We all have "dream jobs" we'd be curious to try out, or wish we'd thought of at a younger age, or wish we'd had the circumstances and resources and natural gifts to break into. Often, we find ways to utilize aspects of those jobs in our lives even if we can't be doing them full time or earning a full income from them. One of my "dream jobs" is wildlife rehabilitator. I've even taken a course on it. But I can't afford to set up a full facility (wildlife rehabilitators are entirely self-funded), so I foster homeless cats and kittens.

Another of my "dream jobs" is private investigator. I'd be a whiz at it. I've always been very good at digging down and ferreting out obscure information from unusual places. I started out when research meant you went to the library (I have been in the deepest basements of some of the scariest libraries you ever saw). In the age of Google, one of my mottos is, "if I can't find it, it's not on the Internet." (I still love libraries, though!)

But you don't have to be a private detective to find 99 percent of the information you need to live your life. You have to look for it, but it's right there. The trouble is, it seems that basic research skills are a lost art in our society. Kids used to be taught how to do research in school. We were taught where to find different kinds of information, how to evaluate the quality of sources, how to compare sources, who to ask to find out more, how to fact-check, and how to assess information for plausibility, accuracy, completeness and factual content.

We learned how to apply critical thinking, which doesn't mean being pathologically suspicious that you're being lied to. It simply means applying quality control to everything you see and hear, and being prepared to change your conclusions if more information comes to light.

Maybe they aren't teaching these skills to the depth that I learned them in the 1970s. (Are critical thinking and research skills on the MCAS?) But even folks in my generation who ought to know better have gotten pretty darned sloppy.

If you understand how to find information--and how obvious most of it is--you're practically immune to conspiracy theories. The number of people who have swallowed outlandish fantasies like QAnon is Exhibit A in the case for the death of critical thinking skills. If you've decided that all sources are unreliable except the ones that tell you what you want to hear, and if you do all your "research" on YouTube while remaining oblivious to how manipulative and slickly fabricated YouTube videos are...you're down a rabbit hole that you may never climb out of.

But a much lesser issue I see is "crowd-sourcing" basic questions. I sometimes feel like "Solve It 7" on Facebook because I am always answering basic questions people asked their Facebook friends--when 30 seconds of Googling or a phone call right to a town office or business would have told them exactly what they wanted to know.

Another chronic problem on social media is people immediately going into fits of rage over a question or complaint posted by someone who is exaggerating, clueless or doesn't know the whole story. By the time a few people post some facts, there are often dozens of nested comments by people ranting about corrupt town boards and going off on wild tangents, and the serious answers are buried in the lengthy thread.

Winchendon has a new Town Manager now, Justin Sultzbach, whose mission in town government is to help people understand the facts about what's going on in their town and how it works. If you really think you can't trust the people who are volunteering to keep your town running, either you should run for office or move somewhere else. But before you do either of those, you might examine your own assumptions and make sure you're really basing them on reality.

After all--before you can check the facts, you have to admit that you might be wrong. Finding out the real truth isn't that hard. You just have to admit that you don't actually know it yet, and work up from there. Asking yourself, "what don't I know about this situation?" before you get emotional will save a lot of misunderstandings and issues, in every part of your life.

They used to call that "humility." It's a virtue the world could use a lot more of these days.

Inanna Arthen