Practising Lateral Reading On A Brand New Topic
Launch library · evergreen read
Choose a genuinely unfamiliar topic, ideally one you actually know very little about beforehand, and practise lateral reading entirely from scratch: opening new tabs to check sources rather than simply settling on the first page you happen to land on initially. Unfamiliarity forces genuine reliance on the technique itself rather than on existing background knowledge you might otherwise lean on.
Notice carefully how quickly a rough sense of overall source reliability emerges once you compare several genuinely independent tabs side by side, even on a topic where you originally started out with absolutely no prior expertise at all to draw on beforehand in the topic.
This exercise demonstrates a core strength of lateral reading quite directly: it does not require any real subject expertise to be effective, since the technique itself relies on comparing sources rather than requiring you to personally evaluate technical content in any real depth at all.