Really good quote from a write-up on the
Nobel Peace Summit in Colombia:
As we saw with the Colombian Peace process, Brexit, and the election of Trump, first we are outraged and then pessimistic to deal with those awful realities. Some turn to sarcasm, some to fatalism, even sadness. Of course, it is not that these emotions are unwarranted. However, those reactions affect our physical and mental health. Furthermore, they lead us to miss the big picture: many news pieces are merely bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Consequently, excessive news leads us to walk around with an entirely wrong risk map in our head. As psychologist and 2002 Nobel Prize laureate in Economics Daniel Kahneman, one of the two non-economists who have received the award, puts it:
People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.
Consequently, news feeds one of our biggest cognitive errors: confirmation bias. It means we interpret all new information so that our previous conclusions remain intact. We seek information that reinforces and confirms what we already believe, sometimes we even fall prey to fake news. This can have an enormous impact on our daily lives, our perceptions of reality and the world.
The rest is more people power stuff, but I thought this was interesting. Terror as a threat is only the threat in people's minds due to news coverage. If you actually calculated their actual risk of death, they would be far more afraid of the pepsi in their hand.
