Seeing this title, you might think this is going to be about information science. It’s actually not — I just recently observed some things and felt compelled to share my thoughts. I happened to come across two statements online where I happened to be quite familiar with the facts, so I感慨ed that second-hand information is truly unreliable.

The first case involves a primary school called Sanfan Affiliated Primary School in the Desheng district of Xicheng, Beijing. Because students can directly enter Sanfan Middle School — one of the top middle schools in Xicheng — this school has always been extremely popular. This year, due to insufficient classroom space, enrollment was reduced from seven classes to four, so the registration residency requirement was raised to four years. Those who hadn’t registered for four years would be reassigned. Actually, the reassignment wasn’t bad, because among the reassignment schools was Xishi Affiliated Primary School, ranked in the top five in Xicheng with ample school places, as well as high-quality direct-entry schools like Leifeng. Some people even bought Sanfan Affiliated Primary School district housing specifically to be reassigned, because Xishi Affiliated Primary School district housing is actually more expensive.

Then, in a highly upvoted comment on a WeChat official account, I saw the claim that Desheng had raised the registration residency requirement to “two or three years” this year. The commenter even used this as a basis to express intellectual contempt for buying school district housing.

Combining the facts with the final statement, you can roughly guess how the information changed throughout the transmission chain. Sanfan Affiliated Primary School in Desheng gradually became just “Desheng,” the four-year residency requirement became “two or three years of residency before being reassigned,” and then further shortened to “requiring two or three years.” Meanwhile, critical information like the fact that reassignment went to Xishi Affiliated Primary School was lost entirely.

The second case: last week, COVID cases appeared in the Wangjing area, and various communities organized mass nucleic acid testing over the weekend. At one testing site, for some reason, the queue was extremely long. However, most testing sites actually had short queues — at some sites, you even had to wait a while to accumulate a group of 5 or 10 people before testing could proceed.

Then this week, I happened to hear a finance influencer talk about this incident, and the information became “tens of thousands of people in the Wangjing area standing in the cold wind queuing for nucleic acid testing.” Actually, what he said wasn’t wrong, and he had no ill intentions — he just mentioned in passing that the pandemic was getting a bit more serious again. But as you can feel, with just a few details missing, the entire impression changes completely. Reading this simplified version, you’d feel quite sorry for the people in Wangjing, but in reality, most people completed their testing easily and happily. As for the site with the long queue, you could always go to another testing site at any time.

So, looking at these two cases — though both are very small matters — I’ve completely lost trust in second-hand information. During transmission, the loss or slight alteration of key details can make the entire meaning completely different. Furthermore, when some people mention things in passing, they don’t consider it an important matter and won’t verify whether the information is accurate. But the listener’s judgment of the matter’s importance may differ significantly. If you make decisions based on such information, you can imagine the consequences.

So, what counts as first-hand information? Here’s a simple list:

  • Facts. These are things that actually happened — for example, “the temperature in location X today is Y degrees” is a definitive event, whereas “it’s very cold in location X today” is a subjective judgment.
  • Professional books. Books go through proofreading processes and have been tested by countless readers, so their credibility is much higher.
  • Public policies. I won’t elaborate on this, as they are the standard.
  • Data from reliable sources.

In summary, I hope everyone will seek out first-hand information, avoid second-hand information, and especially pay attention to information credibility when making important decisions.

Source: https://lichuanyang.top/en/posts/54296/