Nancy, a great way to avoid confirmation bias when you’ve finished a book that has given you a lot of ideas that seem correct, is to go to Amazon and read the one-star reviews of the book. Sure, sometimes reviewers are spouting arguments that are themselves hogwash, but other times you will find pointers to alternative sources that the author of the book would never have cited because they don’t confirm his bias.

My concerns reach even beyond the pandemic. I’m reading an excellent book, Live Not by Lies, by Rod Dreher. He borrowed the title from an essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who warned us decades ago of where America was heading. Dreher has interviewed many immigrants from former Communist nations. What they see happening in America reminds them of what happened in their countries as totalitarianism began to infiltrate their cultures. Included in the back of the book are eight pages of notes, allowing the reader to explore further, and learn for herself the truth of what Dreher writes.

Nancy, sometimes political concerns can be resolved with a regular Google search. For example, a friend recently said it was ridiculous to be talking about the need for paid sick leave to combat coronavirus because paid sick leave is a “standard” benefit for employees–meaning that in his own experience as a person who did not hold a job until after graduating from college, all his jobs had offered paid sick leave. I did a quick search and sent him a link to an article explaining that over 1/4 of American jobs have no paid sick leave, that part-time jobs are much less likely to offer benefits than full-time, and that many retail and food-service employers purposely hire people for slightly less than full-time hours so they don’t have to pay benefits–thus, the people handling your groceries and take-out food are likely to be coming to work sick, which puts everyone at risk! His first response was that he “doesn’t know” anyone who doesn’t have paid sick leave so it must be a “regional difference”; another few seconds on Google found me an article about his state explaining that lack of paid sick leave is an even bigger issue there than in the USA overall. Sometimes our biases are affected by who we know well enough to ask them about their workplace benefits….

Thank you very much for your input, Becca. My concerns are more related to politics than science.

Nancy, when the issue is a scientific one (for example, when someone says “it’s an untested new theory” that masks prevent virus transmission) I go to scholar.google.com and search some key words. A search there will get you mostly actual research published in journals (although it’s not perfect) whereas regular Google may bring up a lot of blogs and other sources that aren’t necessarily well-informed.

Sometimes I’ve been surprised by what I learn!