Book//mark – Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World | Hans Rosling, 2018

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Ten Reasons Were Wrong About the World Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons Were Wrong About the World, 2018

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”

“When I see a lonely number in a news report, it always triggers an alarm: What should this lonely number be compared to? What was that number a year ago? Ten years ago? What is it in a comparable country or region? And what should it be divided by? What is the total of which this is a part? What would this be per person? I compare the rates, and only then do I decide whether it really is an important number.”

“It’s not the numbers that are interesting. It’s what they tell us about the lives behind the numbers,”

“Look for systems, not heroes.”

“Look for causes, not villains.”

“As long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.”

“Here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

“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”

“To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news.”

“The overdramatic worldview in people’s heads creates a constant sense of crisis and stress.”

“But we need to learn to control our drama intake.”

“Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.”

“Free access to data doesn’t turn into knowledge without effort”

“This is data as you have never known it: it is data as therapy. It is understanding as a source of mental peace. ”

“Parents in extreme poverty need many children for the reasons I set out earlier: for child labor but also to have extra children in case some children die. It is the countries with the highest child mortality rates, like Somalia, Chad, Mali, and Niger, where women have the most babies: between five and eight. Once parents see children survive, once the children are no longer needed for child labor, and once the women are educated and have information about and access to contraceptives, across cultures and religions both the men and the women instead start dreaming of having fewer, well-educated children.”

“Delaying the escape from extreme poverty just increases the population”

“It’s amazing how well people can work together when they share the same fears.”

“In the social sciences, even the most basic knowledge goes off very quickly.”

“Slow change is still change.”

“Beware of exceptional examples used to make a point about a whole group.”

“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.”

“Claim” comes just as easily as “blame.”

“Looking down from above distorts the view.”

“The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.”

“Canada’s per capita CO2 emissions are still twice as high as China’s and eight times as high as India’s.”

“US soil, 3,172 people died from terrorism over the last 20 years—an average of 159 a year. During those same years, alcohol contributed to the death of 1.4 million people in the United States—an average of 69,000 a year.”

“Under the current US system, rich, insured patients visit doctors more than they need, running up costs, while poor patients cannot afford even simple, inexpensive treatments and die younger than they should.”

“It is not doctors and hospital beds that save children’s lives in countries on Levels 1 and 2. Beds and doctors are easy to count and politicians love to inaugurate buildings. But almost all the increased child survival is achieved through preventive measures outside hospitals by local nurses, midwives, and well-educated parents.”

“A small minority—3 percent—of the population on Level 4 suffers from a phobia so strong it hinders their daily life. For the vast majority of us not blocked by phobias, the fear instinct harms us by distorting our worldview.”

“Chemophobia also means that every six months there is a “new scientific finding” about a synthetic chemical found in regular food in very low quantities that, if you ate a cargo ship or two of it every day for three years, could kill you.”

“The loss of hope is probably the most devastating consequence of the negativity instinct and the ignorance it causes.”

“Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous—that is, paying too much attention to fear—creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions.”

Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, 2018

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