For a long time now, I’ve been wanting to write about fear. Although I haven’t put my thoughts together enough to write it all out yet, this short piece gets at a lot of what I’m feeling.

I wrote most of this in response to a friend nearly two years ago, but I’ve been hearing some things lately that convinced me to share it more widely.

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The internet has become an incredibly easy publishing vehicle whereby anyone can mass-distribute his ideas. On the surface, that’s great. But as purveyors of this information, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? How do we know what to believe?

These days, when I see or read something new, I start by asking two questions. First, “How does this make me feel?” Because if the answer to that is really anything other than “indifferent,” I know I’ve got a potential problem with my ability to accurately interpret the topic at hand. The second question is: “What are the countering positions?” Then I go about my research with as open a mind as possible, always keeping a critical eye on those two questions.

The human brain has been proven time and again to be a flawed processing engine when it comes to determining truth:

• Studies show that an overwhelming number of us will hold onto false beliefs, so long as they’re presented prior to even the most powerful contradictory evidence.
• The phenomenon of “confirmation bias” allows us to conveniently discard information which might contradict our preconceived notions, while we quite easily accept information that “feels” right.
• We are highly prone to believing things we perceive as potential threats to our safety.
• We naturally seek patterns and infer causes, even when there is insufficient evidence to identify patters or determine causes.
• We are wired be give more weight to anecdotal evidence, especially if based on our own experience, than any objective or comprehensive examination of the topic.
• Groupthink commonly prevents us from exploring alternatives to what many around us believe.
• We are highly susceptible to logical fallacies. (The one I see most often is: correlation equals causation.)
• Any information, no matter how implausible, becomes more believable the more it is repeated.

All combined, these innate flaws make a treacherous path for truth-seekers in the information age. But given the pace of life and change today, the need to focus our attention on real problems and solutions, rather than chasing wild geese, is greater than ever.

That means it’s imperative to improve the way we process the huge amount of information that now makes it to our brains, and then distill it into objective truth. It’s not an easy task. As usually happens in human history, our technological progress has outpaced our ability to adapt behaviors to suit. Critical thinking, based on a rigorous examination of the facts, is something that many of us were never taught how to do. But we risk our very future if we don’t force ourselves to quickly evolve our thinking.