When asked simple questions about global trendsâwhat percentage of the worldâs population live in poverty; why the worldâs population is increasing; how many girls finish schoolâwe systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspectiveâfrom our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we donât know what we donât know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.
Factfulness
Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World â and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World â and Why Things Are Better Than You Think is a 2018 book by Swedish statistician Hans Rosling with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund.
In the book, Rosling suggests that the vast majority of people are wrong about the state of the world.
He demonstrates that his test subjects believe the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it actually is, attributing this not to random chance but to misinformation.
Rosling recommends thinking about the world as divided into four levels based on income brackets (rather than the prototypical developed/developing framework) and suggests ten instincts that prevent us from seeing real progress in the world
What Gapminder foundation is doing?
"We ask thousands of fact questions
to the public in many countries
to see what people think the world looks like
based on the news stories they see.
THEN
we check the data from the UN and other reliable sources
to identify the most common misconceptions
where peoples' ideas differ most from reality.
FINALLY
we can help YOU
identify what youâre wrong about, and keep upgrading your worldview
as the world keeps changing,
AND ENJOY
a fact-based worldview"