Reddit reviews Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
We found 9 Reddit comments about Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I fully agree regarding the news. To follow on to this- Hans and Ola Rosling's TED Talk from 2014, How not to be ignorant about the world, genuinely helped me. Their later 2018 book, Factfulness, further helped focus my understanding of things. Things are better than it seems for the vast majority of humanity.
"My" data on Fukushima is from the National Police Agency of Japan and Ichiseki (2013). According to police records, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami caused 15,894 confirmed deaths, and 2,546 people are still missing (as of December 2017).
Tanigawa et al. (2012) concluded that 61 very old people in critical health conditions died during the hasty evacuation.
About 1,600 further deaths were indirectly caused by other kinds of problems for mainly elderly evacuees, reports Ichiseki:
>The reconstruction agency reports that more than 95% (1206) of victims were aged 60 years or older. About 64% (814) had chronic diseases. About 48% (608) of deaths were confirmed within 1 month, and 78% (986) within 3 months after the earthquake. The most common cause of death was “physical or mental fatigue from life at evacuation shelters” (n=638 [33%]), followed by “fatigue from moving to evacuation shelters” (401 [21%]), “aggravation of illnesses due to halted hospital operations” (283 [15%]), and “excessive mental and physical stress caused by the earthquake and tsunami” (150 [8%]).
Nobody was reported dying from the nuclear leak, and WHO concludes that it might be possible to detect a small increase of mortality, but that it is expected to occur in a very limited group of people.
According to Pew in 2012, 76 percent of people in Japan believed that food from Fukushima was dangerous. The contamination of the very word Fukushima is discussed in the book “Hazards, Risks, and Disasters in Society” by John Shroder (2014).
It's really cool that a lot of elderly people found a new purpose in life by being united after living so far apart for so long. But moving is not easy for sick and old people and it causes a lot of health problems as well.
Anyway, the main point I guess is that our fears are disproportionate to the reality of what causes harm.
A great book on the topic of improvement in the world is Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He gave a several talks which inspired the book, which was his last contribution before passing away from cancer. The book is entertaining, thought-provoking, and optimistic. One of the main points he makes is that not acknowledging world progress is more than a mistake; it has real, negative repercussions--because when we don't acknowledge progress, we are in danger of stopping the actions that made the progress possible. He argues acknowledging the good is paramount if we are to eradicate the bad. I like that argument. It is a rationale reason to be optimistic.
If you get down about the state of the world, and I agree it is easy to do, read that book.
Some of you need to read Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It is a great book talking about how this exact moment in human history is the safest, most transformative, most peaceful, time period we have ever had. The news profits off of negative articles by appealing to the natural fears that we all have inside of us. No one wants to watch a news segment about how child mortality has fallen from 18.2% in 1960 to 4.3% in 2015 because it’s a slow decline over decades of diligent work by governments and health organizations, and it simply does not get as many views as say a Hurricane. Instead the news organizations post murder stories, hate crimes, premeditated violence to ignite that biological fear and to get a reaction, despite violent violent crime rate falling 49% between 1993 and 2017
Tl/dr - the world is a lot better than the news shows. Take 5 minutes to do some research, and you will feel much more comfortable and optimistic about the world you live in.
Yes! Everyone should read this book! Very important message!
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better-ebook/dp/B0756J1LLV
Obviously people's changing perspective affects their behavior along with cultural and social norms, from views on slavery to civil rights or from war to types of government over the ages, but all of that and our reactions to it are based on human nature. We all have biases, complex motivations, and evolved tendencies which can make us get jealous, angry, and so on resulting in horrible mistakes, while also causing us to fall in love, express gratitude, and feel empathy with others, along with the unintended consequences and unexpected results which can always haunt us.
That doesn't mean we can't temper unwanted behavior through laws criminalizing violence, shunning bigotry in media, or removing incentives to cheat, while supporting desirable behavior by promoting education, rewarding cooperation, and building helpful institutions, which people have been attempting to do for millennia. Sometimes these attempts succeed in addressing one problem yet cause other issues we didn't expect, such as the rise of globalism. Other times they fail miserably and hurt even more people than they were meant to help, like the war on drugs.
Our perspectives on the world motivate or discourage us from implementing the changes we think it needs, yet through it all we are still bound by human nature and the consequences of trying to apply our lofty ideals onto the slippery nature of reality. Meaning that no matter what perfectly moral laws we create, people will still react with violence in times of stress. That however much we condemn racism, people are prone to categorizing others as different. And while we can educate people better than anyone else in the past, ignorance will always cause problems.
This doesn't mean the world hasn't been getting better than the past, it truly has in many ways, but that unless we start changing our DNA, some humans will continue to make the same old mistakes we've made for millennia, only with fewer and fewer people making those mistakes as progress marches on.
(I realize this was less an answer to your question and more of a concept I wanted to express to anyone willing to read it. And for anyone wanting to know more on how things are actually getting better, The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, and Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling explain things much better than I could.)
You should really read Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think!
Basically, population growth is one thing we're all instinctually terrible at getting right. He explains it very well in the book (Page 76 begins the section "The Mega Misconception that 'The World Population is just increasing and increasing'") but here's a short overview:
We are currently in a population boom because more babies are surviving into adulthood.
As more babies in a culture survive, the mean number of births per family decreases.
Right now, we have 7 billion people. 2b are children. 4b are adults. and 1b are elderly.
By the end of the century, we will have 11b people. However, still only 2b of them will be children. 6b now will be adults (these are today's children and their children). And 3b will be elderly.
The key concept is that the number of children in 50 or 75 years will be the same number as today. The population boom will have stabilized.
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In any normal time, I would say "What does Google have to say about your sources?"
Unfortunately, our present culture is such that everything is regarded as a completely untrustworthy source by a very vocal minority on one side or the other. So there is not necessarily a simple answer to that question.
One important thing to remember: No source is 100% right. All sources have a bias. The first thing you can do is try to be aware of what biases your preferred sources have. If you are aware that your preferred sources lean [direction], you can try to be aware of any spin they are applying.
There is a great new book called Factfulness that helps you learn how to read the news and spot the facts underlying reporting. Things that the articles might state, but -- intentionally or not-- they might obfuscate for one reason or another. Bill Gates reviewed it here, and in fact he liked it so much that he gave a free copy away to any person graduating from college this year. It's well worth reading if you can find the time. It's a short and quite interesting book, so I recommend it highly.
Read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better-ebook/dp/B0756J1LLV
https://www.amazon.com/How-Think-Like-Leonardo-Vinci-ebook/dp/B000SEFNF0/
https://hbr.org/2014/09/how-philosophy-makes-you-a-better-leader
https://www.amazon.com/Microserfs-Novel-Douglas-Coupland-ebook/dp/B004W2YZ0I
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