“Factfulness” by Hans Rosling

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  • “This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains.”
  • “[O]ur dramatic instincts—are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview.”
  • Beware of averages… The can make a huge gap out of a sea of overlap
  • “Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves non-representative extraordinary events and shuns normality.”
  • News is, by definition, novel and not routine
  • “To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.”
  • “Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context…”
  • “Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to.”
  • We want to consume dramatic information
  • “You can spot stories about them in the news every day:
    • physical harm: violence caused by people, animals, sharp objects, or forces of nature
    • captivity: entrapment, loss of control, or loss of freedom
    • contamination: by invisible substances that can infect or poison us”

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