#mostly unrelated but I was looking through my blog trying to see if I'd already posted abt that aspect of growing up CoC

[roboromantic]

y'know, one of the few good things about the church I grew up in is that there was a big push for us to fact-check things. If someone cites the Bible, we should look it up and make sure that quote actually exists - hell, the preachers would always pause after citing a verse and you could hear people flipping the pages of their Bibles to find it. I don't actually remember if other coc churches did this or if it was just bc of the main preacher we had, I'm kinda curious. Also do other denominations do this? I imagine statistically there must be some but idk how common that is

Certain CoC arguments (complete immersion of "adults" for baptism, no musical instruments in worship) rely on analyzing the original Greek of the New Testament, so at the very least the preachers did some research into that, however biased. Even back then my father used an app that let you compare different translations, though I uh. don't think that was something most other people did.

He also encouraged me to look up English words I didn't know in a dictionary rather than just ask him, and it was definitely in an "encouraging learning" way and not a "stop bothering me" way, so it wasn't JUST the CoC. But it's really quite ironic that this cult-like group actually helped to teach me one of the most important critical thinking skills, lmao.

like what prompted this is I saw this post a while back by a 16 y/o being corrected on some fandom lore stuff where they basically said "oh I'm gullible and don't really know how to research, and that's probably not gonna change XD" and I mean, they're just a kid. At their age I was still very much entrenched in the CoC so I don't exactly have room to criticize.

But if they don't know how to research information for a fandom they love, then I'm genuinely concerned for how they interact with a world of fake news, graphs and statistics distorted to look like something completely different than what they actually represent, search engines that give you ads ahead of and mixed in with actually relevant results, clickbait, and so many things that care more about making you emotional so you engage with their content more than they do about facts.

Odds are they're probably still in secondary education, so hopefully they'll be taught some researching skills that way? There's no guarantee that they are or that said education is any good though, and even if this person wants to get better at research on their own......well, how do they research how to get better at it?

and like. we already know a good chunk of people on this site don't bother to read beyond headlines or fact-check stuff, and their media literacy and analysis is abyssmal; they can't all be 16 year olds. It's a problem for people of any age and/or educational status and this is starting to sound like the paper I wrote on the problems with religious literacy in the US. it comes full circle lmao

OH RIGHT there's this other post of twitter screenshots that's like "google is HIDING other search engines from us" and then has a bunch of links to......academic sites? do they really expect people to use worldcat (which at least while I was in college was actively recommended) to find out when a movie comes out or what time a store closes or the gazillion other mundane things people google. Like just mention yahoo or bing or even marginalia, THOSE have similar functions to google. the links that person is listing are more along the lines of scholar.google.com. the OP has since left twitter so idk if they ever addressed that point

Anyway. I almost wish I could meet this kid and teach them how to do research but I don't know that I'd be any good at it. it feels like that xkcd comic where it's just something I've done forever so what seems like common knowledge to me still sounds intimidating to those who aren't familiar with it