What is source evaluation?

Source evaluation is a concept in personal epistemology: Curating better inputs is more efficient than filtering bad ones. Every hour spent choosing credible sources saves ten hours of downstream fact-checking, second-guessing, and correcting decisions built on noise.

Example: You follow 200 accounts on social media and spend 45 minutes each morning scrolling to find something worth reading. Your colleague follows 12 curated sources — three researchers, two domain-specific newsletters, a longform publisher, and a handful of practitioners who cite their work. She spends 15 minutes and surfaces better material. You are doing the same cognitive work, but she moved the filter upstream. She is not smarter. She has better inputs.

This concept is part of Phase 7 (Signal vs Noise) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for signal vs noise.