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Hans Rosling was a medical doctor and Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation. He was a perennial TED talk speaker and his book, Factfulness, was widely lauded, most famously by Bill Gates. He died a few years ago of pancreatic cancer and this book was published posthumously. He has written a compact, compelling, interesting book that will enlighten many people. We need books like this to remind us that even though we grandiloquently call our species homo sapiens, the wise ape, our thinking processes are still rooted in the African savannah where we evolved many of these “instincts” or cognitive shortcuts.
Rosling uses a combination of story telling, provocative claims, and the foil of embarrassing clever people to illustrate the top ten cognitive failures. In this respect, his intention is similar (and his conclusions) to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which I summarized and reviewed not too long ago: https://medium.com/@marklooi/summary-of-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow-3d1c2ea0e6a
Like Kahneman, he uses the narrative device of getting the reader to fall for an intuitively “obvious” fact or conclusion, then shows it is actually incorrect, thereby illustrating a bias or cognitive flaw on the part of the reader and, indeed, of most people. He also makes his points with anecdotes about experts who draw flawed assumptions, indeed who do poorer than pure chance would dictate. Therefore, he shows even experts must be biased by prejudices or biases planted by culture, the media or cognitive errors, rooted even in our DNA.
Rosling structures his book to explore in sequence the top 10 instincts, debunking them along the way, and showing how to guard against them. He also explores and explains his view of human development, which has resulted in greater health and wealth for most of humanity, despite the constant drumbeat of tragedy and bad news. A recurring theme is “things are better than you think”.
The Top Ten Instincts
Rosling organizes our cognitive failings into “instincts”, the human mind’s propensity to simplify more complex or nuanced concepts. This propensity is likely an evolutionary adaptation that was effective at keeping our ancestors alive. But, now they are a hindrance for living in a complex, technological, interdependent world. The ten instincts are:
- The Gap Instinct
- The Negativity Instinct
- The Straight Line Instinct
- The Fear Instinct
- The Size Instinct
- The Generalization Instinct
- The Destiny Instinct
- The Single Perspective Instinct
- The Blame Instinct
- The Urgency Instinct
The Gap Instinct
Rosling describes the gap instinct as the propensity for binary thinking — black or white; yes or no; right or wrong. He illustrates this with a key point that animates the book: the world is divided into developed and developing countries; rich or poor; advanced or not. He shows that really it is more accurate to think of economic development as a spectrum, with a broad middle, especially in the so-called middle income countries. He sees countries organized into finer gradations, levels one through four. Levels 2 and 3 are middle income, where the abject poverty and misery that animated most human lives until the 20th century is largely eliminated — it only persists on Level 1. In fact, he claims most Level 2 or 3 countries have similar a income and standard of living as much of Western Europe or North America as late as the 1950’s. Most of the world’s people live in Levels 2 and 3.
To counter the Gap Instinct, he says we should look at distributions of data, be wary of comparisons of averages or extremes, and mindful of one’s perspective from a position of privilege.
The Negativity Instinct
Humans have an inclination to presume that things are getting worse generally. Rosling cites numerous trends ranging from life expectancy to pollution, crime, electricity coverage, and so on, to show that objectively for the majority of humanity, life is getting better. And, he points out that even a Level 4 country like Sweden circa 1948 was pretty much the same as Egypt in 2017, as measured by overall health and wealth. To turn back the negativity instinct, look at trends rather than absolute values of measures; beware that good news is rarely newsworthy; more bad news may reflect increase coverage of a topic; and beware that a rosy past is often not supported by the facts.
The Straight Line Instinct
We have an innate ability to extrapolate along linear trend lines; in fact, this has been very useful to us. For example, most people can easily anticipate where a speeding car will be in a second or two, allowing them to take anticipatory action as a pedestrian or driver. We are also good at seeing trends and extending the line linearly, for example assuming population growth will continue along the same trajectory as shown by recent history. But, true linear behavior outside of things in the physical world are not …