Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling

There are three things going on here: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.

Why we tend to see things more negative than they are

When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.

Why disaster looks worse today? Because of the development of information surveillance. In the past, we had no forecast and news about the consequences of tho disasters making it less terrible.

Sometimes an expert will look around for ways in which their hard-won knowledge and skills can be applicable beyond where it’s actually useful.

Feeling ashamed when reading this even though I'm far from an expert. The most important thing I've learned so far is that knowledge is not the thing we can know it all, to avoid being ignorant, we need to keep our past knowledge silent so that new knowledge can speak, especially in our expertise. The more we know something, the more likely that knowledge misleads our perspective. Being open to new, even contrast infos to what we have known is not simple.

You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than you would think it reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help you navigate around the city.

Can not disagree. We can not request journalists to report the fact based news that we don't like and give litte attention to. It's us who choose to see misleading news.

Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.

There is no single hero being able to save the world. It'the whole system with the cooperation of many individuals

Urgency, fear, and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic shut down my ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, I did something terrible.

Really admire the author who needs to make a decision directly affecting multiple lives. The nearly unpredictable consequence of the roadblock causing the deaths of many mothers and children must be a huge burden for him. This also relates a lot to our current circumstance: is strict social distancing the best solution? Is there a high probability of tragedy stemming from that, especially to the poor in our current pandemic?