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

by Hans Rosling

If you want to convince someone they are suffering from a misconception, it’s very useful to be able to test their opinion against the data.

We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.

We almost always get a more accurate picture by digging a little deeper and looking not just at the averages but at the spread: not just the group all bundled together, but the individuals.

We are naturally drawn to extreme examples, and they are easy to recall.

Misconceptions disappear only if there is some equally simple but more relevant way of thinking to replace them.

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

It’s amazing how well people can work together when they share the same fears.

Wrong generalizations are mind-blockers for all kinds of understanding.

It’s also easy to understand how claiming a particular destiny for your group can come in useful in uniting that group around a supposedly never-changing purpose, and perhaps creating a sense of superiority over other groups.

It’s relaxing to think that knowledge has no sell-by date: that once you have learned something, it stays fresh forever and you never have to learn it again. In the sciences like math and physics, and in the arts, that is often true. In those subjects, what we all learned at school (2 + 2 = 4) is probably still good. But in the social sciences, even the most basic knowledge goes off very quickly. As with milk or vegetables, you have to keep getting it fresh. Because everything changes.

We find simple ideas very attractive. We enjoy that moment of insight, we enjoy feeling we really understand or know something. And it is easy to take off down a slippery slope, from one attention-grabbing simple idea to a feeling that this idea beautifully explains, or is the beautiful solution for, lots of other things. The world becomes simple. All problems have a single cause—something we must always be completely against. Or all problems have a single solution—something we must always be for. Everything is simple. There’s just one small issue. We completely misunderstand the world. I call this preference for single causes and single solutions the single perspective instinct.

Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. This is usually a bad approach if you like to understand reality.

The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.

It’s strange where people end up drawing their lines and how well behaved they feel if they stay inside their boxes.

The blame instinct makes us exaggerate the importance of individuals or of particular groups. This instinct to find a guilty party derails our ability to develop a true, fact-based understanding of the world: it steals our focus as we obsess about someone to blame, then blocks our learning because once we have decided who to punch in the face we stop looking for explanations elsewhere. This undermines our ability to solve the problem, or prevent it from happening again, because we are stuck with oversimplistic finger pointing, which distracts us from the more complex truth and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right places.

Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment.