Factfulness – Frank The Chimpanzee
Let’s play a little game. It’s you and I, the human team, against Frank. Frank is a chimpanzee and Frank can’t possibly know what 7 + 28 is, right? I am confident that you and I would know that 35 is the answer. Frank might not be a stupid chimpanzee, but he simply lacks the ability of solving math problems from elementary school.
Now let’s give Frank a chance to get the next question right by giving him and us three answer possibilities (so that he has a 1/3 chance to guess right).
Consider the following question: In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…
A. Almost doubled – B. remained more or less the same – C. almost halved
Write down your answer. Are you guessing? Remember, Frank our chimpanzee is guessing. We should probably do better than Frank, shouldn’t we?
Let’s do another one: Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school?
A. 9 years – B. 6 years – C. 3 years
Write down your answer again.
Now our mate Frank has a chance of 1/9 to get both questions right. Our chance of getting both questions right would be the same if we were to guess. Did you guess? Do you think our chances are better because we are humans and have more knowledge about world poverty and education developments than Frank? Probably you do and I definitely do.
Factfulness – Why Things Are Better Than They Seem
But when I first answered the 13 questions (including the two above) that Rosling asks at the beginning of his book “Factfulness”, I did worse thank Frank. I got two questions right. TWO out of thirteen! Frank would probably have gotten about four right, by guessing!
I was officially dumber than a chimpanzee (no offense Frank).
The correct answers are C and A respectively. How did you do?
When World Leaders Don’t Know Their World
According to Rosling people consistently answer his quiz worse than if they would just guess (which is what chimpanzees would do). Only 5% of attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos got the question about world poverty right! These are government leaders and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies…
“Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless – in short, more dramatic – than it really is”
Hans Rosling, about the bias in judgements of human development
“Factfulness” is Rosling’s attempt to fight the world-wide ignorance of facts. He raises the 13 mentioned questions so that the reader can observe his*her own ignorance. The back of the book reads: “Factfulness: the stress reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.”
I don’t know nearly enough about many things to carry an opinion on them. Even about things concerning my own studies. And I am sure you have met people that seem to carry an opinion on everything, just for the sake of it (maybe you do too).
But we should acknowledge when we are wrong. And humans are wrong an awful lot (just look at the results from the World Economic Forum). So how do we fix this? And more importantly: How do we beat Frank?
Oil Spill Meditation
Throughout the book, Rosling presents a bunch of positive, uplifting developments in the past decades. From countries that work themselves out of poverty, to the constantly decreasing HIV infection rate, back to the rate of girls going to school and even the decreasing number of oil spills. The world is a fundamentally better place than you and I think. This is one of the key lessons in this book.
This short blog post does not do this lesson justice. To really understand it, which should lead to less stress, we must read and understand “Factfulness”.
Take oil spills as an example. Earlier I said that the number of oil spills has been decreasing. In fact, they have gone from 636 in 1979 to only 6 in 2016 (Source: ITOPF). Would you have guessed that? Or does it seem like oil spills happen more often than only 6 times per year?
How we perceive the world is to some degree determined by our media consumption. Oil spills get covered immediately and no spill is left uncovered. But this doesn’t tell the entire story. Take a step back and relax…
“Factfulness” truly is meditation for the mind. Even when it is hard to believe that the world is getting a better place during a pandemic. The overall trend is upwards in many, many areas.
Let’s Beat Frank!
I inhaled “Factfulness”. It’s the first book where I can remember to have chosen reading instead of watching TV. Roslings story got to me. And I am confident it will get to you too.
And although I have started to like Frank, I don’t think he should do better in a quiz about human development than us humans!
So, let’s solve our Reading Dilemma together, acknowledge our lack of knowledge and beat the crap out of Frank!
Joe
Human bias and our flaws in judgement play a big role in Factfulness. If you are interested in the psychology and flaws of human judgement, I suggest the books of Daniel Kahneman “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “Noise”.
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