Where do you adults acquire most of the information you know?

I believe knowledge is gradual and can come from many sources, sometimes without even realising it. I often find I get information that will contradict other information I have received and form and belief or opinion based on my life experiences and personal logic.

If a source has been reliable in the past, it can bare weight on its reliability in future.

The older and wiser I feel I get, the easier I find it to categorise and interpret information I am receiving.

Consensus of fact is also helpful for me when I am making a decision.

Science, since school, I mostly keep up with through books and articles.

I use the Web for a lot of information I need. I look things up carefully, though. I use primary sources and am careful about where my information comes from.

Separating fact from opinion is done through my critical thinking skills.

I still read a daily newspaper. I don’t watch a lot of network news.

CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Science Daily, NOAA, various books, family, friends, and life : )

Textbooks, television documentaries, NPR, CNN. In that order probably.

School and Internet.

BBC, Guardian, Professional blogs, peer-reviewed journals, PBS.

If everything on a source is one-sided then I stop giving them as much credit. It’s why I stopped watching cable news. I don’t want your opinion on a story, I want the facts. I’m quite capable of forming an opinion on my own.

Observation, wikipedia, friends/coworkers, academic journals, the NYT, and professors.

I believe all sources of information have a bias, so I try to expose myself to varied forms of communication of ideas: books, documentaries, magazines, academic journals, online newspapers, white papers, lectures, blogs, other people, NPR.

I tend not to watch TV new except for CNN because media news has a bias in order to captivate viewership—they must sell the news segment before they impart the actual information to drive up viewership numbers. Therefore, they are going to research their target audience’s demographics and biases, and skew the news to make it appealing to that audience.

I have a handful of subjects that I’m passionate about, and will read deeply on those subjects. For other subjects, I absorb information from people who I know to be relatively unbiased, and rely on them to distill information for me on their specialization, or at least enough to give me a conversational base.

I like ideas.

CBC (Canadian News), BBC. (I prefer to steer clear of American News Channels)
Discovery Channel
Textbooks
Documentaries
Online
Family, friends, co-workers

MSU

my homepage is cnn.com, so every time i open the internet i at least see headlines

Musuems, school, books, magazines, tv, internet, and traveling.

Peers

Television documentaries,all kind of book,and internet. I know because I read their biography(for book),I witness their experiences(for documentaries),and I observe their source(for internet).

I get my information from my local newspaper, books, and Wikipedia. Which is a perfectly reliable source for most of the important stuff.

In general, if a news article, a blog, or someone on TV pulls out some shocking statistic I try to ignore it, because half the time it is not properly cited, and I suspect they pulled it out of the air. I do not trust History Channel because someone watched one of their shows and tried to convince me Nostradamus really was the real deal. I trust Discovery Channel because they seem to have no real bias aside from the preserve-our-planet! angle, which isn’t a bad bias to have, all things considered.

I trust Jezebel because they have revealed to me all the scandals of magazine cover Photoshopping. I do not trust most fashion magazines because I know how much they edit their shots, and also because they keep on recommending I buy the trendy new item of the season that is $500, thus implying that you can’t dress well without forgoing, y’know, food and rent.

I do not trust the Daily Kos because it’s too aggressively partisan. I trust FiveThirtyEight because I trust numbers more than words. And this is coming from a writer!

I do not trust overly angry, overly satirical, or overly critical writing, because objectivity is calm, and anger could mean that someone’s judgment is clouded by bias.

I tend to always believe friends and family, unfortunately.

I have a very well trained B.S. detector built in to my brain. I am naturally good at separating fact from opinion. I read. A lot. I do not watch TV for its accurate information but for entertainment and to stay in the loop socially. I read several different news sources, but frankly journalism has gone down hill a lot and news reports are often inaccurate or misleading. I read industry publications and peer reviewed journal articles if I really want the whole story. I spend a lot of time online. I email professors if I have a technical question.

Most of my information comes by way of Scientific American magazine, and books recommended by Scientific American Book Club.

Lifes lessons.

While I don’t think I qualify as ‘adult’, I don’t really see my current schooling doing too much for my total knowledge. My friends tend to be fairly well informed and critical, so I’d usually take their word for things. TV, ha, good one. Documentaries (depending on the obvious political agendas) are somewhere between entertainment and education for me. I’m subscribed to a couple of magazines e.g. australian geographic. But I’d say the most input I get would be from the internet. Scirus is a fantastic place for generally reliable information. I spend quite a lot of time poking around for subjects that take my fancy. And the progressive validity of wikipedia is going well, I’m finding it less and less ridiculous.

I try to be critical of everything. It would be nigh impossible to even get close to objectivity. But I’m trying.

Living…reading.

Internet, tv and common sense.

A tremendous variety of sources but for news I find that BBC is more international than any American source. I enjoy documentaries on Public Television and news from radio like NPR. For the written news I think, the NY Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are stellar. I will read an article in the Scientific American but rarely because I don’t have an extensive Science background and I find it about as dry as stale toast. But I defer to such sources to expound my liberal arts education. I generally trust that there are some areas of scientific thought that I am ill equipped to completely grasp but have faith in expert analysis.
For a general overview of many topics I find that Wikipedia is far more objective than many snobs people give it credit for. There is also an idea about education and insight that many would like to keep arcane and exclusive to a select few and I think that this is the basis of this sentiment. Yes there is definitely the aspect of Wikipedia that has the capacity to be altered/amended etc., but that is also it’s greatest strength-millions of watchdogs. No one can be the overseer of all information and there is the level of trust inherent in every piece of information that we receive including the experts. And if one truly wants to understand something there are countless references to dig further.
And where else can I find something like this in 2.3 seconds

Nature.com online rocks for science news and Wall street journal is all you need for world news and financial. For cheap thrills and latest hype Drudge Report is on the front lines of current events. From there search engines do the rest I use IXQUICK.com for my meta search engine.

Is this homework?

Books. Talking to smart people.

@susanc
Turn off Twitter. Yes this is where you think.~
:P

In order of importance and weight.
Academic papers, researchers in the field (talks/presentations of research), in person with an ‘expert’ of their field, academic journals – or magazines that are close enough, observation, encyclopedias, textbooks (there’s many bad textbooks, I prefer research papers), media (often questionable, apply reverse-engineering constantly), friends, people (everyone holds a little bit of “the truth”).

Should be about all.
Good question. You can go into great depth with this. There is a field in philosophy that goes into the acquisition of knowledge. Also interesting psychology, biology and neuroscience – positions on learning and acquisition from the environment (where it all begins).