Curb Your Instincts: It’s All Gravy

“Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. In Russia, it was called Polish disease, in Germany, the French Disease, in France, the Italian disease.”

— Hans Rosling, Factfulness

Our hyperbolic imaginations powered by our gossip-loving, intuition-driven brain (see my story covering this here), renders us unable to estimate the prevalence of the most basic issues affecting our planet. Rosling’s book, written in collaboration with his son and daughter-in-law, explains the pitfalls of our logical reasoning and attempts to develop a fact-based framework to view humanity’s standing today for what it is: a barnstorming success by almost every measure. Factfulness then is a catalogue of our achievements as a species, an optimistic perspective on how we are doing, a celebration of our collective ingenuity and a call to action to keep up the good work.

The book opens with a 13-question test (a drive-by health scan of the world, if you will) that asks readers to guess how humanity as a whole is doing on income inequality, poverty, disease, literacy, life expectancy, population growth, education and climate change. And readers — me, you, ordinary folk, experts, politicians, journalists, filmmakers, investment bankers, UN health experts — consistently get it colossally wrong. So wrong in fact, that a chimpanzee would score higher by merely guessing. With 2020 being what it is, I needed a jolt of positivity to plough through what remains, and this book gave me that and more. I’ve attempted to distil the key revelations into a rather cursory 5-minute blog post with my top takeaways, but I certainly recommend you pick-up this book to experience the tour-de-force of the Rosling family’s sterling work — if nothing else, the data visualisations alone are worth the entry fee.

The Gap Instinct

The world is split into rich and poor countries and the rich are few and far between.

This instinct is the manifestation of our irresistible temptation for binary thinking i.e. “dividing all things into two distinct and conflicting groups with a huge gap in between”. Binary thinking resolves a continuous spread into a single point, thereby negating all manner of nuance. Things either are or aren’t, people are either rich or not, countries are either developed or not.

Example: Rosling ridicules the developing vs developed countries model that’s undoubtedly etched in our brains and instead proposes a gradient 4-tier model — Level 1 where the poorest 9% of the world’s population live to Level 4, where the richest 16% live, leaving a whopping 75% of the world’s population in this “gap”. In other words, low-income countries are significantly more developed than we think and far-fewer people live in them. The idea of a decrepit world where the elite live while the majority suffer in dire straits is simply untrue. The reality is somewhere in the middle.

Motive: The act of comparing extremes, let’s say Jeff Bezos’s net worth relative to a goat-farmer in Sierra Leone, is an engaging, appealing narrative that captivates our elephant-brains. But extremes are exceptions, not the norm — the norm is where the majority lives, and facts are given little credence in the pursuit of a thrilling story.

Curb your instinct: Ask where the majority is? Also, make room for the grey.

The Negative Instinct

Things were so much better back in my day.

This primitive instinct makes us notice the bad more than the good. Evolutionary psychologists have repeatedly proven “loss aversion” i.e. the phenomenon where the psychological pain of losing something (negativity) is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining that same thing.

Example: Rosling highlights this with two excellent examples — villagers in rural India in the ’90s were shown photographs of the dilapidated conditions their village from the ’70s, through which they had lived. Almost all villagers claimed that it cannot be their village because “they’ve never been that poor”. The other, US crime rates have steadily declined every year since the ’90s and yet the public perception of the frequency of crime has increased at the same time.

Motive: Selective reporting — as Rosling puts it, “our surveillance of suffering has improved dramatically” — combined with our elephant-led and loss-averse intuitions makes us blind to gradual progress. Negative news reaches us, but we must search for positive news. Recency Bias, or the cognitive bias in which we over-index our latest experiences more than older experiences also plays a factor here. Even though things are far from perfect today — global warming, infectious diseases, wealth inequality, etc. — we are at a much better place today (and getting better at a faster rate) than circa. 8000BC when agriculture was invented, or even yesterday. This dichotomy of “bad but better” is hard to rationalise, especially when we hear of suffering happening right now and applauding our progress sounds heartless while being negative about our future makes us sound rational and virtuous. As Morgan Housel puts it in the also-excellent Psychology of Money, “Optimism sounds like a sales pitch, pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.”

Curb your instinct: Expect bad news.

The Fear Instinct

I am terrified of flying

The most self-evident of all instincts: fear. The fear instinct clouds judgements by not leaving any room for facts ensuring our brains believe the unusual to usual.

Example: The fear instinct seems to be more powerful than the phenomenon that generates the fear, as Rosling shows in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster of 2011. The tsunami on March 11, 2011, breached the defence walls of the Fukushima Nuclear complex, flooding the province with water — panic spread among the residents causing them to flee, the mental and physical stress of doing so resulted in the deaths of 1600 people. In other words, the fear of radioactivity poisoning seemingly killed more people than radioactivity itself.

Motive: Evolutionarily speaking, evidence shows that the fear instinct helped with fostering communities, camaraderie and eventually societies built upon the aversion to a common “enemy”.

Curb your instinct: Everything that’s frightening isn’t always dangerous, everything dangerous isn’t always perceived to be frightening. Case in point, look-up the number of deaths due to diarrhoea vs the deaths due to plane crashes for the last fifty years.

The Size Instinct

4.2 million babies die in a year. Do you call that progress?

This instinct typifies our proclivity to assign disproportionate importance to a single number.

Example: 4.2 million children did die in 2016, a majority of these with preventable cures. These are shocking numbers and a shameful indictment of our medical preparedness. It’s bad. But better: in 2015, this number was 4.4 million. A year before that, 4.5 million. In 1950, it was 14.4 million. Bad, but better.

Motive: Like the straight-line instinct, pattern recognition by our drama-driven brains is at play here. A large number, say 4.2 million, will always be large when viewed in isolation. When viewed contextually, say for the last 100 years, it isn’t. It’s an improvement.

Curb your instinct: Contextualise the individual number, conclusions arrived at based on one data point have a high likelihood of being incorrect.

The Destiny Instinct

They’ve always been like this, it’s in their culture, they’ll never change

This instinct compels us to believe that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, cultures, religions or countries and that these characteristics are set in stone and immutable.

Example: Rosling shows that as of 2017, women in Iran had fewer babies than women in either the US or Sweden. But Iran is the third world, right? No free media? Practically a quasi-religious dictatorship? The world over, the only correlation between our standard of living and literacy, mortality, healthcare, and family-size is not culture or religion but income. As income increases, family sizes reduce, no exception.

Motive: Stereotyping is the brain’s cache. It allows for fast, uninterrupted, effortless, low-cost memory retrieval and is thus evolutionarily very beneficial as a survival strategy. Finding food and shelter and ensuring survival today is exponentially easier than in the days of our Cro-Magnon ancestors, but our brain caching has persisted.

Curb your instinct: Understand that fast, cultural change goes unreported (positive news needs to be searched; negative news presents itself) so we need to stay open to new data to rewrite our caches.

The Blame (or claim) Instinct

It’s obvious: it’s always the fault of the evil businessmen, mega-corporations, lying journalists or desperate immigrants

This instinct persuades us that there’s always a simple, linear reason why something bad (or good) occurs. We habitually assign blame (or “claim”) to individuals or groups thereby exaggerating the influence of a human being’s agency. Even the Pope or Chairman Mao (both with more than a billion followers) had limited outreach to affect real change.

Example: Rosling cites the example of the syphilis disease to illustrate the blame-instinct: when it first appeared in Europe, the Russians called it the Polish disease, the Germans the French disease and so on. Would the French ever call it the French disease? We need scapegoats.

Motive: The narrative of believing that we, humans, have the agency to affect change is integral to our worldview — otherwise the world is too confusing, complex and unpredictable. We need a straight-line relationship from “cause” to “effect” as it’s amenable to our intuitions and thus, look for this everywhere and invariably find a scapegoat.

Curb your instinct: Realise that “bad things” are emergent by-products of an interconnected society with myriad inter-dependencies and relationships. Focus on identifying causes and systems rather than scapegoats and heroes.

It’s All Gravy

Identifying and curbing our basic cognitive instincts that arise due to our intuition-driven brain (another plug here) is difficult but not impossible. What Rosling’s magnum opus has taught me is that whilst there is enough reason for us to celebrate, the onus is also on us to be mindful to our own innate fallacies. Doubt is good, scepticism is healthy, and data is factful. Read this if you feel overwhelmed by the goings-on this year or feel hopeless and gloomy about your lack of agency — it’ll give you context, reassurance, a sense of wonder, a tinge of optimism and a handy toolkit to continue navigating the world.

Unputdownable.