Perfect Is the Enemy of Good: Thinking Critically about Information in an Imperfect World

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James Baldwin writes, “In addition, the price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.” In a global culture where digital technology provides a platform for unlimited bean-spilling, finger-pointing, and straight-up hating, there is no need to pursue a profession or calling in order to intimately know its ugly side. Want to learn what is wrong with science, religion, higher education, capitalism, medicine, democracy, the police, or Guy Fieri? A quick Google search will produce more harsh criticism than anyone could read in a lifetime. Even the gold-standard of information, peer-reviewed scholarship, takes its knocks, not all of which are undeserved.

When everything, including information itself, has been revealed as less than perfect, how does any information seeker keep from sinking into the crippling mindset of cynicism or reverting to their cognitive biases to decide what information to accept and what to dismiss? How does anyone “check the facts” when even librarians endorse the idea that “Authority Is Constructed and Contextual?”

Join Donald Barclay for this webinar to consider how librarians and other educators can help learners think about information not as some perfect/imperfect, true/false dichotomy, but rather as points on a continuum of credibility that it is up to information seekers, who are as imperfect as any information they encounter, to untangle as best they can.

This webinar is presented by: Niche Academy