The book was published in 2018, after the author's death, finished by his son and daughter-in-law, who collaborated with him. They currently continue to run the Gapminder foundation , which fights global stereotypes about health and progress.
The beginning of the book is like a slander against the years of education that each of us has received. It turns out that a chimpanzee in a zoo answers better to closed questions about knowledge about the world than an educated representative of the human species . That is why Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and statistician, undertook the difficult fight against, as he himself called it, "catastrophic ignorance with the help of a picture of the world based on facts". In his book published by Media Rodzina, he suggests how to replace stereotypes with real knowledge, so that we realize that we are in a much better situation than before.
Factfulness is a book everyone should read. Not because it is full of statistics that describe the current and real world, but because Hans Rosling shares a few simple critical thinking tools that georgia mobile phone numbers database will help you put the world into perspective and figure out how it works without having to memorize detailed data.
What do we really know about the world?
In the mid-1990s, Hans Rosling was asked to give lectures on global development to students at Karolinska University in Sweden, one of the best in the world in terms of education, it should be added.
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Rosling began his teaching career with a general knowledge test. He asked questions such as how many girls finish primary school in low-income countries, where most people on Earth live, what the current average life expectancy is, what percentage of the world’s one-year-old children have been vaccinated, and what percentage of the world’s population has some access to electricity. The questions were closed-ended, with a set of three answers. Most students—and they were a large majority—got the answers wrong.
Rosling began testing the knowledge of representatives of various walks of life – teachers, university lecturers, distinguished scientists, investment bankers, CEOs of international companies, journalists, activists and even high-ranking politicians. These are highly educated people who, it would seem, should be aware of what is happening in the world. Despite this, most answered very badly, with groups of Nobel Prize winners and medical scientists ranking the worst. It seems that everyone has an incredibly distorted view of the world.
The results are not only devastatingly weak, but they are subject to repeatable patterns. That is, they are not random. As the author of the book emphasizes, the results were weaker than if the answers were given randomly, which can be proven by going to the zoo and giving chimpanzees this test. Each answer is one banana. When the questions are read aloud to the chimpanzees, they would randomly choose one of the bananas to which the number is assigned. And in this way they would get a better test result than a well-educated human. It turns out that every person who was tested by Hans Rosling sees the world as much more frightening, dangerous, and hopeless.
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Bill Gates wrote on his Instagram profile that the book Factfulness is one of the most important books he has ever read. It turned out to be a great guide, telling how to think factually about the world. The idea of factfulness, or opening your eyes to facts, is responsible for this. Ensuring that it is alive every day will allow you to replace a pessimistic image of the world with one that is based on facts. This is a way to eliminate ignorance and stereotypes from our thinking. In his book, Hans Rosling breaks down the instincts that govern our perception of the world and distort our perception. We will analyze the first three of the ten given in the book.
#1. The Abyss Instinct
It is the belief in the existence of a chasm. It is about the irresistible temptation to divide different things into two separate, often opposing groups with an imaginary chasm, e.g. the rich and the poor . The division into developed and developing countries is still taught in schools. It is a division that clearly defines who we are and who they are. We are the West, and they are the Third World. The West still functions in public opinion as a synonym for a long life and a small family, and the Third World is a short life and a large family. Nothing could be further from the truth. The world has changed dramatically, and we have not even noticed.
Source: gapminder.com
In the 1960s, there was indeed a group of countries characterized by small families and long lives, and a group of countries with large families and relatively short lives. However, in the 21st century, it is difficult to find this gap. The revolutionary changes shown by Rosling are not limited to family size and survival rates.
Almost every aspect of human life has changed. Graphs showing income levels, access to education, or electricity will show the same thing: the world used to be divided into two halves, but now it’s different. Today, most people are in the middle. So we should stop using outdated terms like the West and the rest, or developed and developing countries. Today, most of the world’s population—75% to be exact—lives in middle-income countries. In other words, the divide doesn’t exist.
How to control the abyss instinct?
Hans Rosling says there are three warning signs that the pessimistic story you are hearing, the theme of which is division, is designed to trigger the abyss instinct. It is the comparison of averages, the comparison of extremes, and the view from above.
#1. Comparison of averages
When we compare two averages, we risk making an even bigger mistake. We focus on the differences between the two numbers, rather than looking at the numbers that created the average, and those numbers can have a really big range. In reality, we see a gap or a chasm where there is none.