Dispatch #39
🔎 You have a moral imperative to utilize observation and primary sources.
Classical historiography distinguishes primary sources from secondary sources. This strategy is intended to clarify an epistemology based primarily on documents.
We can today expand that twofold framework into four:
Observation. First-hand encounter with an event. Failure mode: irreproducible and untransferable.
Primary sources. An account produced by a first-hand observer. Failure mode: subjective bias and lack of macroscopic perspective.
Secondary sources. A synthesized account by a (human) summarist or chronicler, integrating primary sources and other secondary sources.
Tertiary sources. Automatic summaries produced by other-than-human means, primarily LLMs.
You have a moral imperative to utilize observation and primary sources. If you are going to respect any authority—and you must accept some authority, no matter how antinomian your preference; realistically you should accept certain authorities with this caveat—then it is incumbent on you to exercise your reason and agency to verify the portions of reality that are ready to hand for you.
Generally you don’t expect to see differences from what you are told is there. But you’ll be surprised: take note of when and why. Ask yourself why someone would be motivated to give you a different account than what you discovered. Look for a charitable and a hostile explanation.
That said, there are two wrinkles in our theory. The first is the lability of the distinctions:
Whether a source is regarded as primary or secondary in a given context may change over time, depending upon the past and present states of knowledge within the field of study. (Wikipedia)
The second is that designation as a primary source or a secondary source strips aspects of the voice; i.e. it makes it harder to perceive bias or operative narrative frameworks.
Watch out for those and don’t let the framework itself condition your raw data too much.