Never trust a single source: The new rules for learning anything online

When we spend so much of our time online, we’re bound to learn something while clicking and scrolling. Discover something new with Mashable’s series I learned it on the internet.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, I borrowed a library book on the prophecies of Nostradamus. For weeks I annoyed my family with all the supposed evidence for its main claim, that the 16th century French mystic had predicted the end of the world in 1999. Luckily, the World Wide Web wasn’t really a thing yet, so after I returned the book my Nostradamus fever broke. Only years later did I look back and see my confirmation bias. I’d felt the now-familiar thrill of doing research, without realizing that what I was researching was bullshit — from mistranslated start to misinterpreted finish.  Read more...