Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Factfullness by Hans Rosling is my first summer reading. Lots of good review have been shared and Bill Gages is also giving free copies to all colleague graduates this year. I was curious about how this book can help me discover my ignorance and perhaps changed the way I interpreted data. 

Hans Rosling did an amazing job in explaining the data in a very non-intimidating manner and helped readers make sense of the world through story-telling. I appreciated the author used the four levels (four income groups) to help us better understand the world and challenged the way we classify the developing and developed countries. The “10 factufullness commandments” explained in the book are powerful tools for readers to develop critical thinking and evaluate information received. 

This is a great book for everyone, and I particularly think educators should all read it. All of us coming from different cultural backgrounds and have different ways of doing things and seeing things. If we are not careful, we end up sharing our opinions and ideas based on our feeling, but not based on facts, not based on our thinking. We need to cite facts and be faithful to the data in order to tell a complete story.

After reading this book, I have a new thought on how we should guide students in doing their service projects. There should be no more horrifying images or terrible news to urge others take actions. If we encourage and actually teach students to do this, we fail them as we are just as misleading as the media. Instead, we should guide students to think critically when evaluating different information before making decisions. We ought to explicitly point out the incremental positive changes made and celebrate human achievement. Young people should be inspired and feel hopeful about the world that they are living in, and feel empowered to galvanize us into actions! ​

“It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a world view based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.”

To remind myself and use these tools for fact checking and decision-making, I have created this infographic. An individual is placed right in the center. In order for one to truly become international-mindedness, we need to control our instincts when perceiving the world. The ten instincts are outlined below:

• the gap instinct; 
• the negative instinct; 
• the straight line instinct; 
• the fear instinct; 
• the size instinct; 
• the generalization instinct; 
• the destiny instinct; 
• the single perspective instinct; 
• the blame instinct; 
• the urgency instinct. 

We should be mindful of our ten instincts and become aware of how these instincts can prevent us from putting events in perspective. “10 factfulness commandments”  is suggested as a framework to overcome our 10 instincts and help us develop a fact-based worldview.  

You can directly download the PDF by clicking the picture below.  ​