Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling

 Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling

THE GAP INSTINCT

The gap instinct is very strong. 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.  The gap instinct makes us imagine division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement. It is the first instinct on our list because it’s so common and distorts the data so fundamentally. If you look at the news or click on a lobby group’s website this evening, you will probably notice stories about conflict between two groups, or phrases like “the increasing gap.”

There are three common warning signs that someone might be telling you (or you might be telling yourself) an overdramatic gap story and triggering your gap instinct.

• comparisons of averages, 

• comparisons of extremes, and 

• the view from up here

Factfulness is ... recognizing when a story talks about a gap and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually, the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.

To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.

• Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.

• Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.

• The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.

THE NEGATIVITY INSTINCT

In large part, it is because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. 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.

In order for this planet to have financial stability, peace, and protected natural resources, there’s one thing we can’t do without, and that’s an international collaboration, based on a shared and fact-based understanding of the world. The current lack of knowledge about the world is, therefore, the most concerning problem of all. 

What are people really thinking when they say the world is getting worse? My guess is they are not thinking. They are feeling.

How to Control the Negativity Instinct?

• Bad and Better. A solution that works for me is to persuade myself to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time.

• Expect Bad News. Something else that helps to control the negativity instinct is to constantly expect bad news remember that the media and activists rely on drama to grab your attention. Remember that negative stories are more dramatic than neutral or positive ones.

• Don’t Censor History. The evidence about the terrible past is scary, but it is a great resource. It can help us to appreciate what we have today and provide us with the hope that future generations will, as previous generations did, get over the dips and continue the long-term trends toward peace, prosperity, and solutions to our global problems.

Factfulness is ... recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful. To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news.

• Better and bad. Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g., bad) and a direction of change (e.g., better). Convince yourself that things can be both better and worse.

• Good news is not news. The good news is almost never reported. So the news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally, positive news would have reached you.

• Gradual improvement is not news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement.

• More news does not equal more suffering. The more bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world.

• Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.

THE STRAIGHT LINE INSTINCT

How to Control the Straight Line Instinct, or Not All Lines Are Straight: is simply to remember that curves naturally come in lots of different shapes. Many aspects of the world are best represented by curves shaped like an S, or a slide, or a hump, and not by a straight line. To understand a phenomenon, we need to make sure we understand the shape of its curve. By assuming we know how a curve continues beyond what we see, we will draw the wrong conclusions and come up with the wrong solutions.

Factfulness is ... recognizing the assumption that a line will just continue straight, and remembering that such lines are rare in reality. 

To control the straight line instinct, remember that curves come in different shapes.

• Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or double lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to.

THE FEAR INSTINCT

When we are afraid, we do not see clearly. Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.  Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things. The fear of instinct is a terrible guide for understanding the world. It makes us give our attention to the unlikely dangers that we are most afraid of, and neglect what is actually most risky.

Because “frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk. Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous—that is, paying too much attention to fear—creates tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions.

Factfulness is ... recognizing when frightening things get our attention, and remembering that these are not necessarily the riskiest. Our natural fears of violence, captivity, and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks.

To control the fear instinct, calculate the risks.

• The scary world: fear vs. reality. The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary.

• Risk = danger × exposure. The risk something poses to you depends not on how scared it makes you feel, but on a combination of two things. How dangerous is it? And how much are you exposed to it?

• Get calm before you carry on. When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic

has subsided.

THE SIZE INSTINCT

Getting things out of proportion, or misjudging the size of things, is something that we humans do naturally. It is instinctive to look at a lonely number and misjudge its importance. It is also instinctive to misjudge the importance of a single instance or an identifiable victim. These two tendencies are the two key aspects of the size instinct.

The two aspects of the size instinct, together with the negativity instinct, make us systematically underestimate the progress that has been made in the world. At the same time, we systematically overestimate other proportions. 

How to Control the Size Instinct

To avoid getting things out of proportion you need only two magic tools: comparing and dividing.  

• Compare the Numbers. The most important thing you can do to avoid misjudging something’s importance is to avoid lonely numbers. Never, ever leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with. Be especially careful about big numbers. 

• The 80/20 Rule

• Divide the Numbers Often the best thing we can do to make a large number more meaningful is to divide it by a total. 

• Per Person

Factfulness is ... recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive

(small or large), and remember that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared with or divided by some other relevant number.

To control the size instinct, get things in proportion.

• Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.

• 80/20. Have you been given a long list? Look for the few largest items and deal with those first. They are quite likely more important than all the others put together. 

• Divide. Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing between different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.

THE GENERALIZATION INSTINCT

Everyone automatically categorizes and generalizes all the time. Unconsciously. The necessary and useful instinct to generalize, like all the other instincts in this book, can also distort our worldview. It can make us mistakenly group together things, or people, or countries that are actually very different. It can make us assume everything or everyone in one category is similar. And, maybe most unfortunate of all, it can make us jump to conclusions about a whole category based on a few, or even just one, unusual example.

How to Control the Generalization Instinct

• Find Better Categories:

• Question Your Categories

• Look for Differences Within Groups and Similarities Across Groups

• Beware of “The Majority”

• Beware of Exceptional Examples

• Beware of Generalizing from One Group to Another

Factfulness is ... recognizing when a category is being used in an explanation, and remembering that categories can be misleading. We can’t stop generalization and we shouldn’t even try. What we should try to do is to avoid generalizing incorrectly.

To control the generalization instinct, question your categories.

• Look for differences within groups. Especially when the groups are large, look for ways to split them into smaller, more precise categories. And ...

• Look for similarities across groups. If you find striking similarities between different groups, consider whether your categories are relevant. But also ...

• Look for differences across groups. Do not assume that what applies for one group (e.g., you and other people living on Level 4 or unconscious soldiers) applies for another (e.g., people not living on Level 4 or sleeping babies).

• Beware of “the majority.” The majority just means more than half. Ask whether it means 51 percent, 99 percent, or something in between.

• Beware of vivid examples. Vivid images are easier to recall but they might be the exception rather than the rule.

• Assume people are not idiots. When something looks strange, be curious and humble, and think, In what way is this a smart solution?

THE DESTINY INSTINCT

The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures. It’s the idea that things are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons: they have always been this way and will never change. This instinct makes us believe that our false generalizations from chapter 6, or the tempting gaps from chapter 1, are not only true but fated: unchanging and unchangeable.  Cultures, nations, religions, and people are not rocks. They are in constant transformation.

How to Control the Destiny Instinct

• Slow Change Is Not No Change

• Be Prepared to Update Your Knowledge

• Talk to Grandpa

• Collect Examples of Cultural Change

Factfulness is ... recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes.

To control the destiny instinct, remember slow change is still change.

• Keep track of gradual improvements. A small change every year can translate to a huge change over the decades.

• Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.

• Talk to Grandpa. If you want to be reminded of how values have changed, think about your grandparents’ values and how they differ from yours.

• Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.

THE SINGLE PERSPECTIVE INSTINCT

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.

You probably know the saying “give a child a hammer and everything looks like a nail.”

Factfulness is ... recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions.

To control the single perspective instinct, get a toolbox, not a hammer.

• Test your ideas. Don’t only collect examples that show how excellent your favorite ideas are. Have people who disagree with you test your ideas and find their weaknesses.

• Limited expertise. Don’t claim expertise beyond your field: be humble about what you don’t know. Be aware too of the limits of the expertise of others.

• Hammers and nails. If you are good with a tool, you may want to use it too often. If you have analyzed a problem in-depth, you can end up exaggerating the importance of that problem or of your solution. Remember that no one tool is good for everything. If your favorite idea is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers, wrenches, and tape measures. Be open to ideas from other fields.

• Numbers, but not only numbers. The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone. Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives.

• Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis.

THE BLAME INSTINCT

The blame instinct is the instinct to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened. It seems that it comes very naturally for us to decide that when things go wrong, it must be because of some bad individual with bad intentions. We like to believe that things happen because someone wanted them to, that individuals have power and agency: otherwise, the world feels unpredictable, confusing, and frightening.

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 over-simplistic finger-pointing, which distracts us from the more complex truth and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right places.

The blame instinct drives us to attribute more power and influence to individuals than they deserve, for bad or good. Political leaders and CEOs in particular often claim they are more powerful than they are.

Factfulness is ... recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future.

To control the blame instinct, resist finding a scapegoat.

• Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or systems, that created the situation.

 

• 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.

THE URGENCY INSTINCT

When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.  It’s almost never that urgent, and it’s almost never an either/or. 

The urgency instinct makes us want to take immediate action in the face of perceived imminent danger. It must have served us, humans, well in the distant past. 

• Learn to Control the Urgency of Instinct. When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.

• Insist on the Data

Factfulness is ... recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.

To control the urgency instinct, take small steps.

• Take a breath. When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Ask for more time and more information. It’s rare now or never and it’s rarely either/or.

• Insist on the data. If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful.

• Beware of fortune-tellers. Any prediction about the future is uncertain. Be wary of predictions that fail to acknowledge that. Insist on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how often such predictions have been right before.

• Be wary of drastic action. Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more effective.

FAITHFULNESS IN PRACTICE

How can you use Factfulness in your everyday life: in education, in business, in journalism, in your own organization or community, and as an individual citizen?

We should be teaching our children the basic up-to-date, fact-based framework—life on the four levels and in the four regions—and training them to use Factfulness rules of thumb—the bullet points from the end of each chapter. This would enable them to put the news from around the world in context and spot when the media, activists, or salespeople are triggering their dramatic instincts with overdramatic stories. These skills are part of the critical thinking that is already taught in many schools. They would protect the next generation from a lot of ignorance.

• We should be teaching our children that there are countries on all different levels of health and income and that most are in the middle.

• We should be teaching them about their own country’s socioeconomic position in relation to the rest of the world, and how that is changing.

• We should be teaching them how their own country progressed through the income levels to get to where it is now, and how to use that knowledge to understand what life is like in other countries today.

• We should be teaching them that people are moving up the income levels and most things are improving for them.

• We should be teaching them what life was really like in the past so that they do not mistakenly think that no progress has been made.

• We should be teaching them how to hold the two ideas at the same time: that bad things are going on in the world, but that many things are getting better.

• We should be teaching them that cultural and religious stereotypes are useless for understanding the world.

• We should be teaching them how to consume the news and spot the drama without becoming stressed or hopeless.

• We should be teaching them the common ways that people will try to trick them with numbers.

• We should be teaching them that the world will keep changing and they will have to update their knowledge and worldview throughout their lives.

Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.

Could everyone have a fact-based worldview one day? A big change is always difficult to imagine. But it is definitely possible, and I think it will happen, for two simple reasons. First: a fact-based worldview is more useful for navigating life, just like an accurate GPS is more useful for finding your way in the city. Second, and probably more important: a fact-based worldview is more comfortable. It creates less stress and hopelessness than the dramatic worldview, simply because the dramatic one is so negative and terrifying.

When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.