How to Evaluate for Reliability

Today I will be discussing the historical evaluation skill of reliability. But I don’t think this skill should be sidelined to just the study of history, I think it can be used in every aspect of your life, especially when we get most of our information from the internet, which is quite frankly swirling cesspit of misinformation.

While trying to find a snappy quote to start off this bonus episode, I found one attributed to the Chinese philosopher Confucius. “A man who lacks reliability is utterly useless.” Firstly, um… what about women? Secondly, this quote is in English, I am pretty sure that 2500 years ago in China, English was not the language of choice, so who knows what might have been lost in translation. Thirdly, just because you have found a Google image with a black background and an authoritative looking portrait set to the left, with a decorative boarder and a wise font, doesn’t mean it’s really true. Even four-year-olds can use Canva. The irony of this Confucius quote about reliability is that, I don’t think that this quote can be reliably attributed to Confucius.  Yes, that’s right I just fell down a confusing Confucius rabbit hole.

Most of the sayings that are attributed to Confucius were from an ancient text that was compiled after his death called the Analects, this book was supposedly written over a time period of 50 years. Now think about it. If you are trying to remember word-for-word a conversation that you had last week, it is total struggle street, imagine trying to write a book of quotes from someone 50 years after they died. Yeah sure, maybe you might get the essence of someone’s philosophical beliefs, but I don’t think you could reliably say that any of the sayings attributed to Confucius are 100% accurate.

Part of checking the reliability of a source is to see if other scholars corroborate, so let’s see what other people have to say about these writings.

Firstly, Marc Csikszentmihalyi, who is the Chinese program professor at the University of California in Berkley, he has a PhD in Asian Language Studies and is the editor of the Journal of Chinese religions. He has translated and edited at least 3 books on Chinese philosophical though. I found the following information in an article he wrote for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last updated in 2020 and which has 23 academic citations. So, I am going to assess the reliability of this article as being well researched and written by a credible expert. He says, “The many sources of quotations and dialogues of Confucius, both transmitted and recently excavated, provide a wealth of materials about the philosophy of Confucius, but an incomplete sense of which materials are authoritative.” So our expert scholar, is unsure about the reliability of the Confucian writings.

Now to find some corroborating evidence. In a Washington Post Article by Angela E. Couloumbis, she writes, “the words … from … the…Analects of Confucius, [were] compiled by his disciples after his death.” I want to make some observations about the reliability of this article. The author is not a Chinese scholar, but a journalist. She holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism and has worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996. She is listed as winning the Vigoda Award for journalism. Not to downplay the achievement, but when I looked into the award, it is only for writing staff at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Additionally, the article does not have any citations, the role of a journalist writing for a popular newspaper is fundamentally different from that of scholar writing for an Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Although, it has a similar sentiment, journalism has many functions and I would categorise this as more of a “think piece” about Confucianism rather than from years of translation and scholarly research on a topic. So that is an example of how you might assess the reliability of sources.

When looking up the credibility of the authors, I used a concept called “Lateral Reading”. It means instead of just reading what is on the page, you take side-step and try and find out as much information about the author or organisation as you can. There are 2 excellent YouTube videos I would recommend from both Crash Course and Stanford History Education Group, that go into more depth about the skill. I will link them below.