Introduction

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen

The author starts with a quiz, to evaluate our view on world’s progress (or the lack of it). The quiz has 13 questions with 3 choices to choose from, ranging from ‘where does the majority of world population lives’ to ‘climate experts believe that over the next 100 years the average temperature will…’.

The questions might look simple, but according to author the majority of participants scored not even one-third. Statistically, a Chimp can do better than the participants. The sample size of participants ranges from CEOs to college graduates, policy makers to politicians.

Only actively wrong ‘knowledge’ can make us score so badly - Hans Rosling

Our cravings for sugar and fat make obesity one of the largest health problems in the world today. We have to teach our children and ourselves to stay away from sweets and chips. In the same way, our quick-thinking brain’s cravings for drama - our dramatic instincts are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic world view.

Chapter 1: The Gap Instinct

  1. Gap Instinct - We humans have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into 2 distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between.

Child Mortality rate measure takes temperature of whole society. Because children are fragile, there are so many things that can kill them. It measures the quality of a society.

  1. When put in a chart we won’t find any country where the child mortality has increased. Because the world in general is getting better.
  2. The world is not split into 2 parts, like west and rest, or developed and under-developed. Instead we should have 4 levels based on income levels. Level 1 being lowest income country and level 4 being the one with highest income.
  3. Misconceptions disappear only if there is some equally simple but more relevant way of thinking to replace them.
  4. How to control Gap Instinct
    1. Beware of averages - if we could check the spreads we would find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
    2. Beware of comparison of extremes - In all groups of countries/people, there are some at top and bottom. The majority is somewhere in between, where the gap is supposed to be.
    3. The view from up here - Looking from above distorts the view.

Chapter 2: The Negativity Instinct

  1. Negativity Instinct is our tendency to notice the bad more than good.
  2. You never trust the data 100%. There is always some uncertainty.
  3. The misconception that the world is getting worse is very difficult to maintain when we put the present in its historical context.
  4. The news constantly alerts us with bad events in present. The doom-laden feeling that this creates in then intensified by our inability to remember the past; we fail to recall there were same number of negative events 1 year ago or 10 years ago.