In an age when protest, reasoned reasoning, and self-deception are all the rage, Rosling argues that when we see the world on the basis of facts, we can also make better plans to create the future in which we would like to live. The challenge is, as humans, we’re not wired to deal with facts by default.

Why our instincts get the better of us

Rosling presents the book with the news, talking about the horrors of the world – growing inequalities, disasters, corruption, environmental disasters, etc. He calls it “the overly dramatic worldview”, describing it as “stressful and deceptive”. He compares our instincts and sensitivity to drama to the instincts that helped our ancestors survive as small groups of hunters and gatherers. For example, take our carb cravings:

Our cravings for sugar and fat make obesity one of the biggest health problems in the world today. We need to teach our children and ourselves to avoid sweets and fries. Likewise, our quick brains and drama cravings – our dramatic instincts – are the source of misconceptions and an overly dramatic worldview.

Rosling also emphasizes the role of the media, writing: “Journalists know this. They present their stories as conflicts between two opposing people, points of view or groups. They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people who are slowly dragging themselves into a better life. Journalists are storytellers. The same goes for people who produce documentaries and films.

Why the media feed our instincts

Deliberate or not, journalists of course only give us what they are prompted to do – what we want and choose to pay for. As David Streitfeld paraphrases Ev Williams: “Say you’re driving on the road and you see a car crash. Of course you watch. Everyone is watching. The internet interprets such behavior to mean that everyone is asking for car accidents, so it tries to provide them. “

When i shared Factuality with my Best of Books newsletter in january, I wrote:

In this book, Hans Rosling demystifies some of the common prejudices – what he calls “instincts” – that we have in mind. Things change quickly and every day someone is discovering new trends or complexities that the rest of us haven’t realized before. Many of the things that we take as hard facts or truths are in fact concepts that may be decades old, and in our day-to-day lives our confirmation bias only considers the evidence that supports them. If we are to move forward as informed individuals and societies, we must develop a deeper understanding of what we believe to be facts and an awareness of our own common biases that blind us to the truth.

I’ll quickly cover the first of the ten instincts Rosling calls for in Factuality so you can get an idea of ​​what the book is about:

The instinct of the ditch

Rosling calls the first instinct he covers The Gap Instinct. He describes it as: “This overwhelming temptation we have to divide all sorts of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imaginary gap – a huge chasm of injustice – between the two. It’s about how the gulf instinct creates an image in people’s heads of a world divided into two types of countries or two types of people: rich versus poor. Of course, most of us are not straightforward enough to use this language. So we code it in terms like “developed countries” and “developing countries”.

The first is the challenge of definition; for example, what is a developing or developed country? The World Bank used to use infant mortality and fertility rates to distinguish between developed and developing countries. As one of Rosling’s students suggests, “Maybe we can define it like this: “Us in the West” have few children and few children die. While ‘they in the rest’ have many children and many children die.

In November 2015, Tariq Khokhar and Umar Serajuddin pointed out that most countries had low infant mortality and fertility rates – and therefore, the distinction between “developing” and “developed” was no longer so relevant. They proposed that the World Bank phase out its use of the term “developing world,” which the World Bank did a year later.

Rosling says, “Today most people are in the middle. There is no gap between the West and the others, between developed and developing, between rich and poor. And we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there are. In the following video, Rosling uses a measure of life expectancy to make his point:

A live version of this graph is available here, measuring life expectancy and income. According to data that Rosling compiled from the World Bank, most people are in the middle now. He writes: “Eighty-five percent of humanity is already inside the box that was once called the ‘developed world’. Most of the remaining 15 percent fall between the two boxes. Only 13 countries, representing 6 percent of the world’s population, are still in the “developing” category. But while the world has changed, the worldview has not changed, at least in the minds of “Westerners”. Most of us are stuck with a completely outdated idea of ​​the rest of the world. “

Four keys to reality

“The more facts you accumulate, the closer you get to the truth that exists,” writes biographer Robert Caro in Job. “And finding facts – by reading documents or by interviewing and re-interviewing – cannot be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time. Facts need to be checked and compared to other possibilities, after all.

The facts alone are not perfect either. These are not bricks of hard truth. On the contrary, all facts necessarily involve omission of context – one fact is in fact interconnected with many others – and reliance on source and method. But more importantly, adding the facts together and understanding them together brings us closer to the truth.

For example, there are criticisms of Rosling’s methods and data framing, as well as his omissions. There is also Rosling’s ideology and his method of persuasion. It is the slow and agonizing process of getting closer to the truth. It is fitting that the organization behind the book, Gapminder, covers some of the errors printed in the first edition of Factuality. To state something as a fact – unalterable, unimproveable, completely true – is not scientific and would not be in the spirit of reality.

Despite some inevitable inaccuracies, this does not mean that the pursuit or virtue of the facts is futile or unworthy. As Isaac Asimov writes to one of his students in The relativity of evil, “When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that to think that the earth is spherical is just as wrong thinking that the earth is flat then your point of view is more wrong than the two combined.

Over time, the facts allow us to be less mistaken about our understanding of ourselves and our world. And the facts are the closest thing to understanding the truth. “When we have a view of the world based on facts,” writes Hans Rosling in Factuality, “we can see that the world is not as bad as it looks, and we can see what we need to do to keep making it better.” We can totally agree with Rosling’s ideal philosophy of pursuing and rigorously evaluating the facts and open-mindedness, even if that is not the conclusions he came to.

This article originally appeared on Herbert Lui’s blog and is reprinted with permission.