invertedpassion

This is a linkpost from https://invertedpassion.com/is-the-world-becoming-better/ This essay is inspired by the book Factfulness where the key idea explored is that the world has witnessed significant progress over the last few decades, but most people are unaware of that fact because they hold distorted views. Talking of distorted views, to get a sense of how much do you know about the world, I highly recommend taking this quiz. Hans Rosling, the author of the book, had been quizzing thousands of people across the world and most of them (including Nobel laureates) performed worse than random chance on such questions. For example, most people overestimate the percentage of the human population living in extreme poverty (which is defined as having an income of less than $2/mo). It’s 10% (as of 2017) but even the most educated people get it wrong. People don’t just get the latest facts wrong but they get the trend wrong as well. Many indicators such as extreme poverty, child mortality rate, babies per family have been rapidly improving across the world. Via Gapminder How does this knowledge matter? Well, it matters because your decisions based on wrong facts are likely to be wrong. The knowledge that extreme poverty has not been rising but rather is rapidly falling across the world gives you an entirely different emotional and rational framework to live your life by. One of the phrases I loved from the book is that things can be bad and better. Bad in the sense that even 10% extreme poverty is nothing to celebrate about, but better in the sense that just a few decades ago, this figure was 50%. In other words, you can hold both these thoughts simultaneously in your head: a) billions of people have escaped extreme poverty in recent times; b) hundreds of millions of people are still living in extreme poverty. Remember: things can be bad and better. Why do we hold distorted views? Believing wrong facts is mostly due to our cognitive biases, which are hard-wire