How to Implement Razor-Sharp Logic (The Factfulness Summary)

*The following article is a summary of Factfulness. There are sentences in the content which represent word-for-word content from Factfulness.*

“When someone threatens you with a machete, never turn your back. Stand still. Look them straight in the eye and ask them what the problem is.”

This is the mindset can Factfulness help us achieve.

If you really want to change the world, you must understand it. Being humble means you are aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. This article shares the 10 instincts within Factfulness, which are like holes in our attention filer. After all, illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our minds. The question becomes how can we prevent our brains from systematically misinterpreting information.

The goal of Factfulness is to have a fact-based worldview and control our instincts. This has more to do with courage and razor-sharp logic, rather than formal education or memorizing.

In doing so, you can worry about the right things, not just things, and stay coolheaded to support the increasing number of problems which require collaboration.

From now on, you are a Possibilist! — someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. A possibilist has a clear and reasonable idea about how things are, thus a worldview that is constructive and useful.

The Gap Instinct

We must realize humans have a tendency towards binary thinking. In doing so, we can quickly divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. However, averages mislead by hiding a spread (a range of different numbers) in a single number. It is important to note how much overlap between two comparisons may be present. Go deeper than average by looking at the spread of the data or information: not just the data or information all bundled together. The result of looking at the spread can then be identifying the majority — a more truthful insight. Furthermore, be careful jumping to any conclusions if the differences are smaller than 10%, and the fact that the majority could mean 51% or 99%.

The Negativity Instinct

Stories of gradual improvements rarely make the front page. Good news and gradual improvement are not news. Thus, information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. However, more news does not equal more suffering. Realize things can be both bad and better (improving) at the same time. The detail is in the wording — bad is a level and better is a direction of change. Did you know every country in the world has improved its life expectancy over the last 200 years?

The Straight Line Instinct

Not all data is a perfect correlation resulting in uniform increase or decrease (i.e. a straight line). The world population isn’t just increasing because increasing can come as different rates. Therefore, not all increasing is created equal. Many aspects of the world are best represented by curves shaped like an S, or a slide, or a hump, and not by a straight line.

The Fear Instinct

When we are afraid we do not see clearly. There’s no room for facts when are minds are occupied by fear. The big facts and the big picture must wait until the danger is over. Moving forward, we must make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided. Get calm before you carry on.

Paying too much attention to fear creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong direction. Unfortunately this is what the media does as tapping into our fear instinct is an easy way to grab our attention. If we are not careful we come to believe the unusual is usual. We must remember to separate our perceived risk (how frightened we are) from the danger (the objective reality). Risk includes how much exposure there is to a danger, not just a danger itself (risk = danger x exposure).

The Size Instinct

The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone. A lonely number can make you prone to misinterpreting a situation. For example, paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives. To control the size instinct, get things in proportion. Always look for comparisons, ideally, divide by something. This is where benchmarks reveal their importance. Rates (dividing by the total population ) are often more meaningful than an amount. A per capita measurement (i.e. rate per person) will always be more meaningful than absolute numbers.

The Generalization Instinct

Categories are absolutely necessary for us to function. They give us structure to our thoughts. Imagine if we saw every item and every scenario as truly unique — we would not even have a language to describe the world around us. However, categories can be misleading, therefore question your categories. The generalization instinct makes ‘us’ think of ‘them’ all the same. Just like with the Gap Instinct, beware of majority, as the majority could mean 51% or 99%.

When presented with new evidence, we must always be ready to question our previous assumptions and re-evaluate and admit if we were/are wrong. When many people become aware of a problematic generalization it is called a stereotype (wrong generalizations are mind-blockers for all kinds of understanding). If someone offers you a single example and wants to draw conclusions about a group, ask for more examples.

The Destiny Instinct

Learning how things worked and then assuming they would continue to work that way rather than constantly reevaluating was probably an excellent survival strategy in the past, but things change as knowledge is updated. It is misleading to think things have always been this way and will never change. Societies and cultures are not like rocks which are unchanging and unchangeable. Rather, societies and cultures are in constant transformation. As with milk and vegetables, you have to keep getting it fresh, because everything changes. The way things are now is neither how they have always been nor how they always meant to be. Slow change is not no change. Keep track of gradual improvements. The 1% each day can cumulate.

The Single Perspective Instinct

Being always in favour of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. It’s not either/or, it’s both and it’s case-by-case. “It isn’t that the picture of my foot is deliberately lying about me, but it isn’t showing you the whole me.”

It is a slippery slope from one attention-grabbing simple idea to a feeling that this idea beautifully explains or is the beautiful solution for lots of other things. “All these solutions are great for solving some problem, but none of them will solve all problems. It is better to look at the world in lots of different ways.”

The Blame Instinct

This is the instinct to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened. Otherwise, the world feels unpredictable, confusing, and frightening. However, resorting to blaming makes us exaggerate the importance of an individual or of particular groups. The Blame Instinct distracts us from the more complex truth, and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right places. Finding someone to blame can distract us from looking at the whole system. When we identify the bad guy we are done thinking.

To understand most of the world’s significant problems we have to look beyond a guilty individual and to the system (likewise when things go right). Educators know that it is often the availability of electricity rather than more textbooks or even more teachers in the classroom that has the most impact on learning, as students can do their homework after sunset.

The Urgency Instinct

We are offspring of those who decided and acted quickly with insufficient information. But now that we have eliminated most immediate dangers, the urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to our understanding the world around us. Exaggeration once discovered makes people tune out altogether. Urgency, fear, and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic shut down my ability to think things through.

In addition, the urgent now or never feelings the overdramatic worldview creates leads to stress or apathy (it’s hopeless there’s nothing we can do, time to give up). We don’t necessarily want to take immediate action in the face of a perceived imminent danger. For complex and abstract problems such as climate change, these require systemic analysis, thought-through decisions, incremental actions, and careful evaluation.

What this instinct comes down to is action driven by fear and urgency vs. action driven by data and clear analysis. When a problem seems urgent, the first thing to do is not to cry wolf, but to organize the data. Be vary of drastic action and ask what the side effects will be. To control this instinct, take small steps. Lean, iterate, constant evaluation, cool heads, collaboration. In doing so, it is possible to care about the problem but not become victims of frustrated, alarmist messages.

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Nathan Kolar, www.reachworldwide.ca