Personal note: Cultivate your critical thinking

Many people think that believing in a conspiracy theory, or other "fake news," reflects a lack of intelligence, and yet with the arrival of this epidemic we've seen more and more doctors telling all sorts of things, sometimes outlandish, to anyone willing to listen.

So why do even people capable of performing complex logical reasoning without any trouble fall into the trap of this "fake news"?

Because the problem doesn't come from the reflection or the reasoning mechanism, but from the data we rely on to carry it out, and this data—our education and our history haven't taught us to verify it, to source it in order to root out errors, whether intentional or not.

Moreover, our brain isn't designed for this in the first place; this is what's called confirmation bias: our brain will favor information confirming our preconceived ideas and minimize the importance of information working against them.

But then, if false information has always circulated, and our brain isn't designed to specifically seek out the truth, what has changed for conspiracy theories to grow to such an extent?

One answer: the speed of information. In the golden age of print journalism, a full 24 hours would pass between two print runs, and all newspapers were printed in the morning, regardless of the newspaper's name.

This pace had the advantage of giving journalists time to verify their information, cross-check it with different sources, and be able to deliver more reliable information. With the explosion of radio, television, and especially later 24-hour news channels, the race to be the first to break the exclusive was launched.

Here again, even though the reliability of information was undermined by this frantic race, the dissemination of information remained unilateral: from the journalist to the listener (or viewer).

The consequence of this unilateral nature was to shape our entire society into delegating the work of verifying information to a "trusted third party," which had the effect of gradually atrophying our critical thinking over hundreds of years, like a muscle left unused that would fade away generation after generation.

However, the arrival of the internet, and of social media, has enabled a great reversal: the dissemination of information is now multilateral, and everyone is free to exercise this right, or not, and in whatever manner they see fit.

But what becomes of the work of verifying information, originally delegated to someone specially trained for it and whose specialty it is, the famous journalist? It finds itself drowned in the mass of information that is shared, modified, forwarded, interpreted, and sometimes falsified.

This is dramatic, and at the same time it's counterproductive to blame people who spread information and who have never learned to verify, source, and use their critical thinking, lost for generations.

This is the message I wanted to share with you today. Never stop, not just doubting information, but relentlessly verifying it. Exercise your critical thinking no matter what, and encourage those around you to do the same.

Those around me are sometimes saddened to see that I verify every piece of information I hear, even when it comes from the people I love most in the world; it can be perceived as a lack of trust, and I can understand that.

But believe me, it has nothing to do with trust—I'm simply convinced that in our era, with the staggering number of decisions we have to make every day that impact our lives, it has now become VITAL to get our critical thinking working again, in order to make decisions informed by correct data.

So no matter the topic, whether it's the coronavirus, 5G, nuclear power, masks, please verify all the information you hear, see, and read as many times as possible before even taking a stance.

Learn to say: I don't know, I'm not informed enough, I'll give my point of view when I know enough about the subject, and you will come out of it better for it, and so will our society. ︎