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

by Hans Rosling

I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. 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.

Factfulness is … recognizing when we get negative news,

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

We find simple ideas very attractive. We enjoy that moment of insight, we enjoy feeling we really understand or know something.

I love data only when it helps me to understand the reality behind the numbers,

Most of what I understand about the world I learned not from studying data or sitting in front of a computer reading research papers—though I have done a lot of that too—but from spending time with, and discussing the world with, other people.