Questions to gauge the honesty of the creators you follow:
If no amount of evidence would change someone's opinion, then they don't hold a rational opinion, they hold an ideological belief. All of the thinkers I respect the least see changing their opinions as tantamount to destruction of their sense of self.
When your ego and your stances have fused so tightly that you can no longer separate them, you will become less and less objective. If someone doesn't regularly alter their opinions, they're either an unserious thinker, or a deity.
Straight out of The Charlatan Playbook. Leaning into tribal biases is a fast-track to getting people on your side. Humans are naturally super-tribal, so manifesting an enemy group to galvanise everyone to battle against will be superbly effective at encouraging affiliation.
However bonding together over the mutual distaste of an out-group is inherently fragile because everyone's only bonded because the enemy of their enemy is a friend.
A Purity Spiral will begin where in order to continue to bond the group together, heretics who don't conform to the in-group ideology will be identified and shamed. Check whether you love the work of the people you look up to, or if you just hate the people who hate them.
Openness and vulnerability is a costly signal. It means that the person you're following cares more about being accurate than seeming perfect. They're prepared to identify their own blindspots in service of being honest.
Performative mistake porn is a tool that smart charlatans can use to pretend that they're owning up to a mistake but it's also a smoke screen so people can't accuse them of being too hubris.
Related to all of the above. If their entire body of work is an echo chamber where the only divergent voices are ones that they speak to in order to make them feel silly, galvanise out-group hatred or simply for clickbait they're not concerned with the truth.
Not only is it important for you, and their learning, to be exposed to different opinions, but it's also important to show that you can talk to people who you disagree with without turning it into the sort of slanging match that everyone hates about the internet.
I'm sure there's other common trends I've missed but this seems to be a good start for judging people's intentions. It's also a set of rules I really need to keep aware of myself both as a consumer and a creator; I'm far from perfect.
Chris Williamson | @chriswillx