I am glad that we were asked to write a reflection about one chapter of Hans Rosling et al book “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” It was the first time I heard about this book and the fact that I had to write a reflection about one chapter, gave me the opportunity to read through it and focus my attention on misconceptions. Once I had the chance to read it, this book made me reconsider my perspective about what I know about the world. It also made me understand how my way of perceiving the world around me is based on negative things I learned in school or read in the press. By reading the book I became aware that we tend to fall for a dramatic biased misrepresented view of the world. Generally speaking, the image, we have about the world is altered due to our tendency to over dramatize the world as we see it.
In chapter one “The gap instinct” Rosling talks about our inclination to separate things into two distinct groups with an imaginary gap in between them. The author introduces us to his experience about world misconceptions. In October 1995, while teaching his class he asked his students a question about the child mortality rate . His students responded with different numbers from different countries, all associated with what they knew about those countries. At that point Rosling made remarks about the Mega Misconception about the world, and people’s tendency to assume that news stories in the media, about rich people in developed countries, reflect the most representative life experiences. “The gap instinct” makes us think that in developed countries every person owns a house or a yacht, has access to good education and health insurance, this is not true. Most people’s lives, in the world, are somewhere in the middle, no matter if you live in a developing or developed country. Rosling suggests that due to differences in lifestyle within a country, to label a state as ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ is wrong and deceptive. In order to avoid misconceptions of the world around us, Rosling shows us new ways to see beyond statistics and to build opinions on strong supporting facts. To prove his point Rosling presents us with a set of questionaries’ about standards of life such as: education, income, and utilities, and proposes a way of evaluating and comparing such standards. Additionally, he underlines the importance of comparisons and makes us aware of the limits of compression of averages and extremes. Rosling suggests that comparing “the averages we risk misleading ourselves even more by focusing on the gap between those two single numbers, and missing the overlapping spreads, the overlapping ranges of numbers, that make up each average. That is, we see gaps that are not really there.” On the other hand, comparison of extremes also has its limits. “These stories of opposites are engaging and provocative and tempting—and very effective for triggering our gap instinct—but they rarely help understanding. There will always be the richest and the poorest, there will always be the worst regimes and the best.”
Works cited MLA (7th ed)
Rosling, Hans, Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna R. Rönnlund. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. London: Sceptre, 2019. Print.
List of 5 Misconceptions
Doing research to produce a list of 5 misconceptions, I came across of this site Centre for climate and Energy solution at :
https://c2es.org/site/assets/uploads/2017/03/misconceptions-realities-climate-science-06-2012.pdf
As Climate change is a top subject of news headlines, I found it interesting to use the list of 5 misconceptions regarding climate change, form the referred site.
Misconception #1: Recent global warming is caused by the sun.
Misconception #2: The climate is always changing, or it has changed many times in the past before and those change occurred naturally.
Misconception #3: The world has been cooling for the past decade; or, Global warming stopped in 1998 or 2002
Misconception #4: There is no scientific consensus on the existence or causes of global climate change.
Misconception #5: Scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s. Since they were wrong about that, there is no reason to believe they are right about global warming.