https://marklooi.medium.com/summary-and-commentary-on-rosli…

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 bett…