Hans Rosling (1948–2017)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3142977.html

I was a huge fan of the videos of Hans Rosling, who died in March 2017; and I write as one who generally hates vlogging (even though I have indulged in it myself occasionally). In Factfulness, the book he rushed to complete with his son and daughter-in-law when he learned he was dying, he calls on us all to engage critically with news stories and perceptions about the world - particularly about the state of humanity as a whole, most of all the show more developing economies. The concept of 'Factfulness', clearly intended as a close relative of mindfulness, is defined as :
the stress-reducing habvit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.
He repeatedly makes the effective point that most people - including the rich, privileged and well-informed - perform less well on a basic test about the state of the world than would a chimpanzee selecting answers at random.

If I can boil it down, his first key message is that things are better than they were, but that should not deter us from making them better still. In particular, humanity is healthier, more prosperous, safer and more peaceful than it has ever been, and the greatest improvements have been made in countries which were desperately poor decades ago and have caught up since. BUT, his second key message is that news reports naturally concentrate on the drama of failure and crisis, so it's easy to get the impression that the world is going to hell; improvements are generally gradual (not always - there is the striking case of the recent decrease in birthrate in Iran, for instance, which of course received no international media coverage) while disasters, epidemics and wars fit the news cycle. HOWEVER, thirdly there is a real climate crisis, but we must be careful not to exaggerate it; the facts themselves are worrying enough, without resorting to worst-case scenarios or irrelevant issues (and he has plenty of cites for those).

I find this all very attractive. If we are looking for a framework to push back against fake news, Rosling's fact-based approach is a very good place to start. but also, if we are trying to get to grips with crises (of which climate change is clearly the most drastic), it's very helpful to be able to point to the progress that has already been made as well as the further steps that are demanded. Certainly I find it easier to be motivated by the thought of building on previous good work than the notion of crusading against an inevitable fate. Strongly recommended. show less

Han Gosling - medical doctor, Professor of International Health and all round superhero - died in 2017, and boy do I wish he was still around in these COVID times.

If you've never heard of him before, Rosling was a Swede who started life as a medical doctor, working in many different countries across the world before his experience led him into the world of research. There, he made a name for himself as a renowned public educator, advising WHO and UNICEF. He also co-founded Médecins Sans show more Frontières in Sweden, spoke at numerous international conferences and become a bit of a TED Talks legend. This career journey led him on a path to becoming a champion about people properly understanding the true facts of global issues, as in his experience no matter how senior or educated the individual, there was a common thread of not working to the right set of facts, or at least interpreting the facts correctly. He co-founded Gapminder with his son and daughter-in-law, which is focused on the elimination of ignorance in the world around issues such as global poverty, climate change and education.

Gosling was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer just as he was starting to write this book with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, so it's truly a swansong of the most important things he'd learnt about misconceptions and ignorance on world issues. Written in a very accessible format (i.e. you don't need to be a maths geek to appreciate it), Rosling shows us how our assumptions and interpretations of information are often wrong, and at the end of every chapter gives life tips on how to interpret facts going forward so that we get the full picture. And it's fascinating stuff. Rosling refers to himself as a possibilist rather than an optimist, and in this book works to demonstrate how much the world has progressed and is actually improving in most areas, despite the doom and gloom outlook that's presented to us in the press. Across 10 chapters he explains 10 different issues that cause us to go with the wrong takeaways from information, such as our urgency instinct and destiny instinct, and explains how world poverty (or wealth) should not be viewed from the perspective of developed world / undeveloped world - or 'them' and 'us' - but rather as 4 different levels of income.

Where Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund come in is that they have made a name for themselves creating a different way of visually presenting this type of data, and the book is packed full of their interesting graphics which really do help the data stick in your head than the usual line graphs or bar charts.

Spookily, Hans Rosling states towards the end of the book that he believes there are 5 main issues of concern still in the world, and #1 on his list was the risk of a global pandemic, because we'd been there before and it was highly likely. Given Rosling's understanding of the media needing to make their living from reporting depressing rather than optimistic news, I wish he was still around to give us the true facts on COVID-19, as we're all aware of how much inconsistency there is in the data being reported.

4 stars - a superbly interesting and thought-provoking read that will stick with me. show less

Having read both Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker and Factfulness, I can say that both are great reads but differ in significant ways.

Enlightenment Now explains why progress has occurred, how it can continue, and why we should all embrace the enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and progress. It also explains in greater depth where progress has occurred and how to think about the world’s biggest problems.

Factfulness, while covering progress and the statistics behind it, is show more more about the psychology of why people deny progress and on average know less about the world, when tested, than chimpanzees picking random answers.

In other words, they can both be read as complimentary reads, although if I had to pick a preference I would choose Enlightenment Now. Of course, if you’re looking for a lighter and quicker read, and are more interested in the reasons why people have an inherently distorted picture of the world, Factfulness is the way to go.

There’s a lot of great information in Factfulness along with some interesting anecdotes about Rosling’s life. I won’t review every point but here are some of the most important lessons I took away from the book.

1. To properly understand the world, you have to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind simultaneously, namely that something can be both bad AND better at the same time.

Poverty still exists, as does violence, and since journalists don’t report long-term positive trends but focus instead on single instances of dramatic negative events, we get the impression that world is getting worse. But, it’s possible to say that the world is both violent and getting less violent, which it is.

Progress is simply a matter of some measure going up or going down, and the statistics tell us that almost every measure of human progress is increasing. Of course there are some exceptions like opioid deaths and climate change, but the major trends in health, wealth, education, and political freedoms are all on the rise throughout most of the world.

2. Hans Rosling, by his own admission, wouldn’t have made it from a poor working-class family to become a prominent physician and educator without the benefit of free education (he became a doctor through universal education) and free healthcare (he had his cancer treated through universal healthcare)—in other words, without a progressive society as exists in Sweden. This makes you wonder how many people like Rosling are being held back in a society where the poor do not have the same access to education and healthcare as the rich, and therefore do not in practice have “equality of opportunity.”

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One issue I did have with the book concerns the chapter on the gap instinct.

The “gap instinct” is our tendency to categorize everything into two groups, with a significant “gap of injustice” between them. For example, we might compare the richest person in the US with the poorest, concluding that income inequality is out of control while ignoring that most people occupy the middle position, or the supposed gap. In other words, there’s really no gap at all, just our tendency to focus on extremes.

There is of course some truth to this, but this instinct doesn’t always lead us astray. Consider this example that Rosling himself provides.

Rosling says the dichotomy between “rich” and “poor” is a fallacy, a gap that doesn’t really exist. He then groups the world population into 4 income levels, as follows:

$1 per day - 1 billion people
$4 per day - 3 billion people
$16 per day - 2 billion people
$64 per day - 1 billion people

Anyone else notice the gap between levels 3 and 4? So out of 7 billion people, 6 billion are living off $1-$16 per day while 1 billion people are living off of at least $64 per day, yet the gap instinct is a fallacy?

I appreciate that levels of extreme poverty have decreased significantly over the years, but this level of inequality still seems to be an issue. In the US it is especially an issue. The level of income inequality in the US is at all-time highs—the share of income for the top 1 percent today is at the same peak levels as it was in the late 1920s before the Great Depression. CEO pay has also risen sharply to as high as 300 times the salary of the average worker.

This is even more distressing considering it is the explicit result of political and economic decisions and policy that tends to pre-distribute wealth upwards (see Robert Reich’s book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few).

Taking Rosling’s advice, in this case by not focusing on the extremes, would lead us to conclude that inequality is not an issue at all in the US and that since most people make more than $16 a day we don’t have to worry about an unfair economic system that favors the wealthy.

Rosling thus fails to consider the deeper political ramifications of extreme inequality. show less

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, show more 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."

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