Home > Work > Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
161 " During the Second World War and the Korean War, doctors and nurses discovered that unconscious soldiers stretchered off the battlefields survived more often if they were laid on their fronts rather than on their backs. On their backs, they often suffocated on their own vomit. On their fronts, the vomit could exit and their airways remained open. This observation saved many millions of lives, not just of soldiers. "
― Hans Rosling , Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
162 " If this means you don’t have time to form so many opinions, so what? Wouldn’t you rather have few opinions that are right than many that are wrong? "
163 " Winston Churchill’s wise words: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” See "
164 " I had even once eaten porridge made from mosquitos. "
165 " Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. "
166 " I would puke the rat back up. "
167 " In the third century BC, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka when he declared a piece of forest to be officially protected. It took more than 2,000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States. "
168 " To understand most of the world's significant problems we have to look beyond a guilty individual and to the systemThe same instinct is triggered when things go well. ''Claim'' comes just easily as ''blame''. When something goes well, we are very quick to give the credit to an individual or a simple cause, when again it is usually more complicated.Following your blame instinct isn't going to help "
169 " What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind? "
170 " Today, conflicts and fatalities from conflicts are at a record low. I have lived through the most peaceful decades in human history. Watching the news, with its never-ending flow of horrifying images, it is almost impossible to believe that. I do not seek to trivialize the horror that undoubtedly remains. I do not try to understate the importance of ending current conflicts. Remember: things can be bad, and getting better. Getting better, but still bad. "
171 " human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. "
172 " I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious “possibilist.” That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. "
173 " Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my food. [...] It isn't that the picture of my foot is deliberately lying about me. But it isn't showing you the whole of me. "
174 " This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains. "
175 " The Chinese harvest in 1960 was smaller than planned because of a bad season combined with poor governmental advice about how to grow crops more effectively. The local governments didn’t want to show bad results, so they took all the food and sent it to the central government. There was no food left. One year later the shocked inspectors were delivering eyewitness reports of cannibalism and dead bodies along roads. The government denied that its central planning had failed, and the catastrophe was kept secret by the Chinese government for 36 years. It wasn’t described in English to the outside world until 1996. (Think about it. Could any government keep the death of 15 million people a global secret today?) "
176 " It’s not the numbers that are interesting. It’s what they tell us about the lives behind the numbers, "
177 " 拯救窮苦小孩只會讓人口繼續增加」這個說法乍聽正確,其實說反了。脫貧進展愈慢只會愈導致人口增加。一個世代處於赤貧,就會生出更龐大的下一個世代。目前唯一經證實能有效抑制人口增加的方法就是消除赤貧,給民眾更好的生活,包括提供教育與避孕用品。在全球各地,這種父母都選擇生下更少小孩。 "
178 " Here are a couple of headlines that won’t get past a newspaper editor, because they are unlikely to get past our own filters: “MALARIA CONTINUES TO GRADUALLY DECLINE.” “METEOROLOGISTS CORRECTLY PREDICTED YESTERDAY THAT THERE WOULD BE MILD WEATHER IN LONDON TODAY. "
179 " Because “frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk. Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous—that is, paying too much attention to fear—creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions. It makes a terrified junior doctor think about nuclear war when he should be treating hypothermia, and it makes whole populations focus on earthquakes and crashing planes and invisible substances when millions are dying from diarrhea and seafloors are becoming underwater deserts. I would like my fear to be focused on the mega dangers of today, and not the dangers from our evolutionary past. "
180 " When a problem seems urgent the first thing to do is not to cry wolf, but to organize the data. "