It looks like 2016 has been hectic for many.

Many things happened, many debates were made, many sub-debates were added… Much information and many comments were shared, losing many of the signal in the noise.

Confusion, outrage, overreaction… this plays all too well in our reptilian/fight-or-flight and primate/social brains: new, shiny, loud things all over the place.

It’s also easy to lose oneself, one’s time, and one’s mental health in all this.

There’s a problem with underreaction too! The word “normalization” was all over the place in my Twitter timeline.

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It’s all well known that we prefer information we already like, and disregard the rest. So it’s not a surprise that we have a tendency to believe fake news. The more we are aware of our many cognitive biases, the more we should fight the urges to let them rule us.

As citizens, or as humans, we have a duty to others: to be informed and to act. I feel we have a duty to look for truth, to keep a healthy skepticism.

In a fast-moving world, where jokes or propaganda are re-shared by people in power, we have a duty to check the most dubious things, and not share until we check.

Perhaps the burden should not be on us. Well, no one will take it, so now it is ours.

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Press and ethics in press have always struggled: they should write what people buy, but they should print what people don’t want printed (“or it’s not press but PR”).

And by the way, I would have said the previous quote is from Orwell. But I checked, and there seems to be no evidence for that misattribution.

Oh, well.