is just naff.

Dog-fooding

In contrast, we have dog-fooding. Dog-fooding is a hard concept to swallow. [pun intended] My sister is actually an expert in dog food as a veterinarian, but that’s not really what i’m referring to.