One of the most important books that I’ve read that highlights the importance of looking at data and challenge my worldview. Rosling talks about our dramatic instincts that exaggerate and distort what we see as facts and truth. If you are hesitating whether you should read this book, allow this quiz to affirm that decision. Let me know your score!
Rosling describes ten dramatic instincts that affect the way we think, process information, and eventually arrive at wrong conclusions about the world. I am going to describe the first three.
The Gap Instinct
We like to divide everything into two distinct, non-overlapping, and usually opposing groups with an imagined gap in between them. E.g. rich vs poor, developing vs developed, us vs them. Things don’t just fall nicely into two buckets. The data that Rosling illustrated is on developing vs developed countries. This separateness exists back in 1965 and not in 2021. The reality today is often not polarized at all. Rather, the majority falls right in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.
To control our gap instinct, we need to search for the overlooked majority. On top of comparing averages in data, look at the spread of the data as well — high chance there is an overlap rather than a gap. Be aware of comparisons of extremes in groups as that often creates that imaginary gap without accounting for the majority.
Instead of seeing the world on a polarizing spectrum, Rosling offers another way to present the data: segregating the world’s population into 4 levels of income brackets. Careful not to look down from above as it distorts your view that everything else looks equally short when it’s not.
The Negativity Instinct
This refers to our tendency to notice the bad more than the good or that ‘things are getting worse’ as we are flooded by bad news from the press. Also, objects in our memories are worse than they appear. It is not to say that there are no bad things in the world but we often neglect the progress that we have made thus far. Bad things like extreme poverty are decreasing and good things like life expectancy are increasing. Our world is becoming better.
The solution, however, is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That’s just called self-deceiving. E.g. balancing too much sugar with too much salt will become a baking disaster. A solution that worked for Rosling is to keep two thoughts in tension at the same time: it can be bad and better. For example, you can say that a cancer patient’s health is getting better from various treatments but their condition is still bad. It is both bad and better, at the same time.
The Straight Line Instinct
When I first study about graphs in school, I learned to draw the straight-line graph. Straight-line graphs often exist in maths questions but it is rarely the case in reality. It may be simplifying real-world data. Furthermore, a line plotted based on data will not just continue straight. This is important when we look to forecast or make extrapolations on the trends. There are many trends that follow other shapes like S-bends, slides, humps or doubling lines.
The example that Rosling used was: the false idea that the world population is just increasing. Most people think that our world population will continue to increase at the current rate, extrapolating a straight-line from 7.6 billion people in 2017. This caused people to panic and jump to the wrong conclusion that if nothing is done, we will face the problem of overpopulation.
The UN however predicts that the growth of the world population will slow down and the curve will flatten out at somewhere between 10–12 billion people by 2100. The large increase in population is not due to more children but because old folks are living longer and the children who already exist today are going to grow up and ‘fill-up’ the diagram with 3 billion more adults.
Factfulness Commandments
For each of our dramatic instincts, Rosling offers ways to control them through factfulness. I highly recommend this read (or his Ted talks) as we deal with the prevalence of data, news, and numbers in our lives.