Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - Hans Rosling - ★★★★.½

AUTHOR: Hans Rosling

GENRE: Nonfiction

PUBLICATION DATE: April 3, 2018

RATING: 4.5 stars.

It was truly coincidental that I took up a book written by a global health expert just before a global health crisis. When I started with this book, the Coronavirus scare had begun, but was restricted to China and parts of Europe. But as I progressed with the book, the virus and the panic seemed to grow at an exponential rate. In these stressful times, if there were a few things that helped me retain my sanity, one of them was this book.

Factfulness, mainly authored by Dr. Hans Rosling, teaches you a "factful" way of looking at data and making sense of it. Dr. Rosling fleshes out the seemingly boring topic with a very steady, interesting, interactive and sometimes humorous approach that causes you to be spellbound. Every single page is enlightening. Each chapter is named after a particular instinct that he says humans have which causes them to look at data in a lopsided way. For instance,

the Blame Instinct which causes us to search for the accused instead of searching for a solution;

the Generalisation Instinct that makes us create broad theories about entire populations based on a small, sometimes singular, sample;

the Fear Instinct which leads to incorrect hasty conclusions simply because the fear overrides our logic.... (Such as overstocking on masks & sanitisers!)

Replete with graphs and practical examples, the book slowly unfolds the vagaries of data interpretation to your previously ignorant self. Dr. Rosling's examples primarily relate to global health & standards of living, but in the last chapter, he explains how we can utilise the same approach in our daily encounters at the workplace, in our cities, and so on. When you read the book, you feel like some great guru has come and opened your third eye. In fact, I was so impressed with the quality of the content that after about 5 chapters, I googled Hans Rosling to know his opinion about the current covid-19 scare. It was very disappointing to find out that he had actually expired in 2017 itself, just months after drafting this book. (Well, the book does mention his death but that's in the epilogue!) Nevertheless, by the time you complete the book, you can gauge his opinion on covid-19 too. That's how impactful and practical the book is!

If you feel that you'd like to hear a voice of reason in the craziness that is going on currently, go for Factfulness and see if it makes a difference to your thinking. The problem or the situation won't change, but your approach to it certainly will.

I'll leave you with an excerpt from the book, which in my opinion is some of the most pragmatic advice I have read in any non-fiction book in a really long time.

"We should be teaching our children that there are countries on all different levels of health and income and that most are in the middle..........

• We should be teaching them how to hold the two ideas at the same time: that bad things are going on in the world, but that many things are getting better.

• We should be teaching them that cultural and religious stereotypes are useless for understanding the world.

• We should be teaching them how to consume the news and spot the drama without becoming stressed or hopeless.

• We should be teaching them the common ways that people will try to trick them with numbers.

• We should be teaching them that the world will keep changing and they will have to update their knowledge and worldview throughout their lives.

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."