Rating: Stop what you are doing and go read this book.
Factfulness is a book that will mess with your mind in all the right ways. It introduces systematic thinking errors (“instincts” as Rosling generously calls them) that we human folk all have pre-loaded right from the factory. Oddly, though, the book does it in a way that leaves you feeling much better about the state of the world.
Rosling (who died in 2017) was a Swedish physician and college professor. In those roles, he began to notice peoples’ beliefs about the state of the world were massively wrong in systematic ways. He became focused on understanding why people regularly got answers to certain questions so predictably wrong. After several false starts, he landed on ten built-in human instincts, all of which served us well on the savanna, but steer us wrong in the 21st century.
As an example, Rosling explains the Fear Instinct, where being disproportionately frightened is an advantage that keeps us alive in the wild but leads us to confuse dramatic events that are scary with more mundane things that are truly dangerous (say… shark attacks versus coronary disease).
What Rosling accomplishes with this book is really kind of amazing. He delivers the potentially disturbing news that your brain has been systematically deceiving you for your whole life in a way that is not just non-threatening and clarifying, but also uplifting. This a book that leaves you entertained, thinking far more clearly and feeling better about the world. It’s definitely one to go read.