Thread by @LaurentFranckx

The best point yet I read in @HansRosling 's "Factfulness": in the past, people did not live in balance with nature. They *died* in balance with nature. As Hobbes already knew, live was short, nasty and cruel. /

I quite often say that books are highly recommended, but "Factfulness" is a must read in the most literal sense of the word: it should be put on the school curriculum. Not just because it sets so many things straight about the world, but because it is one big argument in /

favour of a data rather than impressions based approach to understanding the world. If the data tell you that your priors are demonstrably false, you need to update your priors. Also, it is a good guide to the mental biases that guide our /

perceptions of the world. Some of them are well known (we are more attentive to bad news than to good news, we tend to extrapolate linear trends, news media thrive on spectacular items). But there's another point that people who work on economic history understand very well:/

an accumulation of small changes on an annual basis eventually lead to spectacular accumulated changes. And, of course, people easily forget how much more awful everything was in the past.

As far as oneliners go, this is a good one: "The fears that helped our ancestors to survive, now help journalists to keep their jobs"

Another interesting point: the comparison between the Global Terrorism Database and the Wikipedia pages on terrorism. The Database is based on meticulous fact checking, which takes time. The result is that the database is updated very slowly. So Rosling asks: should we use /

Wikipedia as an alternative source of information? It turns out that there's a problem with Wikipedia. It's not that the information is factually incorrect, it's that it is biased. Around 80% of deaths due to terrorism are not included in Wikipedia - simply because it almost/

only includes death in the rich world. Only 25% of deaths in the "rest of the world" are included.

Does this matter? Yes, because the increase in deaths due to terrorism in the last two decades is largely due to deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria. In the rich world, the number of deaths has decreased by 75%. Facts do matter.

In the next chapter, Rosling describes how, as a young doctor, he worked in completely hopeless circumstances in Mozambique, but took care to collect data. And concluded that basic improvements in first line care would be more effective in reducing child mortality than /

high tech medicine in large hospitals. Rosling thus used data for a utilitarian cost benefit analysis. Not surprisingly, he was accused of callousness. While he actually saved more lives than if had not bothered to analyse reality and had just followed his guts.

Half of the reduction in child mortality worldwide can be attributed to mother basic numeracy and literacy.

The final lessons are sooooo important: we need to teach our children modesty and curiosity. Teach them to admit that they don't know everything. To reassess their beliefs in the light of evidence.