Factfulness
by Hans Rosling summary
One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.
– Bill Gates
Hans Rosling was a professor of international health and renowned public educator, a clear thinker, a doctor solving major health crises, Ebola included, and a man with many other astonishing achievements. He was an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and co-founded the Gapminder Foundation.
The book is well organized, and naturally for the subject, very rich with facts, which are thoroughly analyzed and augmented with the personal stories from the professor’s life journey. By using a clear thinking, sound reasoning, and hard facts, Rosling in each chapter deeply reasons and busts different kinds of our biased instinct. Each chapter ends with the factfulness arguments and important key points.
Most of us don’t see the world as it is, because we sift the inputs through a mental filter that favors dramatic information.As a result, we tend to have an overly-negative view of the world, which creates unnecessary fear and stress.
Our dramatic instincts exist for a reason and everyone has them. The key is to manage these instincts, so we can think factfully and find better solutions based on a real understanding of the world. The books starts with a simple 13 question quiz, which the author Hans Rosling has given to many audiences worldwide (disregard the java errors at the top). The best part about the results is that it doesn't matter if your politics are left, right, or center - chances are the world is a much different, and better place today than just about anyone believes. And it doesn't matter how well one is educated, or one's area of expertise. Some nationalities do better, but virtually every demographic does just about equally poorly on his test, including journalists of every stripe.
According to the author, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls got to school, their children get vaccinated, they live a two-child families. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.
The 10 Dramatic Instincts in a nutshell
• The Gap Instinct: We tend to divide things into 2 distinct groups and imagine a gap between them.
• The Negativity Instinct: We tend to instinctively notice the bad more than the good.
• The Straight Line Instinct: When we see a line going up steadily, we tend to assume the line will continue to go up in the foreseeable future.
• The Fear Instinct:We tend to perceive the world to be scarier than it really is.
• The Size Instinct:We tend to see things out of proportion, over-estimating
(a) the importance of a single event/person that’s visible to us, and
(b) the scale of an issue based on a standalone number.
• The Generalization Instinct: We tend to wrongly assume that everything or everyone in a category is similar.
• The Destiny Instinct:We tend to assume that
(a) the destinies of people, cultures, countries etc. are predetermined by certain factors, and
(b) such factors are fixed and unchanging, i.e. their destinies are fixed.
• The Single Perspective Instinct:We tend to focus on single causes or solutions, which are easier to grasp and make our problems seem easier to solve.
• The Blame Instinct:When something goes wrong, we instinctively blame it on someone or something.
• The Urgency Instinct:We tend to rush into a problem or opportunity for fear that there’s no time and we may be too late.