Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling

Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.

Only actively wrong “knowledge” can make us score so badly.

And I’m no better than chimpanzees

Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading.

We instantly think the worse, WHY?

Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.

the overdramatic worldview is so difficult to shift because it comes from the very way our brains work.

Oke, so the wrong misleading information came from our own brain. Interesting idea.

This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains. They are systematic misinterpretations, unrelated to individual sight problems.

Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.

This is data as you have never known it: it is data as therapy. It is understanding as a source of mental peace. Because the world is not as dramatic as it seems.

Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.

At first, I’m questioning of why the reader who read this book automatically labels as Level 4, based on the income it doesn’t make sense in my country, but except for that, and along with the explanation follows, it starts to make sense.

The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.

The loss of hope is probably the most devastating consequence of the negativity instinct and the ignorance it causes.

So true

Factfulness is … recognizing when frightening things get our attention, and remembering that these are not necessarily the most risky.

The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

Like this phrases

“But from now on we count carbon dioxide emission per person.”

Applause!!!!!!! And yes, they can't do this and it's unfair without looking at the number of populations.

Factfulness is … recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive (small or large), and remembering that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared with or divided by some other relevant number.

We must all try hard not to generalize across incomparable groups. We must all try hard to discover the hidden sweeping generalizations in our logic. They are very difficult to discover.

Different group, different conditions gave more unexpected variables so to generalize that is not accurate.

Factfulness is … recognizing when a category is being used in an explanation, and remembering that categories can be misleading.

it is easy to understand why so many people assume that women in some religions give birth to more children. But the link between religion and the number of babies per woman is often overstated.

Old generations still think that having more children brings more fortune.

Factfulness is … recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes.

The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem.

Factfulness is … recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions.

Factfulness is … recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future.

So, what is the solution? Well, it’s easy. Anyone emitting lots of greenhouse gas must stop doing that as soon as possible. We know who that is: the people on Level 4 who have by far the highest levels of CO2 emissions, so let’s get on with it. And let’s make sure we have a serious data set for this serious problem so that we can track our progress.

So, how do the level 4 travels then?

Factfulness is … recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.

When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.

Liked!!!!