User Profile

The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

“frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things. The fear instinct is a terrible guide for understanding the world. It makes us give our attention to the unlikely dangers that we are most afraid of, and neglect what is actually most risky.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

One week after September 11, 2001, according to Gallup, 51 percent of the US public felt worried that a family member would become a victim of terrorism. Fourteen years later, the figure was the same: 51 percent. People are almost as scared today as they were the week after the Twin Towers came down.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

On US soil, 3,172 people died from terrorism over the last 20 years—an average of 159 a year. During those same years, alcohol contributed to the death of 1.4 million people in the United States—an average of 69,000 a year. This is not quite a fair comparison, because in most of those cases the drinker is also the victim. It would be fairer to look only at those deaths where the victim was not the drinker: car accidents and homicide. A very conservative estimate would give us a US figure of roughly 7,500 deaths a year. In the United States, the risk that your loved one will be killed by a drunk person is nearly 50 times higher than the risk he or she will be killed by a terrorist.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

1,600 more people died. It was not the leaking radioactivity that killed them. Not one person has yet been reported as having died from the very thing that people were fleeing from. These 1,600 people died because they escaped. They were mainly old people who died because of the mental and physical stresses of the evacuation itself or of life in evacuation shelters. It wasn’t radioactivity, but the fear of radioactivity, that killed them.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking, If there had been an equally large positive improvement, would I have heard about that? Even if there had been hundreds of larger improvements, would I have heard? Would I ever hear about children who don’t drown? Can I see a decrease in child drownings, or in deaths from tuberculosis, out my window, or on the news, or in a charity’s publicity material?

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

In large part, it is because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. There are three things going on here: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

To control the gap instinct, look for the majority. • Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all. • Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

The gap instinct makes us imagine division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

we need to learn to control our drama intake. Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

the way humans can quickly and almost reflexively reject information that contradicts their established beliefs is named the Semmelweis reflex.

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time. —You (also, Jorge Luis Borges)

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

if you have a lot of cows, you are doing pretty okay.

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North