Building A Personal Source Literacy Habit
Launch library · evergreen read
Source literacy, meaning understanding who is speaking, why, and how reliably they have spoken in the past, works considerably best as a standing, ongoing daily habit applied to absolutely everything read, rather than as a special process reserved only for claims that already feel obviously doubtful at first glance to the reader.
A simple version of this habit works well: before fully absorbing a claim, briefly note its source, whether that particular source is genuinely familiar to you, and whether it actually has a track record worth trusting. This takes only a few moments but shifts reading from passive absorption into active, ongoing evaluation.
Practised consistently across ordinary, everyday reading, not only on unusual or particularly striking claims, this habit gradually becomes close to fully automatic, quietly shaping which information genuinely earns confidence over time and which instead remains merely provisional and genuinely unproven for the time being at least.