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

by Hans Rosling

I love experts, but they have their limitations. First, and most obviously, experts are experts only within their own field. That can be difficult for experts (and we are all experts in something) to admit. We like to feel knowledgeable and we like to feel useful. We like to feel that our special skills make us generally better. But … Highly numerate people (like the super-brainy audience at the Amazing Meeting, an annual gathering of people who love scientific reasoning) score just as badly on our fact questions as everyone else. Highly educated people (like the readers of Nature, one of the world’s finest scientific journals) score just as badly on our fact questions as everyone else, and often even worse. People with extraordinary expertise in one field score just as badly on our fact questions as everyone else. I had the honor of attending the 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, and addressing a large group of talented young scientists and Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine. They were the acknowledged intellectual elite of their field, and yet on the question about child vaccination they scored worse than any public polls: 8 percent got the answer right. (After this I never take it for granted that brilliant experts will know anything about closely related fields outside their specializations.)