Factfulness: Gaining a Better (and More Hopeful) Perspectiv…

Factfulness: Gaining a Better (and More Hopeful) Perspective of Today's World
/Factfulness: Gaining a Better (and More Hopeful) Perspective of Today's World
The world today can seem a scary place. Many Americans share concerns about major current events and perhaps even a general concern that circumstances are growing worse in numerous ways, stability declining, and dangers rising everywhere. In 2019, a step back to look at what’s happening is daunting - from dozens of mass shootings to economic uncertainty, volatile foreign powers, cyber-threats, questionable privacy, rapidly evolving technologies, cultural dissent, and more, a sense of being scared and overwhelmed seems reasonable. But are things as bad as they seem? Swedish statistician Hans Rosling and his son Ola Rosling in their 2018 book, Factfulness, take a step back from the fray to analyze trends and data to see whether our lives are getting worse or better, and show that in the grand scheme perhaps things are better and more hopeful than mass-media-fueled majority majority of everyday people might realize.
Factfulness is about understanding how our instincts program us to exaggerate situations and distort our perception of reality in ways that further exacerbate problems and how we react to them. In his book, Rosling outlines ten of these fundamental instincts and how to combat them to cultivate shift towards a perception based in fact that will ultimately alter the way we think, feel, and behave as a result.
Here’s a summary of some key insights and lessons for building a more “factful” perspective:
(Scroll to the end for a link to the book)
Factfulness Book Summary
10 Instincts That Distort Our Perspective
1. The Gap Instinct
Summary: The tendency to divide things into distinct and often opposing groups and imagine/project some sort of gap between them (e.g. us and them).
Key Takeaways:
More than 85% of the modern world falls into what we would call in the past, the “developed” world, with most of the remaining 15% in between “developed” and “developing.” As few as 13 countries (6% of the world’s population) qualify as “developing” countries.
In addition to this, low-income countries are significantly more developed than most people think, with vastly fewer people still living in them. This means the perception of a massively divided world in which the majority remains relatively impoverished and deprived is a misconception.
The world has grown too complex to be understood in simple categories like developed versus developing, with most countries living neither as high-income or low-income but simply a middle-income majority.
The media by nature and design drastically tends to emphasize the exceptional over the ordinary
Factfulness:
The world is better understood by imagining data distributions on a bell-curve rather than as a series of opposing polarities - the majority (and accurate perception) usually exists in the middle, not as warring opposites. Polarizing our view of the world can foster an “us versus them” mentality that spills into our actions and imagines a separation “them” and “us” that in fact, does not truly exist.
2. The Negativity Instinct
Summary: The tendency to notice/emphasize the negatives over positives (or in evolutionary terms, threats versus opportunities - e.g. believing that things are getting worse when they may actually be getting better).
Key Takeaways:
People’s attention naturally gravitates towards negatives over positives. Evolutionists would argue that this prioritization is a biological protective mechanism to help us recognize danger. However, this instinct can also bias us towards a more negative perception of many things than is actually true.
Mass-media can often fuel negative perception since it rewards and emphasizes that which will garner the most attention, which is more frequently negative than positive. Good news and gradual improvement don’t make for great topics, and often negative perception is owed more to surveillance of suffering than a worsening world.
As Rosling writes, “Does saying ‘things are improving’ imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.”
Factfulness:
Recognize that the media machine feeding us news prioritizes negativity by nature, but that doesn’t mean the nature of things is negative. Like with the first instinct above, the truth is most often found somewhere in the middle.
3. The Straight Line Instinct
Summary: The tendency to believe that things will continue as they have before.
Key Takeaways:
We know that things change (often permanently) over time, yet we so often fallaciously believe that one aspect or another of life will remain constant.
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