Book - Factfulness

Overview

I decided to try to understand why. Why was this ignorance about the world so widespread and so persistent? We are all wrong sometimes - even me, I will readily admit that - but how could so many people be wrong about so much? Why were so many people scoring worse than the chimps?

Only actively wrong “knowledge” can make us score so badly.

If your worldview is wrong, then you will systematically make wrong guesses.

We need to learn to control our drame intake. Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.

Factfulness, like a healthy diet and regular exercise, can and should become part of your daily life. Start to practice it, and you will be able to replace your overdramatic worldview with a worldview based on facts. You will be able to get the world right without learning it by heart. You will make better decisions, stay alert to real dangers and possibilities, and avoid being constantly stressed about the wrong things.

How to recognize overdramatic stories and how to control dramatic instincts? How to shift your misconceptions, develop a fact-based worldview?

If you are more interested in being right than in continuing to live in your bubble; if you are willing to change your worldview; if you are ready for critical thinking to replace instinctive reaction; and if you are feeling humble, curious, and ready to be amazed - then please read on.

I call them mega misconceptions because they have such an enormous impact on how people misperceive the world.

Chapter 1 - The Gap instinct

The mega misconception that “the world is divided into two”

We have an irresistible temptation to divide all things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap - a huge chasm of injustice - in between. It is about how the gap instinct creates a picture in people’s heads of a world split into two kinds of countries or two kinds of people: rich versus poor.

By dividing the world into two misleading boxes - poor and rich - it completely distorts all the global proportions in people’s mind.

Hunting down the first mega misconception

If you want to convince someone they are suffering from a misconception, it is very useful to be able to test their opinion against the data.

The data needs to be more clear. That would help us to show more people, more convincingly, that their opitions were nothing more than unsubstantiated feelings. That would help us to shatter their illusions that they knew things that really they only felt.

The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion. A complete misconception. Simply wrong.

The Gap instinct

Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with noting but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villians. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.

The gap instinct makes us imagine division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement.

How to control the gap instinct

The thing known as poverty in your country is different from “extreme poverty”. It is “relative poverty”. For example, in the United States, people are classified as below the poverty line even if they live on Level 3.

What do you need to hunt, capture, and replace misconceptions? Data. You have to show the data and describe the reality behind it.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.

To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.

1. Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads, you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
2. Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
3. The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it is not.

Chapter 2 - The negativity instinct

The Mega Misconception that the world is getting worse

It is easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in the world. It is harder to know about the good things: billions of improvements that are never reported. I am talking about fundamental improvements that are world-changing but are too slow, too fragmented, or too small one-by-one to ever qualify as news. I am talking about the silent miracle of human progress.

Alongside all other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.

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

Keep in mind that the positive changes may be more common, but they don’t findyou. You need to find them.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better, we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.

To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news.

1. Better and bad. Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g. bad) and a direction of change (e.g. better). Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad.
2. Good news is not news. Good news is almost never reported. So news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally positive news would have reached you.
3. Gradual improvement is not news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement.
4. More news does not equal more suffering. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world.
5. Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.

Chapter 3 - The straight line instinct

The straight line instinct - the false idea that the world population is just increasing. The instinct to assume that lines are straight.

The numbers are freely available online, from the UN website, but free access to data doesn’t turn into knowledge without effort.

The radical change that is needed to stop rapid population growth is that the number of children stops growing.

By assuming we know how a curve continues beyond what we see, we will draw the wrong conclusions and come up with the wrong solutions.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing the assumption that a line will just continue straight, and remembering that such lines are rare in reality.

To control the straight line instinct, remember that curves come in different shapes.

1. 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.

Chapter 4 - The fear instinct

When we are afraid, we do not see clearly.

I didn’t see what i wanted to see. I saw what I was afraid of seeing. Critical thinking is always difficult, but it is almost impossible when we are scared. There is no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.

The media can’t waste time on stories that won’t pass our attention filters.

The unusual stories we are constantly shown by the media paint pictures in our heads. If we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like.

Of all our dramatic instincts, it seems to be the fear instinct that most strongly influences what information gets selected by news producers and presented to us consumers.

For the vast majority of us not blocked by phobias, the fear instinct harms us by distorting our worldview.

Here is the paradax: 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.

If we look at the facts behind the headlines, we can see how the fear instinct systematically distorts what we see of the world.

It is amazing how well people can work together when they share the same fears.

The fear instinct is so strong that it can make people collaborate across the world, to make the greatest progress.

Fear vs Danger

Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things. The fear instinct is a terrible guide for understanding the world. It makes us give our attention to the unlikely dangers that we are most afraid of, and neglect what is actually most risky.

The fear instinct distorts our focus. To understand what we should truly be scared of, and how to truly protect our loved ones from danger, we should suppress our fear instinct and measure the actual death tolls.

Because “frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk. 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.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing when frightening things get our attention, and remembering that these are not necessarily the most risky. Our natural fears of violence, captivity, and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks.

To control the fear instinct, calculate the risks.

1. The scary world: fear vs reality. 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 - precisely because it is scary.
2. Risk = danger X exposure. The risk something poses to you depends not on how scared it makes you feel, but on a combination of two things. How dangerous is it? And how much are you exposed to it?
3. Get calm before you carry on. When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.

Chapter 5 - The size instinct

I remember the words of Ingegerd Rooth, who had been working as a missionary nurse in Congo and Tanzania before she became my mentor. She always told me, “In the deepest poverty, you should never do anything perfectly. If you do, you are stealing resources from where they can be better used.”

Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives. This principle applies anywhere we are prioritizing scare resources. It is hard for people to talk about resources when it comes to saving lives, or prolonging or improving them. Doing so is often taken for heartlessness. Yet, so long as resources are not infinite - and they never are infinite - it is the most compassionate thing to do to use your brain and work out how to do the most good with what you have.

Just as I have urged you to look behind the statistics at the individual stories, I also urge you to look behind the individual stories at the statistics. The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

The 80/20 rule

It is so easy to get things out of proportion, but luckily, there are also some easy solutions. Whenever I have to compare lots of numbers and work out which are the most important, I use the simplest-ever thinking tool. I look for the largest numbers.

We tend to assume that all items on a list are equally important, but usually just a few of them are more important than all the others put together. Whether it is causes of death or items in a budget, I simply focus first on understanding those that make up 80% of the total. Before I spend time on the smaller ones, I ask myself: Where are the 80%? Why are these so big? What are the implications?

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive (small or large), and remembering that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared with or divided by some other relevant number.

To control the size instinct, get things in proportion.

1. Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make yu suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.
2. 80/20. Have you been given a long list? Look for the few largest items and deal with those first. They are quite likely more important than all the others put together.
3. Divide. Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing between different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.

Chapter 6 - The generalization instinct

Strategic business planners need a fact-based worldview to find their future customers.

Reality Bites

You need the generalization instinct to live your everyday life, and occasionally, it can save you from having to eat something disgusting. We always need categories. The challenge is to realize which of our simple categories are misleading - like “developed” and “developing” countries - and replace them with better categories, like the four levels.

Question your categories

It will be helpful to you if you always assume your categories are misleading. Here are five powerful ways to keep questioning your favorite categories: look for differences within and similarities across groups; beware of “the majority”; beware of exceptional examples; assume you are not “normal”; and beware of generalizing from one group to another.

Beware of “The Majority”

When someone says that a majority of a group has some property, it can sound like most of them have something in common. Remember that majority just means more than half. It could mean 51%. It could mean 99%. If possible, ask for the percentage.

Beware of exceptional examples

Beware of exceptional examples used to make a point about a whole group. Chemophobia, the fear of chemicals, is driven by generalizations from a few vivid but exceptional examples of harmful substances. Some people become frightened of all “chemicals”. But remember that everything is made from chemicals, all “natural” things and all industrial products. Here are some of my favorites that I would rather not live without: soap, cement, plastic, washing detergent, toilet paper, and antibiotics. If someone offers you a single example and wants to draw conclusions about a group, ask for more examples. Or flip it over: i.e., ask whether an opposite example would make you draw the opposite conclusion. If you are happy to conclude that all chemicals are unsafe on the basis of one unsafe chemical, would you be prepared to conclude that all chemicals are safe on the basis of one safe chemical?

When seemingly impregnable logic is combined with good intentions, it becomes nearly impossible to spot the generalization error.

Sweeping generalizations can easily hide behind good intentions.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is…recognizing when a category is being used in an explanation, and remembering that categories can be misleading. We can’t stop generalization and we shouldn’t even try. What we should try to do is to avoid generalizing incorrectly.

To contral the generalization instinct, question your categories.

1. Look for differences within groups. Especially when the groups are large, look for ways to split them into smaller, more precise categories. And…
2. Look for similarities across groups. If you find striking similarities between different groups, consider whether your categories are relevant. But also…
3. Look for differences across groups. Do not assume that what applies for one group (e.g, you and other people living on Level 4) applies for another (e.g. people not living on Level 4).
4. Beware of “the majority.” The majority just means more than half. Ask whether it means 51%, 99%, or something in between.
5. Beware of vivid examples. Vivid images are easier to recall but they might be the exception rather than the rule.
6. Assume people are not idiots. When something looks strange, be curious and humble, and think, In what way is this a smart solution?

Chapter 7 - The destiny instinct

The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures. It is the idea that things are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons: they have always been this way and will never change. This instinct makes us believe that our false generalizations, or the tempting gaps, are not only true, but fated: unchanging and unchangeable.

Societies and cultures are not like rocks, unchanging and unchangeable. They move. Western societies and cultures move, and non-Western societies and cultures move - often much faster. It’s just that all but the fastest cultural changes - the spread of the internet, smartphones, and social media, for example - tend to happen just a bit too slowly to be noticeable or newsworthy.

A common expression of the destiny instinct is that Africa will always be a basket case and will never catch up with Europe. Another is that the “Islamic world” is fundamentally different from the “Christian world”. This or that religion or continent or culture or nation will (or must) never change, because of its traditional and unchanging “values”: again and again, its the same idea in different costumes. At first sight, there appears to be some analysis going on. On closer inspection, our instincts have oftern fooled us. These lofty statements are often simply feelings disguised as facts.

Cultures, nations, religions, and people are not rocks. They are in constant transformation.

It is clear that a free media is no guarantee that the world’s fastest cultural changes will be reported.

Slow change is not no change

Societies and cultures are in constant movement. Even changes that seem small and slow add up over time: 1% growth each year seems slow but it adds up to a doubling in 70 years; 2% growth each year means doubling in 35 years; 3% growth each year means doubling in 24 years.

In the third century BC, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka when he declared a piece of foresst to be officially protected. It took more than 2000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States. By the year 1900, 0.03% of the Earth’s land surface was protected. By 1930, it was 0.2%. Slowly, slowly, decade by decade, one forest at a time, the number climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost imperceptible. Today a stunning 15% of the Earth’s surface is protected, and the number is still climbing.

Don’t miss an annual change - even an annual change of only 1% - because it seems too small and slow.

Be prepared to update your knowledge

It is relaxing to think that knowledge has no sell-by date: that once you have learned something, it stays fresh forever and you never have to learn it again. In the sciences like math and physics, and in the arts, that is often true. In those subjects, what we all learned at school is probably still good. But in the social sciences, even the most basic knowledge goes off very quickly. As with milk or vegetables, you have to keep getting it fresh. Because everything changes.

To control destiny instinct, stay open to new data and be prepared to keep freshening up your knowledge.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes.

To control the destiny instinct, remember slow change is still change.

1. Keep track of gradual improvements. A small change every year can translate to a huge change over decades.
2. Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.
3. Talk to Grandpa. If you want to be reminded of how values have changed, think about your grandparents’ values and how they differ from yours.
4. Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.

Chapter 8 - The single perspective instinct

We find simple ideas very attractive. We enjoy that moment of insight, we enjoy feeling we really understand or know something. And it is easy to take off down a slippery slope, from one attention-grabbing simple idea to a feeling that this idea beautifully explains, or is the beautiful solution for, lots of other things. The world becomes simple. All problems have a single cause - something we must always be completely against. Or all problems have a single solution - something we must always be for. Everything is simple. There’s just one small issue. We completely misunderstand the world. I call this preference for single causes and single solutions the single perspective instinct.

You can have opinions and answers without having to learn about a problem from scratch and you can get on with using your brain for other tasks. But it’s not so useful if you like to understand the world. Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. This is usually a bad approach if you like to understand reality.

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.

Great knowledge can interfere with an expert’s ability to see what actually works. All these solutions are great for solving some problem, but none of them will solve all problems. It is better to look at the world in lots of different ways.

And of course some of the most valued and important aspects of human development cannot be measured in numbers at all. We can estimate suffering from disease using numbers. We can measure improvements in material living conditions using numbers. But the end goal of economic growth is individual freedom and culture, and these values are difficult to capture with numbers. The idea of measuring human progress in numbers seems completely bizarre to many people. I often agree. The numbers will never tell the full story of what life on Earth is all about.

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

It is strange where people end up drawing their lines and how well behaved they feel if they stay inside their boxes.

The communist system in Cuba is an example of the danger of getting hooked on a single perspective: the seemingly reasonable but actually bizarre idea that a central government can solve all its people’s problems. I can understand why people looking at Cuba and its inefficiencies, poverty, and lack of freedom would decide that governments should never be allowed to plan societies.

The health-care system in the United States is also suffering from the single-perspective mind-set: the seemingly reasonable but actually bizarre idea that the market can solve all a nation’s problems. I can understand why people looking at the United States and its inequalities and health-care outcomes would decide that private markets and competition should never be allowed anywhere near the delivery of public goods.

As with most discussions about the private versus the public sector, the answer is not either/or. It is case-by-case, and it is both. The challenge is to find the right balance between regulation and freedom.

There is no single measure - not GDP per capita, not child mortality (as in Cuba), not individual freedom (as in the United States), not even democracy - whose improvement will guarantee improvements in all the others. There is no single indicator through which we can measure the progress of a nation. Reality is just more complicated than that.

The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It’s not either/or. It’s both and it’s case-by-case.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions.

To control the single perspective instinct, get a toolbox, not a hammer.

1. Test your ideas. Don’t only collect examples that show how excellent your favorite ideas are. Have people who disagree with you test your ideas and find their weaknesses.
2. Limited expertise. Don’t claim expertise beyond your field: be humble about what you don’t know. Be aware too of the limits of the expertise of others.
3. Hammers and nails. If you are good with a tool, you may want to use it too often. If you have analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating the importance of that problem or of your solution. Remember that no one tool is good for everything. If your favorite idea is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers, wrenches, and tape measures. Be open to ideas from other fields.
4. Numbers, but not only numbers. The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone. Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives.
5. Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis.

Chapter 9 - The Blame Instinct

The blame instinct is the instinct to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened.

It seems that it comes very naturally for us to decide that when things go wrong, it must be because of some bad individual with bad intentions. We like to believe that things happen because someone wanted them to, that individuals have power and agency: otherwise, the world feels unpredictable, confusing, and frightening.

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: it steals our focus as we obsess about someone to blame, then blocks our learning because once we have decided who to punch in the face we stop looking for explanations elsewhere. This undermines our ability to solve the problem, or prevent it from happening again, because we are stuck with oversimplistic finger pointing, which distracts us from the more complex truth and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right places.

 To understand most of the world’s significant problems we have to look beyond a guilty individual and to the system.

The same instinct is triggered when things go well. “Claim” comes just as easily as “blame”. When something goes well, we are very quick to give the credit to an individual or a simple cause, when again it is usually more complicated.

If you really want to change the world you have to understand it. Following your blame instinct isn’t going to help.

Because most of the journalists and filmmakers who inform us about the world are themselves misled. Do not demonize journalists: they have the same mega misconceptions as everyone else.

Our press may be free, and professional, and truth-seeking, but independent is not the same as representative: even if every report is itself completely true, we can still get a misleading picture through the sum of true stories reporters choose to tell. The media is not and cannot be neutral, and we shouldn’t expect it to be.

You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than would think it reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help you navigate around the city.

Finding someone to blame can distract us from looking at the whole system.

Blame and Claim

The blame instinct drives us to attribute more power and influence to individuals than they deserve, for bad and good. Political leaders and CEOs in particular often claim they are more powerful than they are.



More Likely Suspects

I have argued above that we should look at the systems instead of looking for someone to blame when things go wrong. We should also give more credit to two kinds of systems when things go right. The invisible actors behind most human success are prosaic and dull compared to great, all-powerful leaders. Nevertheless I want to praise them, so let’s throw a parade for the unsung heroes of global development: institutions and technology.

Institutions

Only in a few countries, with exceptionally destructive leaders and conflicts, has social and economic development been halted. Everywhere else, even with the most incapable presidents imaginable, there has been progress. It must make one ask if the leaders are that important. And the answer, probably, is no. It’s the people, the many, who build a society.

Brave and patient servants of a functioning society, rarely ever mentioned-but the true saviors of the world.

Technology

The Industrial Revolution saved billions of lives not because it produced better leaders but because it produced things like chemical detergents that could run in automatic washing machines.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future.

To control the blame instinct, resist finding a scapegoat.

1. Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.
2. Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.

Chapter 10 - The urgency instinct

When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action. 

You have probably heard something like this before, from a salesperson or an activist. Both use a lot of the same techniques: “Act now, or lose the chance forever.” They are deliberately triggering your urgency instinct. The call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly, and act now.  Relax. It’s almost never true. It’s almost never that urgent, and it’s almost never an either/or. You can put the book down if you like and do something else. In a week or a month or a year you can pick it up again and remind yourself of its main points, and it won’t be too late. That is actually a better way to learn than trying to cram it all in at once.

The urgency instinct makes us want to take immediate action in the face of a perceived imminent danger. It must have served us humans well in the distant past.

 But now that we have eliminated most immediate dangers and are left with more complex and often more abstract problems, the urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to our understanding the world around us. It makes us stressed, amplifies our other instincts and makes them harder to control, blocks us from thinking analytically, tempts us to make up our minds too fast, and encourages us to take drastic actions that we haven’t thought through.

We do not seem to have a similar instinct to act when faced with risks that are far off in the future. In fact, in the face of future risks, we can be pretty slothful. That is why so few people save enough for their retirement.

When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.

Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for that. It needs systematic analysis, thought-through decisions, incremental actions, and careful evaluation.

And I don’t like exaggeration. Exaggeration undermines the credibility of well-founded data. Exaggeration, once discovered, makes people tune out altogether.

But the future is always uncertain to some degree. And whenever we talk about the future we should be open and clear about the level of uncertainty involved. We should not pick the most dramatic estimates and show a worst-case scenario as if it were certain. People would find out! We should ideally show a mid-forecast, and also a range of alternative possibilities, from best to worst. If we have to round the numbers we should round to our own disadvantage. This protects our reputations and means we never give people a reason to stop listening.

When you are called to action, sometimes the most useful action you can take is to improve the data.

We cannot get into a situation where no one listens anymore. Without trust, we are lost.

 They must look at the worst-case scenarios but also remember the uncertainty in the data. In heating up others, they must keep their own brains cool so that they can make good decisions and take sensible actions, and not their credibility at risk.

If you can’t track progress, you don’t know whether your actions are working.



We shouldn’t blame them. A long jumper is not allowed to measure her own jumps. A problem-solving organization should not be allowed to decide what data to publish either. The people trying to solve a problem on the ground, who will always want more funds, should not also be the people measuring progress. That can lead to really misleading numbers.

Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to action, no matter how noble the intentions.

Chapter overview

Factfulness is… recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.

To control the urgency instinct, take small steps.

1. Take a breath. When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Ask for more time and more information. It’s rarely now or never and it’s rarely either/or.
2. Insist on the data. If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful.
3. Beware of fortune-tellers. Any prediction about the future is uncertain. Be wary of predictions that fail to acknowledge that. Insist on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how often such predictions have been right before.
4. Be wary of drastic action. Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more effective.

Chapter 11 - Factfulness in Practice

How can you use Factfulness in your everyday life: in education, in business, in journalism, in your own organization or community, and as an individual citizen?

 Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.

Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.

Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.

But the world will keep changing, and the problem of ignorant grown-ups will not be solved by teaching the next generation. What you learn about the world at school will become outdated within 10 or 20 years of graduating. So we must find ways to update adults’ knowledge too. In the car industry, cars are recalled when a mistake is discovered. You get a letter from the manufacturer saying, “We would like to recall your vehicle and replace the brakes.” When the facts about the world that you were taught in schools and universities become out of date, you should get a letter too: “Sorry, what we taught you is no longer true. Please return your brain for a free upgrade.”

When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems - and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.